[MUD-Dev] [BIZ] Advertising sprawl (yahoo)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001 22:30:06 +0000 (GMT), Matt Mihaly
<the_logos at achaea.com> wrote:

> Web banner advertising crashed and burned because the expectations
> were too high. It's not like it doesn't work. It just doesn't
> justify the prices people were previously paying.

It might, if it worked properly.

Sometimes I'll go to a site and see a banner I would REALLY like to
click on -- in a few minutes, once I get done with what I'm doing.

Unfortunately, when I have to go to another page to finish what I'm
doing, I lose the banner. Sometimes it's still there when I hit the
back button, but more often it's not. It's not always possible to
"copy shortcut" and stick it in a text editor for later, either,
because that comes up with "javascript:" links that stub down to a
dynamically generated script kept in a source file on the server. The
rotation and tracking of banners effectively turns "show me your
stuff" into "can't be bothered". It is only on VERY rare occasions
that I will sit at some page and reload repeatedly until the banner I
want to follow comes back up. I think I've done that twice, and on
both occasions it turned out to be a waste of time anyway, so I
wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen again.

If I could just go to a page on the site that showed me all the ad
banners, I'd go there and look for the one I was interested in. Then
I'd see all the other banners, too -- and I'm already in a "click on
the banner" mood, so they'd be in a really good place. But I
can't. Nobody does that. And that's not really the answer, either:
what I *really* want is some way I can say "yes, I'm interested, but
not right now" and then I could get a reminder to check it out later
on. Wouldn't that be nice? Couldn't some nice person start a service
that would keep track of all the banners you clicked and just send you
a friendly reminder once a week? I'd *read* that. And if it carried a
few extra ads, that's just fine.

And if you put your ad banner in a dinky little window that's in my
way, I close it before I even bother to look at what's on it. Rule #1
of advertising: don't annoy me! Annoyed people don't buy things!

In short, web banners don't work because the people who use them are
incompetent. Not a single one of them has sat down and said "how do I
want web banners to work when I'm browsing web sites?" -- they've said
"how do I want web banners to work when I'm looking at web banners?"
instead, but unfortunately nobody does that. Since when have you ever
gone out looking for ads on the net?

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