The Devil & Online Advertising
April 15, 2007
A very long time ago, way back in the past… like 10 years ago, people started getting on this crazy thing called the World Wide Web. Somewhere in a dark room filled with crabby old men, it was decided that advertising online would never make sense… “nobody is really going to spend a lot of time in front of the computer. They have books & magazines to read, movies & television to watch, music to listen too…” (I guess they never thought we’d end up doing that ON the computer.)
It was this lack of faith in the internet that kept online advertising from being seen as a legitimate way for companies to reach their markets, so the key to the internet’s chastity belt was left right out in the open. With no set rules, people looking to make boon with online advertising established the game. Web pages could have several if not a dozen forms of advertising on a single page. (Can you imagine a 30 second TV commercial that pitched 213 different companies?)
How Do You Measure the Madness?
As it it is now there is no practical and meaningful standard of measuring a websites true value from an advertisers perspective. Let’s examine the following methods currently used to measure a websites attractiveness to advertisers…