Online ads are getting better — not worse
Sorry Marco — I disagree. Online ads are slowly getting better.
Remember when every article had pagination at the bottom?
Pagination was used by publishers to artificially boost their page count. More page counts led to more ad impressions which led to more income. This mentality created to a race to bottom — pop-ups, pagination, hidden ads at the bottom of the page and low quality ad space.
Recently, advertisers wised up. They realized that they didn’t want to pay for ads that people don’t see (or for ads that piss people off). That’s why the MRC created a formal definition for a viewable impression a year ago:
Pixel Requirement: Greater than or equal to 50% of the pixels in the advertisement were on an in-focus browser tab on the viewable space of the browser page, and
Time Requirement: The time the pixel requirement is met was greater than or equal to one continuous second, post ad render.
This is a subtle difference from the traditional impression, but the effects are huge: viewable impressions only come from active users. Publishers now have incentive to prioritize user engagement over stuffing ads in every nook and cranny of the page.
That’s why publishers stopped paginating their articles. Instead of risking that users leave when they see “next page”, publishers will show the entire article on one page and display ads along the side.
With viewability, the best interests of the publisher are closer aligned with that of the user. Publishers want to keep users on the site as long as they can and the only way to do this is to produce better content and to improve user experience.
In the long run, this will inspire a focus on ad performance. Publishers are beginning to realize that slow page loads have a strong impact on user engagement. Anything that annoys the user costs the publisher money. Believe me — ad-ops people are starting to talk about performance all the time.
I’m not saying online ads are great — but I am saying that we’ve set up an environment where they will improve in the long run. There’s reason to be hopeful.
Disclaimer: I work at Moat. We’re an ad analytics company and we helped introduce viewability to the rest of the industry. If this sounds interesting to you, let us know.
