Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It struck me that the Internet was attracting younger, more savvy users now and the younger crowd traditionally do not like to read!
Text ads may be losing their appeal as it may seem to a lot of the younger, more in a rush crowd that text ads take up to much of their time. It seems to make sense with the explosion of video ads everywhere.
I am starting to believe that a bouncy visual ad would make the grade where a plain vanilla text ad wouldn't.
As a test I turned on image and text to see if my clicks go up. Should know by the end of the coming week.
Give me your thoughts on this, I feel sort of excited about this "stray thought"
Ann
It struck me that the Internet was attracting younger, more savvy users now and the younger crowd traditionally do not like to read!
I guess it would depend on your site topic, but Yes I would agree that one must customize the look and feel of their site to fit their target audience (including the ads). I would also add that some of us may be suprised as to what age groups are in our target audience.
Then again, even if your website attracts the younger generation in the serps but your target consumer is an adult, you may get more clicks in the short term with image ads but your conversions may go down as well as your CPC.
In my experience and for my websites, I have found that there isn't enough of a quality image ad inventory for my topics and that turning them on reduces the almighty bottom line.
Kids these days expect all ad types (text, image, media) to appear on a web page. In fact, some folks may even consider a non-ad web page "boring".
With that, I do believe a bit of ad-blindness has set in over the past couple of years.
Give me your thoughts on this, I feel sort of excited about this "stray thought"
I think you may be right in the general sense, but not when it some to Adsense text ads. The changes you describe would take place gradually, over a decade. The changes reported in these forums are on a time scale of months, or in the extreme cases, a year. There's no reason to believe the demographics of the web, at least the English language part, have changed in any radical way in the past year.
Some other publishers have blamed saturation or ad blindness for falling revenue in the past, or new competition and changes in the way advertisers buy ads, but all of these would show up as gradual changes. When something comes along every once and a while and whacks your eCPM by a double digit percentage from a given date in time, it's due to changes at Google or on your websiste, not changes in the nature of web visitors. Since we don't make structural changes in our website and add content on a slow basis, we're confident that the changes are on Google's end.
It struck me that the Internet was attracting younger, more savvy users now and the younger crowd traditionally do not like to read!
What! In the last 60 or 90 days this transition happened? There are plenty of thin and grey hair folks using the internet and "we" haven’t changed our habits that much of late. And, I doubt the “younger crowd” became that much more numerous and savvy spontaneously, especially if they “do not like to read “. BTW, my adult kids are not "savvy users" on the internet, or anything else for that matter.
If you are in search of an answer to this latest Adsense phenomenon, I would personally suggest that you concentrate your speculation on the forces of human nature and business evolution within Google.
My speculation (not theory)? Google is simply keeping the higher quality and paying ads for their own network – I would.
What has changed (dropped) is eCPM. This change is either due to either a lower price being paid by AdWords participants or else a change in the way Adsense determines my cut of the money paid by AdWords advertisers.
In any case, I'm inclined to disagree with the suggestion that the Internet is attracting "younger, more savvy users now and the younger crowd traditionally do not like to read." If anything, the Internet audience is probably older now than it was a dozen years ago, when the kids were on AOL and the Internet catered mainly to an adult, educated, technical crowd.
I do think there's something to the idea that, over the long term, "ad blindness" may threaten AdSense revenues on sites whose topics and audiences don't have an obvious affinity for direct-response advertising. However, I think AdSense text ads will continue to work well (or at least adequately) on sites where readers are researching purchases or at least researching topics that may lead to purchases. (Good examples would be camera-dealer ads for the Widgetco DSLR on a Widgetco DSLR review or unicycle tour-company ads alongide an article about unicycle travel in Elbonia.) That's how direct-response advertising works in offline media, where you'll find the most direct-response ads for computer accessories in magazines like PC, for cameras and lenses in POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY, and for books in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.
That's not to say there's any one-size-fits-all solution. Some types of sites and some types of advertisers may do better with multimedia ads. But it's too bad Ann felt the need to to subtitle the thread "Why I believe AdSense is broken" -- if there's anything "broken" about AdSense at all, this isn't it.
When I spoke of kids I meant those from 16 to 30, even a thirty year old is a kid to me.
Ann
Take the case in point, that we saw during the month times when our site was targeted by the advertiser(s) and daily revenue shot up. There are other days when their campaigns were turned off or directed elsewhere and all we saw were contextual clicks. On those days the ecpm fell drastically, and the majority of the ads were for "somecrappysite.biz_cheap_spammy_extension".
Makes total sense to me! (we did see the "glitch" in October but have recovered nicely)
