Monetizing websites after Internet advertising

Seth Godin predicted that banners on the Internet as we know it will be disappeared by the year 2000. Although that didn't exactly happen, we slowly see graphical ads being replaced by text ads such as those by Google AdSense. However, as people get used to these, click-through rates, and thus revenue, are declining and we have watched Google change the standard ad format several times to create some sort of freshness effect. I don't think this is a sustainable strategy.

Even with those innocent text ads, people get annoyed by them. They fill up valuable space of a webpage and increase clutter. And would you honestly call these ad blocks pretty?

We saw the same phenomenon with television. Lots of people now change channels at commercial breaks or simply record their favorite shows with a device like TiVo, removing all advertising. Thanks to Firefox, and in particular extensions such as AdBlock (plus) and Greasemonkey, people are being enabled to block all Web ads by simply installing a little software.

The people doing this still form a very small group, not yet posing a serious threat to your advertising revenue. However, imagine what would happen if Firefox 3.0 (or 4.0 for that matter) would include an ad filter preinstalled. We would no longer lose money just from very few tech-savvy folks, but from anywhere from five to twenty percent of our users. Once this fairly big group surfs the Web ad-free, users of Internet Explorer and other browsers will soon follow and look for similar software or simply switch browsers.

Although this of course is purely hypothetical, chances are such a tend will indeed emerge and someday (I suspect on the mid to long term) threat all online websites based on advertising revenue.

This clearly is not an immediate or current theme, but it does raise the question what are feasible revenue alternatives to advertising. Even if ad-blocking stays limited to some geeky subculture, it is good to think about because there may be some other event or trend causing Internet advertising income to drop or simply because decreasing the number of ads is one of the easiest ways to increase user-friendliness.

Since you are a reader of Digital Point, your initial impulsive response is likely to be affiliate marketing. But how exactly would you apply this to a random website? Graphical ads linking to an affiliate site are still ads are annoying, thus will be blocked. The same thing goes for text ads as we know them. You could of course integrate them in your content, which will be fine for a shopping (-related) website but where would you put them in, say, an encyclopedia article. On a weblog you could of course do a (paid) review of an affiliated product, but these are rated even worse by your visitors because it is commercial content in the form of editorial content.

The aim of this thread is not to discuss the possibility or likelihood of the use of ad-blocking software by mainstream surfers but rather true alternatives to advertisements on sites that now rely on them for the gross of their income. How can we monetize our content websites without bothering the user with ad clutter and interruption marketing? There will probably not be a definitive answer to this question that goes for every website but there may be some big ideas and strategies that can be applied in some way to all of them.

I hope you can help me (and eachother) with this question I've been thinking about lately.

-Daniël

 

I know it's quite a read but I'd really love to hear your comments.

 

I think in text link ads are the future. Kontera is blocked by much fewer plugins than AdSense, but will probably be blocked in the future. Some kind of php script, which picks keywords from your text and makes them into links might have a huge market, if browsers became more aware of ads.

 

Boy, that is quite a read!

As marketers and advertisers, we have to always be flexible and roll with the times. Now that Firefox has that plugin (Kontera) that will easily stop ads from displaying on sites that people visit, popup/popunder blockers, script blockers, spam blockers, and the like, we must think of new ways of generating income.

Google is working hard to improve its search results and is really targeting sellers of text links. I'm thinking that some sort of content advertising that is built into the text of the content. I'm really not sure where we'll go next.

 

The New York Times has an article on the subject today.

 

Heres my solution:
Simple!Make the ads unblockable i.e create some cloacking techinques to hide the ads from the blocked.
But this is not permanent solution as adblock plus and other ad blocking softwares update often.
So again we are left without any good solution

 

I think text links to relevant sites/sponsors within content is the way to go. In fact we're developing software right now to do this for our own sites. Any ads in the form of ad blocks will eventually dwindle like the banners did the more people understand what they are.

 

There is already forum software and scripts that place links into random text on pages. Many times when you mouseover the text a small add will popup, very annoying. Adblock strips most of this anyway.

 

Yeah those are very annoying. That's not what I was referring to though. Hard links to relevant sites, which cannot be stripped.

 

I agree. The important thing is that the links are added on the server side. Then the browser (or addons) cannot distinguish them from other links.

 

I want to add to this discussion, as a Kontera rep., that the idea behind in-text advertising is to generate ads which are most congruent with the user experience. The ads can be ignored or displayed depending on the user's immediate choice and in this sense they do not create page clutter as mentioned before.

Mika
Kontera Optimization Team

 

I use kontera content links on my blog and i am very satisfied with the results so far. It's not that annoying even if the little ads pop-up like that, i understand that the kontera people can't make it in such a way that it tricks visitors into clicking them and those links have to differ from the original links on the site. maybe that's why they have double underlines too.. And I also use kontera content links with adsense and until now it has been alright. I'm sure they work well together and don't step on each others toes. I know because i asked kontera help for that info.

 

I agree with Sutoku that textlinks are the way to go. They less intrusive. People can choose to click on them or ignore them as they please. If used with care and if you do not just clutter your whole website with lots of ads and provide true value to your visitors then they will remain effective.