Inline hates
Dec 17th, 2007 by handolio
I’ve been banging on about hyperlinks a bit lately, but they’re a pretty important part of writing online. Done well, embedding links within your copy can provide context, give a route to further reading, or even act as punctuation or emphasis. Taken together, the benefits improve the reader experience, and will help your visibility in search engines.
If you ask me, though, one way to fuck it up royally is to allow somebody else to embed adverts around keywords in your copy.
Advert reaction
That’s why this Press Gazette article left me a little depressed. Adverts are all over the shop, both in print and online, but no matter how intrusive they’ve become, there’s always been a clear distinction on the page between journalism and sponsored content.
Not any more: Vibrant’s ads, woven into the body copy, are clearly marked as advertisements, but only after you’ve activated them.
Ad infinitum
This kind of inline or popup advertising has been around for a while now, seemingly without spelling an end to journalism as we know it. But just as inserting a good hyperlink can add authority to your story, allowing somebody else to add a poor one can take it away.
Take the ad pictured right, anchored on the text “mobile phones”. It links to a generic advert for IBM’s solutions (don’t start me) for IT managers, which, so far as I know, don’t include mobile phones. It’s tacked onto one of two passing mentions of them in a 4,000-word Computer Shopper article I wrote about wireless power.
It’s a pertinent example, as John Barnes specifically mentions IBM in the Press Gazette article:
Vibrant is saying to companies like IBM, ‘if you want to target this type of campaign to these kinds of people then we would recommend these sites and these types of words’
Is this advert targeted, or just an annoying and pointless, off-topic distraction? Shopper’s a consumer magazine, not read by many IT managers. The article isn’t about mobile phones, but the displayed ad isn’t relevant to wireless power either.
Ad nauseam
The first problem I have with inline ads, then, is that they need to be better placed than they currently are in order to be relevant or useful to anyone, including the advertiser. The two examples pictured here show that the current method of attaching ads to keywords represents crude and hopeful fishing: journalists invest a lot of thought in choosing their words, and if advertisers are to get their hands on them they should exercise the same level of care.
The second problem I have is more fundamental. By being in the context of the body copy, these adverts intrude on a space that shouldn’t be for sale. Though they may not change the words, by attaching a payload to them advertisers modify their meaning.
Well put. This kind of anchor-text-advertising is designed by those with no sense of shame.
The sooner we get some good research that demonstrates how many people would rather chew off their own legs than endure articles with crudely sponsored hyperlinks the better.
Ok, proof of pitiful click-through rates would probably do just as well.
I jumped the page to read this full article, and before I continued reading I spent about 30 seconds trying to immediately close what I thought were dirty ad popups in your article.
I then realised that they were just screenshots and calmed down. So, there’s some research - I HATE THEM SO MUCH I GOT DISTRACTED FROM YOUR ARTICLE LAMBASTING THEM AND TRIED TO REPEATEDLY CLOSE THEM!
Arghhh - they make me so angry