Log on to Youtube and watch a couple of clips in a row. Chances are you’ll be faced by a minimum five second delay. If it happens once, no problem. But let it happen after every other video, especially if the clips are short, and it becomes annoying. Entire websites have been dedicated to express their hatred of advertising, but in the end we have to ask whether we can really do without it?
It’s a rather fickle business which has been debated for a while now. In the one corner is the pro-user group with an active focus on content rather than advertising. Google is one of the biggest proponents in this group. Although not against advertising, Google has always sought to at least present online users with advertising relevant to the on-page content, or past search behavior. Over the past years the search engine monolith has become increasingly strict with regards to advertising, with another blow to hit some advertisers in an upcoming update.
In the other corner is the pro-advertiser group, largely consisting of publishers receiving a steady flow of traffic, and advertisers who rely on that traffic to help their clients make money. Digital ad spend is expected to have increased by more than 12% in 2013 from 2012, and by an additional 11% in 2014, meaning more and more businesses are favoring paid search instead of, or in conjunction with, organic search.
To understand why there is such an increase in ad spend, and therefore online advertising potentially obscuring the content you want to peruse, it’s necessary to understand why businesses are investing in paid search. On the one hand digital offers the advertiser an advantage with its ability to collect information about online audiences. Complex engines that drive online advertising campaigns can reveal which audience segments ads are reaching, and how they interact with the ads or subsequent content. This gives the marketer or advertiser more information to fine-tune campaign messaging for better results.
And lest we forget there is no such thing as failed advertising; exposure to a brand, despite no initial interaction, plants the seeds of familiarity within a user’s subconscious, and therefore possible future interaction.
When compared to organic search, paid search does have an advantage: ads can be displayed almost immediately, whereas organic search can take weeks to bring in results.
On the other hand there is another drive for online advertising, specifically from publishers themselves. Traditional advertising revenues typically paid for 70% to 80% of newspaper, magazine and even television content. But since the explosion of the internet many real world publishers have been faced with dwindling advertising revenues, forcing them to go digital.
The amount a publisher can charge for on-site advertising is directly related to the number and quality of visitors that visit the site each day. An increased demand from users for better content requires more money to be spent; but without increased ad spend (more visitors) website operators face a catch-22 situation. As a result many publishers are opting for additional revenue streams, such as paywalls, to provide users with the content they desire without drowning them in ads.
So while you may be getting more frustrated by ads with little or no relevance to the content on the page or your past browsing behavior, it’s important to remember that that 5-second wait on Youtube does serve a crucial purpose: it keeps online content free.