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New research reinforces 'banner blindness'
Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox essay, in a nutshell, validates the concept of "banner blindness": people shown pages with graphical advertising units intermixed with non-ad content almost always focus on the non-ad content.
What elements attract attention most consistently? Plain text, faces and "private parts," says Nielsen.
But not most ads, he observes, with one exception:
"In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content."
In other words, what's old is new again. Newspapers and magazines have long dealt with advertisers who try to make their messages -- often, it seems, pushing wealth-building or holistic health products -- look and read like news articles. Many periodicals, in their ad-acceptance policies, restrict use of certain fonts that are too close to the editorial design.
That control would be much more difficult in an Internet economy where ad networks, especially remnant networks that serve third-party ads at lowest prevailing rates, deliver many of the ad messages visible on many content sites.
Nielsen's latest work supports quite a bit of conventional wisdom on this subject. It does not provide much good news for content-oriented Web brands that need to make money from display advertising. When people deliberately avoid even looking at a message, that message has no value: just another tree falling unheard in the forest.
Both blogs
[...] New research reinforces ‘banner blindness’ : Small Initiatives - Sensible Internet Design by Jay... “Nielsen’s latest work isn’t good news for content-oriented Web brands that make money from display advertising. When people deliberately avoid even looking at a message, that message has no value: just another tree falling unheard in the forest.” (tags: usability advertising research problems publishing) [...]
Jay,
I take exception to this statement:
Did you ever think that the reason "ad networks deliver most of the ad messages visible on many content sites" is because the ad placements on most content sites suck for advertisers?
Isn't the newspaper (or online newspaper for that matter) business all about aggregating a large audience, specifically for the purpose of monetizing that audience? Via advertising?
I'm not talking about Journalism, rather the news business in general.
Maybe, just maybe, if newspapers and newspaper websites put the ads closer to the content, or wrapped the content around the ads a little, people would notice them. Which, would make the ads more relevant to the audience, and the audience more responsive to the advertisers... that'd lead to better response, more sell through, and less remnant inventory.
At the end of the day, isn't a newspaper's (or news tv-station for that matter) website about continuing to aggregate that offline audience for their advertiser base, when that audience moves online?
I'm continually surprised by people in the newspaper business that don't get the fact that in order for the newspaper business to survive, it's going to have to forget that their business is "newspaper" and realize that their business is audience aggregation and monetization. If the newspaper business doesn't figure that out, then it really is doomed... and we'll be stuck with nothing but a lot of bloggers who don't fact check, don't do their homework, do rant, and don't practice good journalism feeding us our news...
The same goes for the newsprint side of the newspaper business: make the ad placements more relevant and more appealing to the audience, and they'll perform better for your advertisers.
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