online advertisements

After reading “Web Numbers: What’s Real?” from Business Week, I wanted to talk a little about the effectiveness of online advertisements. Personally, I find online advertisements to be one of the most ineffective advertisements. Surely, it could reach a lot of people, but reaching doesn’t mean it gets users’ attention.

I think the main reason for the ineffectiveness of online advertisements is the “skip” button. Unlike TV ads, which I basically have no control over, online ads make it easy for us to avoid it by simply providing the “skip” button. Don’t get me wrong here. I am not claiming to remove the skip button on online ads. It will certainly make a lot of people mad if we are forced to watch or read ads on internet and have no control over to simply skip it. What I want to emphasize here is this: it is probably very difficult to give our attention to online ads especially when we are surfing the internet to find information of our wants.

Let me talk a little bit about an advertisement strategy of a Korean Web site called “mncast.com.” This Web site is like a Korean version of Youtube. What’s interesting about this Web site is its method of putting advertisements. In order to watch a video, you have to see a 30 sec video ad at the beginning of the video. You don’t have skip button for these ads. All you can do is either watch the ad, or look elsewhere for the 30 seconds. These advertisements, however, don’t happen for every time you view videos. It happens randomly. From my experience, I would say the ad appears about once in eight videos I watch. I thought this wasn’t too bad. Besides, since the ads are videos, I usually pay more attention. I don’t pay any attention to ads that are basically banners with a skip button on it. Surfing this Web site made me curious about Youtube. Will Youtube try to put ads in this kind of system? If this happens, will this system work for American people? Or could there be better ways to put effective advertisements on big video Web sites like Youtube?