TechNayak(mirror)

Advertising has come a long way since its inception. A simple concept of endorsing links to online resources has becoming a dominating factor on the web. But given the state of online advertising now, what is the roadmap and what can we expect in the future.

The answer is of course non trivial and I will only make a fool of myself by trying to predict the answer, but there are certain inferences I have made based on my observation which I shall pen down. I divide the broad category of pc users into prospects and adless users. Prospects are users who are new or ignorant to concept of online advertising, people like my mother who doesn’t know people endorse links for money. This category could also include people who are open to targeted advertising and see a value add with it. These are people who wholeheartedly click on interesting links. The other category I call adless users, users who have been around the internet long enough to understand irrelevant ads and can spot and ignore ads in a page.

More time a user spends online, the probability of him/her realizing the web is filled with irrelevant ads and over time becoming adless users. As a result, almost all users tend to move towards becoming adless users. This is dangerous for marketers, ad companies, publishers etc as there is a whole eco system depending solely depending on money made out of ads. As new users discover the web, their prospect phase is what publishers can hope to cash in on, but eventually the shift will happen. What happens then ?

Search engines are arguably the best places for advertising and probably the best place for demonstrating the phenomenon I call intrusive or endorsed content. Take the example below.

Ads will stop being sidekicks and move into the foreground, I have shown the shift pictorically. Payperpost got the next concept right, people wont read ads, but social media yes, so pay people to write about your product/service etc. More results on search engines will be endoresed and most of them already are, how do you know a review you are reading of some product isnt already endorsed. Now here is the strangeloop bit, you could say you will search for bad reviews instead of good like this. It wont take long for the advertisers to see this trend as well and then pay for people to write moderately bad reviews inturn endorsing the product. You know that they know that you are looking for bad reviews !!

A surprising result on top caught my eye. A visit to the site will tell you immediately that the site isn’t half as good as the second or the third result, but still its on top. SEO has come a long way and to cheat search engines into making a page popular isn’t that hard. You can hire professionals to do that job. That in a wierd sense is a form of endorsing, a professional SEO group can start bidding for making pages more popular and start their own cartel for endorsed content.

The other strange phenomenon I see that people recognize big search brands, Google in particular, but don’t necessarily relate to the results( you can’t possible relate to the results). You could have the Google homepage serving ads from ask.com and nobody would know the difference if the results looked like Google returned them. Thats probably the reason there still are companies trying to capitalize on the search market. Take a look at the results page below.

In this case the difference between a result from the index and an endorsement is a mere patch of color. How difficult do you think it is to remove that demarcation during difficult times. Ethical boundries as meagre as color differences can be crossed very easily and corporations have showed time and again it can be done.

Thanks to the falling prices of bandwidth and also social media, video is the next big delivery mechanism and it was quite understandable that Google paid a billion and a half to capitalize on youtube’s huge market share and put intrusive ads on videos( you dont have a choice there, no adblock plus !! ). Same goes with pictures and audio. Radio, papers and the television have been doing it for years.

The world thought that we moved away from pop up advertising but we have just made the situation far worse. Ads will become more and more intrusive and there could come a time when content and advertisement are indistinguishable. More on this later.