More invasive ads for free content websites are here to stay, so lets just move on. This blog usually covers much more relevant topics, lets not bother complaining about online advertising which will always to some degree be an annoyance.

Those crazy Coca-Cola marketing people.

Of the 100 page views we had, 5 people who couldnt figure out how to avoid your ad saw it.

Of those 5, one person accidentally clicked on it. Congrats! that’s a 20% click through. That rates as a highly effective ad!!

ok, seriously… I think we both understand where the other is coming from. Ads arent going anywhere for a good long while. A lot rides on them. I sold and relied on them once upon a time.

The intent of my original comment was to draw thoguht to a possible third option beyond OptionA: Ads and OptionB: Selling content/micropayments.

Simply saying that X number of people have ad blockers installed is like saying 90% of people switch channels when TV ads screen.

Effectiveness isn’t measured by how many people saw an ad. That’s reach.

Effectiveness is a measure of whether the ad viewed by the recipients, understood or acted upon the message that the advertiser intended, against the dollar spent on one medium/site versus another.

People ‘not viewing’ advertisements is a fact of life. It’s like switching channels during TV ads. The only people touting this line as the doom of advertising are those who pretend to know what advertising is about. I don’t know why you’d include the people who ‘opt out’ of advertising into the loop, as clearly, the effectiveness measure will only include the number of people who actually viewed the ad and their subsequent responses.

Oh and by the way, since we were talking about a NZ site, the IAB numbers I quoted were from IAB NZ. At ~$17 million this quarter, it’s the highest its ever been.

Sure, we can have a discussion around global stats. But how effective would that be if you don’t focus on the domestic factors?

This is online. Offline, things don’t look so rosy. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/29/the-wounded-us-newspaper-industry-lost-75-billion-in-advertising-revenues-last-year/)

Effectiveness is not so easy to measure.

Let’s ask firefox. Their ad-blocker add-on is in the top 10 shared add-on’s for their browser and has been downloaded 63,203,135 times.

You’re about to say, ‘hold on! Just because people don’t want to see them, doesnt mean they’re not effective’.

It turns out there’s a name for it. Jakob Nielson calls it Banner Blindness. It’s hard for them to be effective if you don’t see them.

Have a look at the picture: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness-examples.jpg
ref: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html