What would you think of human placed ads?
Thursday July 2, 2009
I was reading Almighty Link today, and the first article is about human placed ads that are essentially text ads at the top of blog posts. They would get caught by the RSS readers and thus seen by people that wouldn't otherwise see the ads on your site. But there are some questions. Here are my thoughts:
- Why shouldn't blog posts include hand-placed textual advertisements?
I noticed the ad first thing, but I didn't click on it, and I wasn't terribly impressed by it. If you place them as the first part of the post (to get caught by readers and Twitter etc.) you risk alienating the people you're writing for. - Can humans do a better job than Google at determining contextually relevant ads to serve?
Well, I've been told that Google does use humans, but that aside, I think that yes, in general a human could choose better, but you might not have a lot of time to do it and so you'd end up with computerized choices anyway. - Who would match the ad to the content? Editorial or advertising staff?
As a member of editorial, I don't want to choose ads. I don't want to be accused of a conflict of interest, or get complaints from a company if their ad is placed on a review where I pan their product. - Are consumers more likely to read sponsored messages that aren't shoved into the right-hand side of a site?
Probably until they get habituated to the new location, then they'll ignore that new placement too. - Would an ad unit like this require ad-serving software?
In order to track the ads, yes. Most people buying ads want to know exactly what their money is buying, and if you can't provide that with software they won't trust you. After all, you benefit if their ad is served once but they pay for 1000 views. They benefit from the reverse. Ad-servers provide some level of trustworthiness. - What tools would need to be built to facilitate the quick research that human-placement would require?
I don't know. - Would this change the way editorial and advertising staff work together?
Not on my site. But on sites that don't have a separate editorial and advertising staff it would. - Would a sponsor's message appear as an article's summary in search engine result pages?
If you didn't include a meta description, then most likely yes. - If the answer to the previous question is yes, would that decrease the article's chance of being clicked?
Definitely. - What are the SEO/SEM implications for the content publisher? For the advertiser?
For the publisher, it would probably drop their SEO results because the first part of the page was not the article but rather ad text. For the advertiser, unless the ads were nofolow, it could increase their position, especially if the site they were linked from had a higher rank. But ultimately it would probably hurt both sites, especially if the ads were annoying.
Thank you for taking the time to provide some very good answers to my questions. It was exactly this kind of feedback I was looking for. Don’t expect any more posts from me with text ads as badly-formed ledes!
Hi there,
Thank you for sharing your views regarding Human placed ads. This is very useful information. Can you also shed some light on the benefits of direct ads vs. ad agencies.
Cheers,
Eddie Gear