Display Advertising: traditional web vs mobile
Display Advertising on the web is a success story from the early internet days.
From 1994, when the first documented case of a website banner was recorded, it’s become the main go-to approach for capitalizing on your internet visitors, or in other words “monetizing your website”.
A quick google search will even tell you the click through rate of that first campaign a whopping 78%! But don’t trust us — see for yourselves. Here’s a great article about that.
And that’s was the point of this new media. It was hyper-measurable.
It’s not a billboard or a tv commercial (though some would correctly argue there are excellent way to measure that those as well). On our digital screens, it all quickly became quite easy to track. It first consisted of just tacking the server requests to the site, as early as, you guessed it, 1994. Google, by the way, acquired its web analytics technology in 1998 through its acquisition of Urchin Software. It then very quickly evolved into what we now know today as event tracking — our ability to measure what goes on in the page and in each session of the user’s visit to our site.
This ushered in a new, reliable, performance based way to spend your marketing budget or to monetize your site. The display industry is a mammoth now. Display formats, concepts, ad exchanges and massive networks — serious technological marvels really, make this industry a worth as much as $180 Billion dollars in US alone, by some standards. It’s mindboggling. Top google ad spenders range as high as tens of millions of dollars a month. It’s possible since advertisers can rely tracking their data to a precise ROI, the old tried and tested buzz word of choice to for any scale operation on the internet.
As screens grew bigger, and resolution peaked, web advertising was able to carve itself a rightful place. Most media sites today respect the maxim of a fine balance between usability and revenue — content to ads. A few banners here up top, a few on the side and a nice on in the middle… that will net you a good few bucks.
But mobile web is different, for many reasons. One of them being — it’s a gosh darn small screen. Granted, mobile screens might grow. iphone 5 screen size is a 4 inch display, the iphone 6 is set to be possibly 5.5 inches. But no matter how you spin this, it’s still way to small to burden users with display ads in the same way desktop or laptop or even tablets do this. Mobile web is not taking the advertising paradigm lightly.
Mobile ads detract spaces from an already cluttered screen. Don’t believe us? Next time you read an article from your favorite news site, try looking at your display format. Chances are you’ve come across an article you liked on facebok (hey, on mobile, facebook is THE gateway to content). So once you open that article on, say, an iphone screen, you’ll be sent to read it on facebook’s in app browser (a facebook branded in app browser working on the iOS web kit). Right of the bat you’re given a blue frame, taking about 100 pixels off your screen. Then what? Well, if you’re lucky, you get no splash ad on full screen before your content loads, and then you probably get a 300x50 banner at the top with a sticky ‘catfish’ banner of a similar size at the bottom. Within the article you should see a few other sizes here and there and what are you left with there? I would argue that leaves about 300–400 pixels worth of context to browse on, if you’ve got one of the newer generation phones. In absolute terms that would be about an inch or two. By the way, how are your eyes doing by now?
It’s not exactly a good starting point for arguing that mobile display advertising is headed in the right direction. Not if you’re going to run the regular display concept of 1994. This might just be time for a change in the way we think about it… just saying.
