I'm not sure if this is the way to catch up to Google. Peter Kafka at Media Memo points out that Ask has gone where I thought search engines wouldn't tread again. It turned its entire homepage into an ad. There are too many properties chasing too few ad dollars. The race for them will lead to many more intrusive ad formats in the name of being "impactful." The argument is this is no different than a full page magazine ad. After all, readers buy magazines as much for the ads as the content. (This is the trope that ad sellers trot out. It's only true in a few cases.) The trouble is the Internet will increasingly resemble Times Square. There's a price to be paid, not just in aesthetics. My mom has even noticed. She remarked to me the other day, "What's with all the advertising on the Internet? There's those teeth-whitening ads everywhere. It's worse than TV."
But the difference is that on the Internet, there's a lot of great content without intrusive ads, with even valuable ads, and many with no ads at all. If ads kill a site's user experience, the barriers to switching to another are not high at all.
Posted by: Max Kalehoff | May 21, 2009 at 17:20