August 04, 2004 | View Comments (6) | Category: Our Thoughts
Summary: Forbes.com adds ad links within their news stories, but its implementation is anything to be desired.
Advertisements on a website are almost inevitable if the person who is running the site is looking for a source of income. As readers of the web we have more than likely gained the uncanny sense of being able to ignore these ads (hopefully everyone is checking out my generously placed Google Ads though :-). Because of this, advertisers and designers have to become more and more creative in finding places to put their ads.
Forbes.com has become one of the first companies to include ads within their news stories. Pretty cool idea, but there is one major problem. The ads look like regular links.
A cardinal sin that many graphical heavy sites make is that as a user you are unaware of something being clickable within the site. If you don't know where to click, you don't know where to go and many times you go no where because you can't place your mouse in the right place.
That is why it's good to follow the convention of underlining your links. Doing so allows your readers to know where to click. Forbes however underlines their ads and if you click on them nothing happens. If you wait a second or two a popup will appear telling you that it is a sponsored link and then you can click on the popup to take you to a different site.
I don't have a problem with ads on a site, I just have a problem with the way they were implemented in this case. Inline ads are fine because they are usually relevant to the subject matter at hand. The problem occurs when there is a link in the article that does go to another site how am I to distinguish that from the ad links without waiting for the popup to occur?
Maybe they feel that making the ad links different from regular links will drive users away, but I think this will increase the usability of the site and make the readers more interested (assuming the ads stay relevant to the keyword). However, in their practice I have to wait to see what is real and what is not. I can only hope this will not become a trend (which I am sure it will be). Hopefully, they can find a better way to implement it. I would suggest highlighting, ala 37signals.
How would you do it?
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I noticed on Forbes.com it took forever as well to load simply because the Ad Program had to parse through the article to designate where the ads should go. Annoying to say the least.
But from the other end of the spectrum I can see where they are coming from since once you start making money on the web you tend to think of other ways to make even more money.
Double-edged sword.
Scrivs (http://businesslogs.com)
I do not generally mind ads in content, but as you have said the lack of differenciating between regular and ad links is really horrible on Forbes.
The annoyance however is the hefty load time on the hover description. Not sure if it is intentionally slow to show up, or if it is simply a coding issue.
On a side note, and particularly in the case of Forbes, many of the links have nothing to do with the subject matter. On an article about Bomb Detection equipment they link the word "scanner" to a page selling computer scanners.
Mark Michon (http://makingmark.com)
Aren't these type of link ads similiar in scope and function to the smart tags that Microsoft caused such an uproar over not so long ago?
As far as advertising -v-usability -
It is, as you noted Paul, a double-edged sword. Web developers and IAs would probably make some type of differentiation between a standard hyperlink and an inline ad.
However, as an advertiser / agency, I don't want or need the user to know the difference - I just want eyeballs seeing my ad. I f my ad looks the same as the link, better chance of that happening.
Mark (http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw)
Exactly my thinking Mark #4. I see the battle between the web guys vs. the marketing department as only getting worse. Next they will have the links just go straight to the sponsors websites anyways. That will be fun times.
Scrivs (http://businesslogs.com)
I tried to come up with a way of making an ad that wasn't intrusive at my website: http://graphikjunkie.com/ look for the blogger button :)
Jim Amos (http://graphikjunkie.com)
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#1
Something similar is being done on Neowin.net. See this article for example:
http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?category=gamers&id=22982
At least they are highlighted in a different color here, but there is a noticable pause as the article is updated with the ad links after the page is loaded which is annoying.
Chris Pederick (http://www.chrispederick.com/)