Re: Banner server avoidence
Given that banner ads have many objectionable features -- waiting for the
damned things to show up from a remote server being the most egregious -- I
am wondering what would be a better way for companies to tell us about
their products.
Rick Lehrbaum, on his site, linuxdevices.com, sold vendor sponsorships.
This has very low impact on readers and is ideal for community sites like
debian.org to bring in revenue. But it works best for companies whose names
are easily recognizable. And it's worthless to push specific products.
In the original design for Linux Today, I planned to deliver ads inline
with the newsfeed. In the end, it was more feasible to sell banner ads
because they were easy to sell -- companies came to us asking to buy banner
advertising space.
I still think the inline idea would be a great way to go, but at the moment
I don't have a Web site to try it out on. For a newsfeed type site, we
could have something like:
item blah blah...
item blah blah...
Looking for the best tape backup? Click here!
item blah blah...
Being all text, there would be no access overhead. The effort to skip the
item if you're not interested is also very low overhead. The Web site
design could be much simpler, possibly avoiding graphics altogether. It
would be perfect for getting a advertiser-supported newsfeed on a PDA or
cellphone.
Of course, that would be only the beginning. The ad link could take you to
a place where you could genuinely shop for tape backup products rather than
steer you to just one vendor's alternative.
The Internet is a great opportunity to improve the way buyers and sellers
get together aided by software. Napster is only a teaser for things to
come.
Blocking out banner ads, while understandable, is not really moving toward
a solution.
We are all sick of primetime television-style advertising. What is needed
is a way for buyers to make the first move and opt in to a stream of highly
focused and targeted information that, for the seller, will result in the
sales of products and services. Properly executed, sellers will like this
because of the very high percentage of sales they make -- these will be the
quintessential qualified prospects. Buyers will like it because they won't
be bombarded with sales pitches for products of no interest to them.
Dwight
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