RSS ads ten times less effective?

Posted by | July 19, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Very useful lowdown from Fred Wilson on poor performance of RSS ads.

This is to be expected. Ads are about persuasion, and they need to be seductive, which is why the average TV ad costs more per minute to make than a feature film.

In the context of search, text ads work because people are looking for things to be spelled out simply. They rely solely on a seductive slogan.

On a destination site, the picture becomes more blurred – but the fact of the matter is that the sites with the most traffic do not generate the most revenue from CPC based text ads, like Adsense – it comes from CPM based banner or rich media ads or brand sponsorship.

Adsense ads can be made to perform better by placing them in different positions on the page, but the performance will rarely be as good as rich media ads or text ads on search results pages.

With current RSS ads the control over placement goes away (you don't know what they are going to look like in different aggregators).

If RSS ads are like Adsense, they will always be the bottom of the pile.
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posted via Wists: permamark