

Ask YC: Ads and The Internet - iamdave

I just sat through a 30 second flash animation advertisement on salon.com before I was even prompted the option to skip the ad before it looped back to the beginning.<p>Internet advertising has and will probably forever remain the bane of user experience.  But in some degree, ads have always had an escape plan.  Be it clicking the close button, finding another site with the same content but doesn't force ads on you, or just clicking the "Skip this ad" button.<p>Lately, escape vectors are becoming harder to find and content providers, in the sake of "keeping content free" have begun to sell out and cheapen the user experience by providing no means to escape advertisements.  Personally, I think this is bad behavior chiefly because it encourages bad tactics that will probably only get worse.<p>That prompts me to ask this: while we respect the objective of advertisements on the internet, do you think forcing advertisements on sites is a bad strategy?  What are your thoughts on giving users no escape vectors to see the content they came to see?
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nostrademons
One of PG's "Ideas we'd like to fund" was "Fix advertising". The idea being
that advertisements shouldn't be something odious that you sit through; they
should draw you in and be relevant to your own desires.

I gave some thought to it last month but couldn't come up with any ideas on
where to begin. It's tricky: you're acting as middlemen between three parties
(advertisers, site owners, and users) whose interests are usually (but not
always) opposed, plus the chicken-and-egg problem of attracting advertisers
before you've got sites and sites before you've got advertisers.

If my job hunt goes poorly I wouldn't mind spending some more time on this
problem. It's so obviously broken: companies aren't making many sales off
Internet advertising, websites aren't making much money off advertisers, and
users hate what the other two groups are doing. For now I'm just trying to
clean my open-source plate.

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thwarted
Interesting ads, at least on the internet, have such low return because the
ratio of time/effort/money put into them vs how much they make is so low. If
the return, in absolute terms, is the same as for an ad that no
time/effort/money was put into (largely just mentioning the brand name, which
is what a lot of ads are) is going to be a higher ratio and thus what people
end up generating. It's purely economics.

Even video ads, on television, that could be considered to have "gone viral"
may get a lot of face time in front of consumers because they are interesting,
but they don't necessarily increase actual sales. And a lot of these more
interesting ads may not focus enough on the brand--how many times have you
seen an ad on television and thought "what exactly are they trying to sell me
here?" or "is this really the message they want to send about this product?"--
and you may remember the ad but forget what it's about.

Making ads "interesting" isn't some silver bullet that is going to increase
sales, but it most likely is some silver bullet that will get more eyeballs
looking at your ads. When was the last time you saw a car ad that didn't have
a bunch of meaningless data points (some defensible but largely irrelevant
mention of "handling", damn even MPG is used like a throwaway data point in
car ads) or show the car driving through some city scape or mountain pass?
They _all_ show exactly the same thing.

I'd like to see more ads like the early radio ads (does Paul Harvey still
these?) where something is specifically endorsed by a personality (rather than
just being a paid familiar voice) and the ads are less fluff and catchphrases
and more listing benefits and competitive comparisons. This would be hard to
do because a lot of ads are purposely misleading or downright lies because
they are advertising commodities or consumer items that actually have no
benefits or are not differentiable. Truly informative ads might not be
entertaining, but they would definitely be more useful than, oh, say having
the "Tap The Rockies" Coors Light song in my head because I mentioned "Silver
Bullet" up there. And I _don't_even_drink_or_intend_to_drink_ Coors Light (so
that's a wasted ad on the part of the advertiser).

~~~
qhoxie
Good points, but that is hardly a wasted ad. They got in your head enough for
you to mention it here as an example, potentially compelling a reader here to
go buy some Coors.

~~~
thwarted
Guh. When you can't effectively measure the effectiveness of each ad dollar or
you don't have a meaningful or differentiating product, I guess you take what
you can get. Even "I don't like X" is advertising for X. I think this says
more about the advertisers and the products than the ads or the consumers
though.

