Babblin' 'bout Banners

THE STORY ON WIRED.COM this week that Free iPods aren't necessarily a scam, is one which intruiged me. The premise of the Free iPods website is that money spent on advertising can be better spent elsewhere. Want to reach a bunch of consumers to tell them about your product? You could spend 10, 20, 30 thousand pounds/dollars on a TV spot, or a little less on a web advertisement. But what if, instead of doing that, you simply put the money into giving away cool stuff to people that signed up to use your products, at least on a trial basis? It's not a new idea - companies give things away in promotions all the time - but to do it on this scale, and on the web medium, with no purchase necessary, is new.

Online advertising is a subject which affects all of us. As a writer for the INQ, advertising on this page pays for my work. As the Editor of my own site, bit-tech.net, the advertising on that site pays for the work we do on that. As a reader of innumerable other websites, the advertising on each site pays to keep them online, so I can get my daily dose of Penny Arcade or even The Boi Wonder.

Advertising is something which surrounds us, not just online, and I find it interesting to analyse the attitude to ads in different media and to compare how they work. Take, for instance, a magazine - say, for the sake of argument, PCPro. There is a full-page advertisement in PCPro at least once every 3 pages. Advertisements break up content - a 6 page labs test might have 2 or 3 pages of ads sprinkled throughout. No-one that I've ever heard of has complained about the ads in PCPro, or been disgusted that they would dare to put them in the middle of content. This is the way that magazines have always been, and they're what enable print houses to put out a 200 pages of high-quality content direct to you for less than a fiver.

Apply that same advertising model to the web. Get rid of banner advertising everywhere, just consider a web page as a page of content. Now what if you simply had to load a web page with a big-full screen ad every 3 pages that you read? Wouldn't that utterly cheese you off? It would me, I know. So why can't we apply the print model of advertising to online?

Perhaps part of the answer is perceived value. A web page isn't tangible; one never feels like one is receiving a product when one is browsing a web page. Yet a web publication is a product in the same manner that a print publication is. People work on it, writers have to be paid, production costs have to be met - yet because the end result of web production is not tangible, the reader perceives the value of the web publication to be less.

Another part of the answer is, far from perceived value, one of actual value. Many, many online publications are run by kids, or amateurs, in their spare time; indeed, this is how many of the 'bigger' sites started out. But, in terms of value provided, these websites produce little content of a fairly low quality, often content that can be had elsewhere. The value to the reader is minimal - imposing advertisements on a reader can be a catalyst for him to turn elsewhere.

Consider a publication like Tom's. Regardless of your opinion of it, it is undeniably one of the most professionally run web publications (ed: second only to the INQ, of course), with a large number of dedicated, full time staff on board to keep it running smoothly, with new and regular content. The content is high quality, and those writers are paid for by the advertisements (amongst other things) that Tom's runs. If ever there was a candidate for content being worth a full-page ad every 3 pages, it would be here.

But still, I feel Tom & co. would have a difficult time getting away with that. Print methodology just doesn't work on the web, because the amount of choice on the web, and the cost of entry to the market (that is, the cost of starting a n00b publication) is very low. Print magazines keep their kudos by being good enough to warrant the tens of thousands of pounds that get poured into their startup and continued running.

So because the web, at least when it first started, didn't have any of those investment costs, or anywhere near the level of professional journalism (and because it was evangelised as a free resource for everyone to use) it didn't subscribe to the print methodology of advertisements. Instead, banner ads were created as a way to make money. Part of the reason print-ad styling doesn't work on the web, as the initial online publications found out, is that people won't necessarily stay on your page for long enough to get the ad every three pages - if you have been linked to a single story, you may well read that single story and leave. Publishers, therefore, need a way to make money off you reading that single story, and banners are it.

The trouble with banners is that they severely restrict page design, to the point where almost every online publication looks like every other. Title block at the top, banner below, column down the left with some links and a banner, content down the middle, column down the right with some links and a banner - time after time we see this same design. The layout of an online publication is dictated by the amount of advertisements it carries, and the style and the value that a website will bring to its readers is often inhibited by a complete lack of originality when it comes to graphical design. Whilst many magazines employ a huge pool of art staff to create the individual look and feel of a magazine, most websites look like they've been built out of exactly the same stuff. Design lethargy, plus lack of perceived and actual value, is why online banner ads are so problematic.

Which is why advertisers are trying everything they can to hit the advertising nail with lots of different hammers. Sponsored keywords, flash banners, pop-unders, free iPods - anything to get a message across in an efficient way. When the nail finally gets bashed, the potential is there to completely kill banner ads, to re-focus web publications on design and content, and to kill off magazines completely - because who will want to read a magazine, with an advert every two pages, when better, well-designed content is available for much less inconvenience on the web? But until advertisers find the right implement at the bottom of their toolbox, banners, and print publications, will continue to dominate. µ

Wil Harris is editor of the UK online magazine Bit-Tech