Display advertising had been dying a slow and painful death for quite a while now. CTRs for banners are lower and lower.
Yet when I see ads on weblogs, on Myspace and Facebook it still strikes me how much of this advertising is still just display ads.
At the end of the last boom Overture (purchased by Yahoo in 2003, right as the economy began to emerge from the bust) and later Google brought us a new form of advertising which didn't even look like advertising to begin with: search advertising. Overture's original goal was "sponsored search": the more you bid for a term, the more relevant should the term be in search results.
Perhaps with this bubble dying a new form of advertising will emerge or has already emerged - which we won't initially (or can't yet) identify as advertising.
Brand advertising too has less of a future on the web: search advertising (especially with Google and their consideration of relevance of the ad and not just the bid value - something which didn't exist in Overture's model until Yahoo's Project Panama) enabled the "little guy", the local small businesses, the webmasters to sell their products to an audience that was looking to them.
It's folly too say "all that can invented [in advertising] is already invented". Traditional PPI/PPC banner/display advertising is drying up and rightly so (it encouraged a reductionist thinking, treating users as captive "eye balls" as opposed to customers of a product; it encouraged mee-too copycat websites which called themselves "start-ups"). Yet I wouldn't be quick to discount the possibility of something entirely different taking its place.
At the end of the last boom Overture (purchased by Yahoo in 2003, right as the economy began to emerge from the bust) and later Google brought us a new form of advertising which didn't even look like advertising to begin with: search advertising. Overture's original goal was "sponsored search": the more you bid for a term, the more relevant should the term be in search results.
Perhaps with this bubble dying a new form of advertising will emerge or has already emerged - which we won't initially (or can't yet) identify as advertising.
Brand advertising too has less of a future on the web: search advertising (especially with Google and their consideration of relevance of the ad and not just the bid value - something which didn't exist in Overture's model until Yahoo's Project Panama) enabled the "little guy", the local small businesses, the webmasters to sell their products to an audience that was looking to them.
It's folly too say "all that can invented [in advertising] is already invented". Traditional PPI/PPC banner/display advertising is drying up and rightly so (it encouraged a reductionist thinking, treating users as captive "eye balls" as opposed to customers of a product; it encouraged mee-too copycat websites which called themselves "start-ups"). Yet I wouldn't be quick to discount the possibility of something entirely different taking its place.