🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19981101114609.17689.00002421@ng07.aol.com>, 
skrewthem@aol.com says...
> yea but it seems like no one really clicks on banner ads..i for 
> one never do,

Actually, most banner sites claim about a 1% "click through" rate. Of the 
100 people who view a banner, one will actually click on the ad. Some 
sites (altavista and yahoo, in particular) have introduced context-
sensitive ads. If you do a search on "shampoo", you're likely to find an 
ad for shampoo. This bumps up the click-through rate tremendously. To 
give you some sort of context to put this in, traditional mass mailings 
typically see a response rate of about 2-3%. Slightly higher 
for magazines and newspapers, higher still for television ads. 
Considering that net ads are far cheaper per viewer than other media, and 
that viewers are far easier to harvest, and that viewers can be easily 
targeted, net advertising, banner ads in particular, are quite 
attractive.

More importantly, particularly for the "big guy" companies, the banner 
ads primary focus is not to sell something. It's to create name 
recognition. Name recognition leads to sales and word-of-mouth, which 
leads to more sales. Look at the majority of Nike or Levi or 
beer commercials. They usually have *nothing* to do with the product and 
everything to do with the "image" of the company. Or they try to get you 
to laugh (and associate that laugh with their name). The "Dick" 
commercials come to mind. Most viewers seem to prefer viewing Budweiser's 
Clydesdales clomping through snow than some blaring moron hawking a 
winter used car sale for Woody Anderson Ford. Not to say that loud and 
obnoxious doesn't work, of course.

> and no one i know does..im sure companies know by now that there 
> is little benefit to banner ads so they must be cheap...people go 
> on search engines for a reason--- to find a specific topic they are 
> looking for..they arent gonna randomly waste their time by cliking on  
> ads which never seem interesting anyway. unless middle america really  
> are as tasteless as the ads would have us

It's a new media for advertisers. Compared to the *years* it took radio-
turned-TV advertisers to switch from "radios ads with pictures" to ads 
that relied heavily on the visual element, the net advertisers are 
catching on quite quickly. The big search engines all target their ads 
based upon the context of your searches. Other big information sources, 
such as computershopper.com, also target ads based upon the article 
you're reading or program you're searching for. It works. It works well, 
or they wouldn't be doing it. Expect it to get better. Opinions vary 
widely as to when it will happen, but many in the field believe on-line 
ads to be earning more than traditional print media ads within the next 
five to ten years. Bane or boon to the consumer, on-line ads are here to 
stay. Expect to have ads targeted at you based on the contents of your 
cookie files within the next year. I shudder at the thought. "Oh? You're 
a 23 year-old white male who reads rec.arts.games.pinball, visits 
slashdot.org a lot, and has made on-line purchases from MusicBlvd? Well, 
we think you might like to hear about RedHats's new Linux distribution, 
and while you're reading an article about that, maybe you'd care to 
listen to some samples from 'Tommy'?" I shudder at the thought. I hope 
that day comes later, rather than sooner.

michael