The In-Text Ad, A Web Disease Born Of Greed And Need For Increasing Growth, Is On The Rise
11/26/2007, 9 months 2 weeks ago
In an article published this week, BusinessWeek covered a topic that is likely to strike a particular nerve in the minds of a great many Web users today. A topic that has to do with something so small, yet so unbelievably annoying, that it indeed triggers individuals reading material online to level curses at their LCDs and hurl exasperated insults at invisible webmasters and Internet marketing companies the world over.
What is this infuriating item we speak of? It is invention known as the in-text advertisement .
Yes, you’ve no doubt encountered many bothersome distractions of this kind in your online journeys. Perhaps when reading a news story, you inadvertently rolled your cursor over one such link. Maybe it was an active keyword in the body of a blog post that took you by surprise, showing you a small pop-up advertisement that you never wished to see. Whatever one’s personal experience may be with this sort of aggravation, it’s something that most all of us can agree is a troubling presence on the grand WWW. Unfortunately, it’s a disturbance that’s not going away. In fact, it’s a nuisance that’s growing in size, and growing fast.
Chances are you’ve been long aware of the existence of in-text advertisements on the Internet. Websites big and small employ systems which affix those odious double-lines to keywords automatically, and more join the fold every day. The reason for their use is of course to wean as many ad dollars from a page as possible. With many readers now self-conditioned to avoid interaction with banners and columns placed in margins left and right, in-text alternatives exercise a kind of third-wheel, last-resort function, generating income for a Web business when primary avenues fail to achieve desired results.
Yet as increasing numbers of news outlets and so forth jump onto the in-text ad bandwagon, readers are no doubt bound to become ever more disillusioned with the quickly increasingly population of in-text advertisements, perhaps even to the financial detriment of those very content owners and distributors. Because, well, who in their right mind really wants to see such ridiculous things – and the businesses which use them - flourish? Not I.
Adverse effects are most certainly possible, especially if online businesses proceed apace and venture much too far ahead of themselves, opting to employ in-text ads to the point that links of genuine importance are lost in the madness of rampant use of double-underlined keywords and key phrases. Indeed, today lines are dangerously close to being crossing, as more and more websites are craving to get the most out of such seemingly lucrative advertising systems, adding more in-text links to more pages. (At least as long as it is deemed somewhat safe for them to do so, so as not to risk losing readers.)
As far as this writer is concerned, any online entity truly worth their salt and in the business of providing original content wouldn’t so much as entertain the notion of working with in-text advertisements. (Here’s looking – with a cold, critical eye - at you, MSNBC, Fox News, Indianapolis Star, Arizona Republic, Reno Gazette-Journal, etc.) If one has the interests of the reader at heart, one would rightly deem marketers which utilize such intrusive methods to generate revenue worthy of nothing other than contempt.
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I fail to appreciate the subtlety of a mind which sees one form of advertising as worse than another. They’re all unwanted and they all push up the price of goods in the shops.
And of course they’re all stopped dead by ad-blocking software, which not only makes browsing more pleasant, but also much faster and even helps protect you from drive-by attacks.
Ian, this is the approach I strongly disagree with as the editor of this very blog. Sure, blocking ads is simple and some users (especially those of the geeky kind) often practice such measures. But when you think of the time and efforts all of us (bloggers, traditional media, general websites and web services) invest in creating the unique and useful content YOU personally enjoy, don’t you think that it is only fare that they can pay their bills by YOU watching some banners on these websites as a kind of compensation for being able to get the content (or services) you need?
As long as they’re just double-underlined, it’s fine. And we can spot them a mile a minute, can’t we? I actually like them better than the traditional ads.
But yes, as soon as an ad “jumps” at me in whatever way - blinking, a sudden pop-up, and of course the “regular” blog ads that make the actual text difficult to read - I get annoyed.