Internet advertising has grown into a big  industry. A $45 billion big industry.

The industry may be enormous now, but it should leave doubts behind. Is the standard approach to advertising on the internet sustainable, and is it even a good deal? A large problem is that on the internet, standard banner ads simply don’t work. They don’t attract customers, they’re nothing more than blemishes on a computer screen, and the majority of the time, nobody cares about them. It just may be time for the industry to rethink its strategy.

Traditional ads simply don’t work on the internet. Few read them, even less actually click on them, and virtually nobody buys something from the company being advertised. The reason is that text-based banner ads can’t retain visitors. For example, when I go to a blog, chances are that I’ll be reading the blog post and scrolling right past any ads that I happen to see. It doesn’t help that the ads always happen to be completely unrelated to what I’m reading either. Google Adsense does a decent job of displaying relevant ads, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Internet ads simply don’t work because of two reasons:

1. Nobody wants to see them: There’s nothing worse than clicking on a link only to have a giant ad show up that you are forced to click out of. When someone goes to a website, they go there for the content, not the ads, which means the ads will most likely get ignored.
2. Nobody will read them anyways: The whole idea behind internet ads is that people will read them and click on them while reading something else. The entire idea is flawed. It’s comparable to product placement in TV and movies, except a lot less efficient.

Internet ads need to be fixed, and they need to be fixed quickly before the entire industry implodes. A quick fix would be better ad relevancy; I don’t want to read ads about hot singles in my area if I’m on the NY Times website. There’s not much else to do really, since the very ideas behind internet ads are flawed; they’re all voluntary and they depend on the reader stopping what they were doing to read and click on them. Internet ads could be made mandatory, almost like TV commercials, but that wouldn’t jive well with average Joes. To me, this seems like a dead-end industry. I don’t think that it will collapse altogether (it’s much too big for that to happen), but I do think that revenues from internet ads will shrink in the future unless something serious is done about ad relevancy and implementation.

Disagree with me? Do you like reading ads? Leave your thoughts in the comments! ↓