Michael Haislip: Professional Millionaire

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Angry Canadian Guy is none too pleased with your seamless integration of ads and content, eh.

New year, same old problems for webmasters. If you earn revenue from contextual advertising (Google’s AdWords and the like), then this post is for you.

Remember when banner ads were the top dog of web advertising? Oh, to be back in the halcyon days of the late 90s, when ad prices were based on CPM (cost-per-thousand for you young whippersnappers out there). Page views were all that mattered.

As the web evolved and the once-inexperienced users became web savvy, people learned to ignore the ads. Banner blindness had set in, driving advertisers to use Flash and Shockwave to make their ads fly across the screen and sing and dance and whatever else would catch your attention.

Users started ignoring them, too.

Then AdSense and AdWords came along, promising to save web advertising. For a while, it did.

The question: when will AdWords start being ignored by users? I think it’s already happening. Anecdotally speaking, I can’t remember the last time I clicked an AdWord ad on a website. An experienced user quickly learns to separate the ads from the content, just like people did with banners. (Caveat: I still find contextual ads on search engine results to be very useful, especially when the first page of results is useless. This indicates that the best way to reach experienced users is search engine advertising.)

So who experiences AdWords blindness?

1. Experienced users as described earlier
2. Repeat visitors who have learned your devious ad placements
3. RSS subscribers who get full feeds in their readers. Even though full feeds are user friendly, they do little to convert readers into clicks.

This blindness, of course, is the reason webmasters attempt to make AdWords look like the rest of their content. While this is suggested by Google as an optimization strategy, I would say that it’s the mainstream equivalent of blind linking, a JavaScript technique used mainly by adult sites to hide the true destination of a link. Of course, as a fine, upstanding citizen, I would never visit an adult site. I’m just passing on what I hear.

While blending the text ad’s appearance with the content’s appearance is good in the short term, in may be terrible in the long term. How many people now check a link’s destination before they click? I know I do, lest I be taken to something I didn’t expect or want.

It’s this mistrust of links that I’m worried about. Since linking is the very basis of hypertext and the web, AdWords may very well be doing long-term harm.