The End of Web Advertising

I am a consumer.
Buy my undivided attention.
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Web advertising is dying. Banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, text ads and video ads; all dead horses. Their time has come and gone.

The First Web Ads

The first paid-for banner appeared in 1993, when most people still hadn’t heard of email. A global marketing phenomenon has built up around that simple concept in the intervening thirteen years as the web’s user base has continued to grow.

During that time many companies have grown rich and respected by promoting responsible and non-irritating adverts, conversely the get-rich-quick merchants have (with the same natural and misguided competitive zeal that will destroy humanity), destroyed the market by their desire to get rich quicker than the next guy by any means possible.

Blocking Ads

The result of this advertising abuse is ad-blocking software which is starting to come as standard in web browsers. Today (still), only a fraction of the planet uses the world wide web, but as new, naive web users come online they will be protected from adverts from the outset and can no longer be harangued by irresponsible advertisers in the same way that the first wave of web users were.

We, the people, with our open-source software, have made the web less annoying, but advertising and marketing are important, they promote and reward investment in the web, so blocking ads has a downside.

As of today, 50% of the visitors to this site have advert blocking software installed. That’s probably higher than average, because a lot of visitors are at least a bit tech-savvy, but it’s indicative of a significant upward trend.

It’s also getting easier to block adverts. As web standards (such as XHTML and CSS) have evolved, web pages have become described in terms of what the content is, rather than how it should be displayed, so even if an advert is not marked as such, then the advert blocker can still make a fairly good guess at which part or parts of a page are advertising.

The remaining market

So the future audience of web advertising is a sporadic, poorly defined group of people who have mis-configured ad-blocking software, that’s not a particularly lucrative or stable market for any global advertising business, and it’s certainly a difficult sell-on to the advertiser.

The alternative to web advertising

So my alternative suggestion is that a major broker buys the right to advertise to me and my counterpart web users.

I agree, as a consumer, to enter into an exclusive contract with said advertising broker and in return, they provide me with responsible, bespoke advertising wherever I visit. It’s a win-win-win-win situation.

The four wins:

I win because
1. I get paid to be advertised to.
2. Advertisers can bid on my time, they can bid on how many times I get shown their advert, or what percentage of my daily browsing is laced with their message.
3. The ISP bandwidth that I pay for is not being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for
4. The screen that I paid for isn’t being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for.
5. All adverts are relevant to me, because my broker knows me.
6. All adverts are restrained, they don’t blink at me with garish flair and I never get pop-ups or pop-unders, because my broker is considerate.
The broker wins because they have dedicated groups of consumers that can become the target of concerted long term advertising programmes. Problems such as click-fraud are massively reduced and they can sell larger and more integrated multiple product (i.e. lifestyle) advertising programmes to advertisers.
Publishers win because they can provide the page and let the broker deliver an advert that may be unrelated to page content but still relevant to the user, so the publisher gets rewarded for publishing what interests the consumer, and not for publishing articles comprising mostly buzzwords that are intended to trigger adverts.
Advertisers win because they can target a specific group of consumers rather than a selection of consumers who happen to visit a particular website, plus, their advert can if they wish, be shown on every page I visit.

Advert blocking and page filtering will eventually destroy the basic web-based advertising model, but advertising helps pay for innovation and site development. If the web user enters into a contract with the advertising broker, there may be an intermediate solution that benefits all parties.

2 Comments

Tigere says:

07/12/2007 at 23:52

I think you will require a static IP address for your idea to be practical, that way add messages can be specifically pointed to you, unless your service provider is involved and channels adds to you since you are on their network.
another work around is the development of a browser that uses say 90% of the page for displaying wed content ie wedsites, portals, webapps etc then dedicate 10% to adds. with the need to have content minimum, concise and specific, a lot of space is left unused on browsers these days. this way guarateed anyone using the particular browser sees the add.

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Miranda says:

16/10/2008 at 22:32

When I first started reading this I thought it was a bit of nonsense …another ‘doom and gloom’. In fact I think it is a great idea if it could be put into practice.

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