Out of Sight, Out of Site – Why is Revenue from Online Ads Dropping?

Revenues from ads on websites are dropping. If you don’t know this by now, you either don’t monetize a website or extremely smart or lucky. After several happy years of sharp angle graphs showing numbers growing insanely, the trend has changed.

Theoretically, the positive growth should have kept going. The disturbing economic downturn caused a general decrease in advertising budgets in general. But as part of the process, advertisers are seeking measurable and direct ways to communicate with their potential customers, and online advertising is the leading choice. Therefore, online advertising budgets are still there, that’s not the problem.

The reason that revenues from online ads drop is that the ads have disappeared from our websites. What? The ads have disappeared? Well, not literally, they are still there, but the visitors don’t see them anymore. Just as it happened with other media formats, people’s minds grew to screen the ads out of their sight, and therefore out of the (web)site.

And what have the online marketing industry done to regain the attention to the ads? We made the ads disturb the visitors and fight with the website’s content over the attention of the reader. Banners became animated, living video images walked into the frame, full page ads took over entirely. We replaced reach content with reach media.

But ads can’t win this battle over the minds of people. As readers, we learn how to focus our attention on what we’re looking for. And since it’s the content we’re interested in, not the jumping ads around it, we’ve evolved into human filters, reading content without noticing the ads. In a survey I ran with online readers about their acceptance of a certain type of ads, I added almost by mistake, answers that meant that there were no ads on the page. To my surprise, over 30% of the website’s visitors haven’t noticed the ads, and the single most chosen answer was: “What, there were ads on that page?”

Speaking with younger online dwellers, they describe how they automatically disregard the commercial frame that usually surrounds the content. In fact, they don’t even see it anymore.

While this behavior has not diminished revenues from online ads entirely – clearly, we still monetize our websites – it has a substantial effect on it. I intend to suggest that in addition to the continuous struggle of getting attention to the ads surrounding the text, we should also open our eyes to the potential of the content itself. There’s a hidden treasure in our websites.