On Banner Ads and Click-throughs

I was reading Slashdot (for like the third time today) and found an article titled "Banner Ads: Biggest Advertising Mistake Ever". While I didn't read the linked news article, I did read the comments (set threshold to 3) and I particularly liked two comments. The first of which is (excerpted):

The thing about banner ads is that I'll occassionally see one for something I'm interested in or for a company I didn't realize had a web presence, but usually I'll just make a mental note and surf there myself when I'm in the mood to shop...

To which another Slashdot member replied:

What you've described is the classic model of print advertising. Advertising traditionally doesn't work by immediately creating a sale, it works by building a largely subconscious awareness of the brand and product that is being advertised, and associating that awareness with real (it works!) and imagined (it will make you popular, get you laid, and bring joy to your life!) benefits (also mostly subconciously.)

That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing. In other domains, no one judges the success of print ads by the number of people who stop reading the magazine and rush to the phones, they judge success by the overall increase in business. Likewise, no one judges the success of billboards by how many cars veer off the freeway and head towards the advertiser's business, nor TV advertisement by how many people shut off the TV and run to the mall. However, that is exactly what is used to judge the viability of banner ads - it is expected to provide instant business, and advertisers are loathe to pay for online ad campaigns that don't have a next-click success.

Online publishers are partially to blame for this by promising the moon to their advertising customers, and by selling click-through instead of selling brand awareness. This may be fallout from the heady pre-bust days when no one worried about revenue, anyway - having big accounts (which produced no revenue) was seen as more important to attracting investors than the revenue stream was, so publishers would tell ad sales prospects that they wouldn't have to pay (much) unless there was a click through. Now, they are paying the price for that carelessness.

Cool

So when does it get fixed so that somebody can start charging $2,000,000 for 30 seconds of exposure to XX million eyes?

And when will we go to a site more to see the ads than the program? Oh wait, I already do that at adcritic.com ;-p

I'm sure...

...if you could get XX million eyes to view 30 seconds of high-bandwidth video at the same time with a certain guarantee that they won't interrupt it, maybe one day you'd get $2,000,000 for it. Maybe not, there are different expectations on the Internet.

But then, how much does a sidebar ad in a magazine cost (since the second poster was referring to print advertising)? Maybe one day a monthly e-zine can charge as much for a sidebar ad on one of their articles.