Where is the traffic headed? A new trend in online advertising.
Steve Rubel, who has to be one of the cleverest people I know, recently posted an article over on his blog entitled ‘In the cut and paste era, traffic happens elsewhere‘ in which he suggests that unique content generators such as news services and major portals are facing challenge from sites that’ll enable you to create your own customized view of the world with rss feeds, links and synopses of content – losing them the ‘first touch’ consumer view.
As I see it these portals are between a rock and a hard place.
By creating applications and feeds they’re allowing the consumer to get content from them without first visiting.
This means that browsing behaviour will change from an automatic open and the impression opportunity that goes with it to one where the content featured in the apps or feeds will have to be so appealing that it compels the reader to click for more.
This will result in lower impressions but certainly be a boon for those sites that feature contextually relevant advertising. No longer will the traditional services such as MSN, CNN or Yahoo dominate purely through brand power, they’ll compete on an even footing with sites that offer insightful content and a focused niche.
However, if they don’t offer the services they risk losing visibility to the consumer as they start creating their own Start Pages using tools such as netvibes, where I’ve created a page that reflects my personal needs!
This is great news for those advertisers that are not able to get territory on the large portals as typically the niche content sites offer more opportunity for innovative business models such as affiliate marketing or hybrid performance based advertising.
The ‘bad’ news is that your offer will have to be so much more compelling as publishers that take advantage of this ‘distributed content’ phenomenon will be inundated with offers and may find that their advertising space can be sold at a premium.
What out… new online advertising trend headed our way!
August 24th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Agree to a certain extent, that yes your content can be found elsewhere, but it is the community you build that keeps folks coming back to your space and not reading it elsewhere
August 24th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Hi GMK. thanks for the comment. I agree with your perspective as well.
The point i’m trying to make is that portals will be fighting harder for the community to choose them as a first stop destination.
I have a number of sites that I follow, specifically blogs - so a netvibes type application works well for me, as it saves me having to trawl from one site to another to have a quick view of the world :-). If it’s interesting to me I’ll still visit the site and get the full story. I believe that in an era where consumers are oversaturated with content more will follow the same trend.
This means that the communities you create will become more valuable if they’re sticky - and force those that create communities to work harder at keeping visitors coming back!
J
August 28th, 2007 at 7:02 am
I think in a way the ‘decentralized web’ and its Web 2.0ish premise of ‘user driven distribution’ is doing something very similar to what for example the VCR of old, and TIVO and the like does with broadcast media. You want your message in the feed, not hidden somewhere next to the ghost-town facing shop front window that the conventional web page is becoming. The tighter marketing can be integrated with desirable content the better. Of course, this demands more of the marketing as well, screw up the user experience with disjointed or irrelevant advertising and the content channel will loose its desirability faster than a media buyer can say ‘Advertising is dead, long live advertising’.