Online Advertising Must Be In Trouble
January 6th, 2009
I know a little about the advertising industry, so I can tell you that it’s more volatile than most other sectors. An advertising firm will routinely overhire during good times and mercilessly lay people off during a downturn.
A lot has been written about text ads, and the theory that they’ve moved to an above-the-line expense. I don’t have a lot of evidence on that market. But I am surprised to see how much the display ad industry has collapsed. Look at the backfill ad inventory crop up on this recent TechCrunch article:
That is not a sign of a healthy ad inventory. You have to wonder how Clarion, Rackspace, MediaTemple, and IronScale feel about being placed under that flabby bare midriff.
Update: saw that stomach ad on the front page of techcrunch.com. Ouch.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:08 am
It’s possible that the ad may actually be targeted at you personally. Have you visited any fitness sites lately?
I was wondering about this myself recently as a “10 steps to great abs” (or something like that) ad seemed to be following me around the web. Turns out that nobody else in my office was seeing the ad. DoubleClick must have noticed that I was browsing content related to calories burned during various types of sporting activity, and decided I was in the market for weight-loss tips.
… Ami.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:17 am
I suppose that’s possible, but some queries on my browser history only show a few hits on that type of stuff.
I have looked at a fair number of sites targeted at women lately (DailyCandy, etc) while helping a friend with a site. I wonder if that’s what makes it happen. Surreal.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Hmm, cleared my profile and everything. Same ads. Also got 75% Off Cruises. Looking bad.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Lately, every time I visit lwn.net but also other sites too, I’ve been shown ads for a dating site offering Indian women. Strange but true.
January 7th, 2009 at 1:57 am
I’ve got the Indian women site too. But… you have to figure a lot of male Indian programmers in Bangalore working on Linux stuff, so that sort of makes sense.
Not nearly as spooky as seeing the same “great abs” ad on various sites totally unrelated to abs or to each other.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:40 am
It probably has a lot to do with seasonality. The same thing probably happened last year but nobody was paying attention since the sky wasn’t falling.
January 8th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Could be related to the name, which includes “crunch” as in doing crunches.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I noticed the same ad on my blog not too long ago. I agree with Rob that it’s not a good sign of the times to have such a different target market of ads on the same site.
I actually know many of the folks at one of the vendors listed on this page (the IronScale team). Haven’t talked to their marketing folks yet, but honestly, their service and product offering is pretty darn superior so – even with the flabby stomach article dominating the sidebar, they, IronScale, should be alright