Sponsor's Message

How about pop-ups, float-overs, spam, advertorial items?

Well get used to them because it looks as if advertising on the web is only going to become more intrusive and commonplace.

According to a story on the BBC website (see headlines below), the total spend for online advertising in the UK has just exceeded that for radio ads - which can mean only one thing: advertisers are waking up to the power of the Net.

There was a time shortly after the dot-com bust, when advertisers shied away from "wasting" money on Net advertising, many having obtained decidedly poor returns for their investment.

One of the main reasons for this poor return was the lack of a web presence good enough to convert that advertising into sales. The "dot-com boom" mindset still prevailed and far too many companies thought that all they had to do was have a website, any website, to become very rich.

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These days however, most businesses are aware that there's little point in paying others to direct traffic to your website unless that website is capable of converting that interest into money-generating sales.

The downside for Net users like you and I is that we're inevitably going to see greater and greater levels of online advertising as those businesses spend harder to get that essential virtual foot-traffic to their cyberdoors.

In the past two weeks I've emailed two websites (different country editions from the same publisher) to advise them that I'd no longer be visiting or linking to their pages since they'd really over-stepped the mark with their advertising.

I doubt that my single solitary email will have any effect and I suspect they'll dismiss the chance to be linked in Aardvark's headline summary as unimportant - but if enough web-users do the same then maybe they'll wake up to the fact that guns and feet don't mix.

And, as I've mentioned earlier, some local publications have pee'd me off so much with their excesses that I've simply blocked their advertising -- now they don't make a penny from my visits (foot hurting yet NZ Herald?).

Of course I'm not only a web-user but also a publisher and Aardvark's very existence depends to quite a degree on sponsorship - which is in effect a form of advertising.

Over the years I have strongly resisted the temptation to accept every and all advertising requests pitched at me by companies wanting to reach the Aardvark audience. Perhaps I could have made a snot-load more money by doing so but I'm also aware that one of the features of this site is that it doesn't subject visitors to a barrage of banners and solicitations. I fear that most other sites are driven by far greater commercial pressures however.

Have you noticed an overall increase in the quantity and intrusiveness of online advertising during the past 12 months?

Has the abuse of Flash for such purposes ruined the potential of this product to deliver a healthy level of interaction and animation to pages?

Will higher levels of advertising result in changes to your own browsing habits?

As a publisher, what I want to know is whether advertising is now getting close to levels that will encourage web-users to opt for no/low-ad subscription-based versions of some websites.

Could we be reaching a turning-point where the free (content) lunch on the Net really is over?

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