Advertising Startups at TechCrunch 50: Ignoring the Industry?

Yesterday during one of the sections of TechCrunch 50 conference three startups were launched that all offer their solutions in the same niche – online advertising. Actually I’m afraid I miss one thing here: advertising is what the vast majority of web publishers use to earn revenue so it is kind of a foundation stone for the entire industry and still we only get to see 3 startups at TechCrunch 50 and I have not seen any at DEMOfall after browsing all the press releases available. I do believe there is place for much more innovative solutions in this space but let’s take a look what we now have.

Copybox. Quite a dangerous-sounding experiment that is intended to change the way text in an ad is served based on a user’s location or weather in this place and other variables. So this is something of an automated copywriting tool that introduces changes into an advertising message depending on variables in place.

Adgregate Markets. Transforms online ads to serve as fully-functional stores where a user can perform all the buying actions without leaving the site he is currently browsing. Merchants are invited to build their own Flash-based shopping widgets (that other publishers can also use as affiliates) that can be used on websites instead of traditional banner ads so that visitors could buy goods without leaving the sites they already trust.

AdRocket. A solution to monetize various email and RSS notifications we already get in huge volumes daily from social networks or email subscriptions to news sources and blogs. The service serves a text ad to subscribers to such emails or feeds. Ads are targeted based on the information about a subscriber contained in a profile using anonymized, encrypted data that claims not to violate subscriber privacy.

As you can see, all the startups are focused on making ads more interactive or targeted for advertisers to make customers buy more after interacting with their ads. And while making user buy a product it is no doubt a problem, there are some issues that are not addressed by any of the startups and that still seem to be a huge problem for online advertising industry in general.

Web users find today’s ads to be intrusive

I have recently published a post discussing how the newly launched Chrome browser will influence Google’s advertising business. To my surprise, the discussion in the comments went in a peculiar direction – people talked about advertising and various ad blocking plug-ins in general complaining all the way about how disgusting and distracting ads are and how they would never switch to any browser that does not allow them to block ads completely.

There were reasonable voices claiming that they could willingly unblock ads from certain websites if those websites guaranteed their ads will not be intrusive and will be either of interest to the visitor or won’t disturb the visitor and detract him from the purpose of his visit.

Web publishers have incomplete control of what type of ads they serve to their visitors

I have participated in a few conversations already where a visitor denounced a blogger for pushing a smiley ad at him and claiming that it damaged the value of the content of the blog itself. The irony was that the blog owners actually had no idea what ads are served to all their readers – they only see ads served to his or her country usually and others are hard to control with the most popular advertising networks.

International visitors are difficult to impossible to monetize

That’s another problem that damages revenue for web publishers – even though many websites (including some English-language blogs as well) enjoy large readership outside of the US, these visitors are usually almost impossible to monetize with ad networks either not serving any banners to such visitors at all or sending the cheapest possible (and crappiest also) banners based on geographic targeting.

There are other problems in the industry but I wanted to mention these ones because they seem to be the ones that receive the most attention from readers once mentioned. And I have a feeling that there must be some ways to address these problems instead of continuing to work on interactivity of ads. After all, right now it looks like the more interactive you make ads, the more reluctant people are to see them and the more willingly they will use an ad blocking plug-in. I believe there are vital problems that need to be addressed if we don’t want every single web user to hate all the ads – in this case no matter how hard advertisers will try to reach users with their messages, they will most probably not succeed anyway.