One of the heated discussions I’ve been having at work is about advertising. I’m essentially taking the view that in yer face advertising reduces usability of and traffic to a website, as well as (for reasons I don’t want to go into here) confusing people about who the hell we are. The opposing view is that advertising = $ and £. Not an argument I’m going to review here, but let me just say we’re talking about a top level banner ad and Google context-sensitive ads.
Just now I was writing to a certain person at the Mother Ship about an idea that isn’t a million miles away from the session I’m co-leading on Saturday. And in my research I happened across an entry from Bora’s Snog Blog around the Clock, from 2007. And what made me laugh, given the general tone of the sciencebloggers (ah. Honorable exception, whom I have sadly neglected recently. Apologies) was this Google ad, right at the top:
Bora advertising Bible software
Let’s take a
closer look
Isn’t that brilliant?
Right, back to your scheduled programming.
From a marketer’s perspective, I don’t think much of banner ads—I use ad-blocker plugins, and studies have shown that over 70% of scientists do so as well.
Google AdWords (not banner ads), OTOH, can be effective if targeted well. The trick is to control content network placements, so your ad doesn’t show up in completely useless sites, like the above example.
Since I can’t edit my post, I should probably mention that “useless” was perhaps not the best word…“irrelevant” might be more appropriate :)
Not wishing to be inflammatory, but psst — got data for those claims? I’d be very interested.
laugh Crossed comments, but yeah, that was unfortunate!
Oho. Hohohohoh. Tee hee hee. Recently in another place I posted about rescuing ex-battery chickens. The post was called ‘Hot Girl-On-Girl Action’. It attracted all sorts of exotic adverts on Google AdSense, and, inexplicably, remains one of the most visited parts of my personal blog. Especially from the Islamic world. Perhaps people in the Gulf and Pakistan are interested in ex-battery chickens.
A 2008 study by BioInformatics (not free, unfortunately) put it at 55%. However, I’ve seen a more recent report that I can’t find now, that had the percentage much higher.
This blog post may also be of interest.
I took the ads off my other blog without making a single cent. I could live with the inane creationism nonsense, but not with the ads for baby monkeys on posts about primates.
mmm Baby monkeys.
Fish and chimps, anyone?
Le chortle.
Duck a l’orang
Capuchin-o
with a glass of Ape Mentelle, perhaps?
You can have toast, if you put it under the gorilla.
Now I’m hungry for macaqueroni and cheese.
Perhaps with hazelnut gelada for dessert.
Whew! I’m glad I’m making progress somewhere!
with a glass of Ape Mentelle, perhaps?
Richard, I’m not familiar with that wine. Is it Old World, or New World?
(ba-dum-dum tish)
Dr Isis. The voice of sanity. Thank you.
There’s been a good discussion going on today in the comments on an entry in The Scholarly Kitchen that you might find relevant. It includes some good links to Jakob Nielsen’s studies showing that banner ads are essentially invisible, and some more general thoughts on the differences between “advertising” and “direct marketing”.
I ran into a similar issue on a website I created for one of our books, on Gastrulation . It was frequently over-run by Google ads for anti-stem cell and anti-abortion nutjob sites. I think it still gets some quack therapy and stem cell banking ads here and there, but I just got tired of monitoring it and blacklisting ads. Probably not worth the $3 we earn from Google anyway.
Oh, I say. Thank ’ee very much, all.