A nice juxtaposition – this Sydney Morning Herald article reporting complaints about former Fairfax senior execs earning too much in payouts is accompanied by a video ad.
I think Sankar and David’s payouts were justified – and that shareholders should be questioning why they were pushed out. They were the people behind the Trade Me deal and understood the transformative power of the internet. The current regime has a ery old media flavour to it, which will help streamline the newspapers, but what will happen to the digital assets?
A warning sign for those digital assets could be the video advertisement on the smh.co.au website. Video ads may pay a bit more, but they are a great way to put folks off your site. Use them with care or preferably not at all.
So is the video ad a sign of usability taking a backward place versus demands for revenue?
Perhaps not – this particular ad was for MyCareer.com.au – another Fairfax property.
It’s all wrong.
Lance Wiggs 
A couple of years ago I was approached and offered video ads for Geekzone – those same video ads that show up on the side of the browser and (sometimes) start playing witout any intervention – a pain for office workers who don’t want to make too much noise while others are doing their tasks, etc, etc.
Anyway, it was enticing with promises of up to $100/CPM! What old media company wouldn’t take it?
No, we didn’t accept the ads. Even now if a flash ad uses a bit too much CPU and interfering with other users’s tasks I will get emails from readers – and a couple of times we did take down offending ads.
Can you imagine what a bunch of geeks would say if we had those video ads?
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