- Image via Wikipedia
Premise: We judge the health and authority of a site in relationship to the advertising (or lack of) it carries.
If you went to a corporate website – such as Microsoft.com or Apple.com – and bumped into a slew of banner ads for products from other companies, what would you think? That you went to the wrong site? That they’re not doing so well that they need ads? That’s a pretty straightforward example – you’re expecting a major player and they’re peppering your screen with semi-related offers.
Here is where it gets interesting. If the site has low authority in a field – like a personal blog (ahem), adding a limited number of ads in the right places sends a completely different message – to some it will lend the credibility that comes with a publisher that cares about their blog enough to try to monetize it. You expect the site to potentially be a source of income for the publisher, regardless if it is just an online doodle. To everyone else, regardless of knowledge or experience, there is an association of ideas that takes, and the concepts associated to the ads become related to the blog in the visitor’s mind – its a matter of degrees, of course.
Ad quality transfers to site experience
If the ads on a site are of good quality, it can ad a veneer of credibility/authority to the site regardless of its content. As an example, this site is currently displaying ads for a Web 2.0 application development platform, and some brick-and-mortar universities. This is as close as the blog is going to get in terms of getting associated with such powerful brands – If I have a big ad for Harvard university, some ideas you have associated with that institution are transferred to the experience you receive from my site. If I have the Harvard site everywhere, the more you visit my blog the more the idea of my blog will be related to the concepts you hold with the Harvard logo. Now imagine if my ads were for something shady, like get-rich-quick schemes or using bad logos – like the Enron logo.
This cuts both ways – The danger for advertisers is clear here: As an advertiser you must manage your website placements so you don’t end up associated to the wrong concepts.
Related articles
- Who clicks on banner ads? (sciencetext.com)
- Currencies that buy credibility (brandingblog.com)
