In our day we all look at a lot of random stuff online given a few minutes to kill, or when we briefly get distracted from a more important task. It's a rich forest of content in the still-young wilderness of diverse media delivered over Web. Articles, videos, photos, short text posts, lolling-cats – there are plenty of enjoyable, interesting or important pieces of "content" throughout the landscape.
Something catches your eye, you click and look at it for a minute. "Hmm, that was interesting" *click*. Or perhaps it was not interesting - seeing it quickly you make the judgement in the blink of an eye and go back to what you were doing. Often something else catches your eye and you explore that path for a moment or two. Or six or seven hours.
A key point here is that much of our on-line leisure activity is stumbling-onto things. A tiny bit of curiosity is enough to warrant a click, because the investment is low. Effective online advertising depends on that factor. Advertisers need to hit the right combination of placement and enticement. To reach you, something both needs to be placed on a page you will elect to visit, and it needs to twig your interest to make you interact. Maybe you will click through and surrender the opportunity to influence you a little bit.
Enter annoying advertisements. They come in many forms. Mostly they gain the distinction of annoying because they tread over the line of willing participation. Distracting animations of jittery images and crawling geometric patterns, perhaps. Or the videos that play without your request or interaction; sometimes even with sound.
Our earliest experience of this, as the web emerged, was music that a site host thought would illustrate the excitement they had in mind for the site, or that some poor creative team thought would 'create a mood' complementary to their product. Probably the worst audio-offender is a speaking voice addressing you as you arrive. Any advertisement that uses intrusion into your attention without your explicit permission when you visit a site will most likely evoke anger or annoyance in the visitor. And the only way visitors can vent that is to rapidly depart from the web-page.
Don't get me started on sites that try to disable your ability to depart. Forget how they do it for a moment, and wonder what kind of advertiser thinks holding you hostage will increase your propensity to buy their product. (I think I'm started).
Initially web browsers developers had to scramble to disable features that allowed that kind of click-disabling. Similarly, the never-ending pop-up loops were a brief scourge. The most common hostage-taking approach now seems to be to forward your visit through to several identical copies of the page you have visited. Then when you try to use your browser's back-button, you appear to remain on the page.
Click and hold the back button, and you see that you've been railroaded forward through five or ten identical pages to make it awkward for you to back away. (This is a good reason to open new links of questionable side-bar interest in a new tab, where you can quickly close the entire browser tab if annoyance gets to high.)
Web-content is dealing with an eroding of the landscape much the same as TV broadcasters have been during a large shift in media consumption habits. These are challenging times for traditional media, and those who are not sufficiently clued-in to the end-user experience are often going about dealing with it in a poor way.
Broadcasters obviously need revenue to keep operating, and they dealt initially with stagnant growth in viewership by incrementally driving up minutes-per-hour of ads. Watching a popular show or recently-released movie means it will be drawn out to pack in many ads, and maximize revenue for the time-slot.
As the broadcaster does this, they cross a threshold where motivated viewers take action, acquiring PVR or DVR equipment (video recorders) to allow them to watch later, or watch in 'chase-play' mode and skip over ads. Traditionalists or those with more limited options simply mute or leave the channel, or even the room, during the massively long ad breaks. Some forget what they were doing and don't return to the show, rendering to the advertisers a net loss to viewers, and further diminishing the value of the advertising slot. The broadcaster's reaction to then-shrinking advertising revenue? More ads. It's a feedback loop that destroys the medium. Watching TV has become more and more frustrating, and viewers are leaving in droves to online content.
Similar dynamics begin to threaten in the on-line world. As content providers or aggregators deal with the need to both make money and deliver compelling content, there is an equation that they need to satisfy too. The interest level in the content must be greater than the annoyance factor of the advertising.
Where things fall apart is when content is delivered to which visitors have been attracted by the thinnest of threads, purely based on a very-mild momentary interest. Someone tweets about link they saw. Someone posts a link on Facebook that makes you curious. One knows that with an investment of only three or four seconds they can click and decide then to "consume" that content or bail out. If the content is preceded by an ad, we will run the value equation, and within that 3-second engagement, we can be be quickly disengaged and back to the path we were exploring moments earlier. There is a wealth of content on the Internet, and no shortage of distractions.
YouTube makes calculations about our value-equation. Often advertisements are offered with the opportunity to bail out in 4 seconds and go to our desired content. That changes our equation. We may grit our teeth and bear the burden until the escape button appears. A proportion will not, and no doubt that is tuned carefully.
Some online video content – often on news sites – will feature inescapable advertisements. The statistics gathered by the host site must show a very large departure rate for those. Their statistics cannot gather the people who have run their value-equation and decide to stay, but deal with the annoyance by muting and flipping to a different browser tab for a minute or more. It's the TV experience of muting or changing channels all over again.
Many of us who do that will of course forget we were trying to watch the clip, and never see it, or the ads that line that page, or the ad that followed the clip. The site may elect to put in more ads, the value of the ads diminishes, because advertisers are not getting impressions. We might remember the website after a few instances of this, and not click-through to visit again in the future.
It's a never-ending battle, where only those who understand the balance between advertising and content will succeed. The question is whether the economics work out in the long run, and whether those who do not understand the end-user perspective and their value-equations will ruin the medium due to their slash-and-burn approach to advertising.
