Online Advertising Over The Years

by Marsha Maung
Saturday, August 30, 2008

Oh, the type of advertising methods there are available to businesses today! You’d be crazy not to go crazy with the choices. A large majority of businesses who advertise their business online is through banner advertising – as old as the method is, many companies continue to believe that this old horse can still run. Well, not very fast, unfortunately. The world is changing and the ever-changing attitude of internet users have changed too and as a business, we need to change with them.

Users are no longer naïve or gullible to be sucked into a vortex of pretty images, short ads and banners because they are more likely to click away than to click on the ads. A major example of a new idea would be The Million Dollar Homepage. I’ve got to hand it over to this guy. Build ONE PAGE, optimize it, sell it for a one-time fee and he’s earned himself a handsome amount of money – enough to put a guy through medical school, I’m assuming.

Anyway, it was a refreshing idea pushed through by desperation, if nothing else, and it was something the creator thought wasn’t going to work.

Online advertising has become so diverse these days that there are more interactive options open to advertisers now. Some of them are incredibly useful while others were vain attempts. One of the better ones is the floating advertisement idea. As annoying as it is, it still works better than the conventional type of online advertising. You know how you’d try to avoid an advertisement on a web page by scrolling away? Well, with a floating advertisement, no matter where you scroll the page to, the advertisement remains….well, for lack of a better word, in your face! The only way to get rid of it is to find that tiny little ‘x’ or ‘close’ somewhere. Either way, the ‘x’ would be so small that site visitors might accidentally click through to the advertisement because they missed the target or they spent some time looking for the ‘x’ that they ‘noticed’ something worth clicking on in the advertisement.

The most annoying kind of online advertising today isn’t the floating advertisements, however. I find the expanding advertisements cripplingly annoying. Why? Because the moment you put your mouse over it, the ad expands, sometimes filling up the whole screen! So, you’d have to be very careful where you place the ads. But the good news is that when you pull your mouse away, the advertisement minimizes itself again. The reason why I hate it is because I have to be extra careful where I put my mouse cursor.

Although the abovementioned online advertising is annoying, they’re not developed to trick people into clicking through. There are some advertisements employ trickery to get what they want – they design the advertisement to look exactly like an error message or something that your Windows or Mac would give you when something is wrong. If you saw something like this, wouldn’t you click on it to find out what was wrong? What’s worse is that some people develop these sickening advertisements not for the purpose of advertising something to you – but when you click on the ad, a virus, adware or malware is automatically downloaded into your computer.

In comparison, a pop-up window advertisement is a lot tamer and ethical because even though it’s makes me want to tear my hear out, it doesn’t force something on to you. The milder and more polite version of the pop-up window is the pop-under advertisement. If it pops up, it’s in front of whatever web browser that you’re using. If it’s a pop under, you don’t realize that a new window has been opened until you look at the status bar at the bottom or close the current window.

The more hip, modern and cool type of advertisement forms a very close link to their advertisement cousin, the television commercial. This is the video online advertisement method. I am not at all sure how much it costs to ‘air’ such a commercial on a popular website but I know it’s a whole lot more than a conventional banner or even the pop-up or under.

I happen to think that video advertisements are much more effective than other forms of advertisements. For instance, if I wanted to watch something online and they screen the advertisement before they let you watch the actual video that you want to watch, I think that’s fine because I am going to have to wait for the video to load ANYWAY, so, what’s a couple more minutes of waiting, right?

I heard that more and more people are trying to develop a way to bring online advertisement to mobile phones….I shiver at the thought of that. If and when that happens, I think there would be a huge uproar as to where the line in drawn as far as personal space and privacy is concerned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Maung is a freelance blog content writer, freelance web content provider who has been in the business for eight years and counting. She resides in Selangor, Malaysia and is known as one of the first few Asian search engine copywriters who kicked butts! For more of her successful tactics of reaching top ranking in search engines, log onto http://www.marshamaung.com for samples and details.