Do Huge Display Ads Hurt Online Content Businesses?
The display advertising industry, shaken by the falling prices it can get for its online ads, has taken to showing full-page marketing messages at websites. These blot out all of the content on website pages, some of them at major news sites, and…
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Some of the recent culprits that run full-page ads are Ford’s (NYSE: F) Lincoln brand, a new product for a partnership between American Express (NYSE: AXP) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). The ads from these companies, and others that employ the practice, are only available at a modest number sites, which include the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) and Forbes, so some number of large news and entertainment sites probably turn down ads that use the full-page format.
Because readers come to most websites to read or view content, they probably accept display ads that run next to content — not on top of it — where their placement has been accepted for many years. A reader can view the messages or not. This kind of placement is similar to text ad placement on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so almost all web visitors expect them.
Internet content lends itself to full-page ads when compared to content in physical newspapers or on TV and radio. The user can turn the page of a paper or magazine, change the channel or take a break. Display ads that take up an entire computer screen do not offer the reader similar options, so some degree of annoyance among visitors is guaranteed.
Internet advertisers have become more aggressive because they have to. They need to bolster the number of web visitors who see their messages. They need to be careful, however, that they do not damage their relationships with the people they want to reach.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
