NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Web publishing vs content creation
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Web publishing vs content creation
Peter Bull (peterb_at_dvp.com.au)
Mon, 24 Nov 1997 14:37:08 +1100
Let's take this subject a little bit further still and send a shiver down
the back of some of the many website "publishers" out there looking for
advertising revenue to support their sites.
The publishers of most websites have no direct relationship with any of the
visitors who may wander in to their site from time to time, and because
they have very little control over the way the content they publish is
displayed on visitors' screens, then I suggest they may not be in any
position to accept payment for delivering advertising messages because they
can never be sure that the message will ever be delivered at all, let alone
to a particular target audience. They may already be taking money under
false pretences and that is obviously no basis for a successful
advertising-supported content business.
Suppose I am the dominant local ISP in a medium sized town, not necessarily
in the US, although it could be, but let's stick to my previous example of
Rockhampton Australia. Now, let's say I have offered the local Internet
users in "Rocky" an extremely attractive deal - I will supply them with
free, unlimited net connection time, and in return, they agree to use the
customised IE4 browser that I supply them with, and they accept that I will
display local advertising messages in the non-client areas of the screen
while they are online. Currently, web browser users all over the world
have the right to switch off the display of graphics if they wish when
accessing the web, and part of the contract gives me, the ISP, the right to
choose on the consumer's behalf whether or not any particular web graphic
should be displayed on the user's screen. Pretty good deal, huh?
What it means is that my customers can surf the world, going anywhere they
like, for as long as they like, and every minute they are online earns me
more money in advertising revenue than keeping them connected costs me
(sounds a bit like a free newspaper, doesn't it? The ads earn more than
the cost of printing and distributing the paper).
But here comes the scary bit for websites that carry ads. When my customer
asks for a particular web page, I'll go fetch it for them, and when the
HTML comes down, it more than likely contains the URLs for the banner or
button ads that have been sold on that page, and then I will get a request
from the customer's browser to go fetch them too. But my customer has
given me the right to decide whether to display any graphics or not, so I
might just not bother to go get any of them. They will only slow his page
download, and probably won't be relevant anyway. How can I be sure that a
particular graphic is an ad? I won't always, in which case I'll let it go,
but very often I will know without a shadow of a doubt which URLs are the
ads - for instance www.doubleclick.com/xxx would be a safe bet, and
standard search engine pages and other major sites have designated slots
that could easily be marked. But more to the point, he's my customer and
I'm not getting paid to show any of these embedded ads. The website is
getting paid to show the ad, but they are just free content providers and
can't guarantee to deliver anything, because I own the customer's eyeballs,
not them. At that point I may well choose to trigger the display of an ad
that is already cached on the user's hard drive instead of the one which
will need to be downloaded from Albequerque or wherever the embedded URL
points. Result? Your content, my more relevant ads, quicker downloads,
happy customer. The loser? You, the website publisher who originally sold
space in his content to an advertiser who got stiffed, but who can't do a
damn thing about it.
As I said in my original post, the business model which assumes you can
embed advertising into the original content at source instead of adding it
to the content at the point of delivery like every other advertising medium
does, is probably doomed to failure. You may not like the scenario I just
outlined, but it is being trialled even now as we speak, and control of the
customer's eyeballs is what's behind things like Microsoft's push into
WebTV - slightly different approach, same principle. The content owners and
creators are kidding themselves if they think they are "publishers", and
they are not the ones who in the end will get most of the advertising
bucks.
Peter Bull
Director, DVP Media Pty Ltd, Brisbane, Australia
peterb_at_dvp.com.au
For samples of DVP's most recent work, see:
The world's best online wine store - www.thegrape.com.au
Australian Provincial Newspapers Classifieds - www.checkoutclassifieds.com.au
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