Are you fed up of all those ads coming up while trying to access your Youtube video, or your online newspaper article? With the raise of the Internet usage, and a lot of investment in the market, online companies are monetizing their audience. How do they do? As any other media business, they sell ads to corporation eager to find customers, by delivering them great content.
The problem is that on the Internet there are new tools that allow users to block ads. While you were watching TV, probably you were used to mute your TV set, or even shut it down while the commercials were on. Same thing for the Internet.
- First, you have more and more people using those tools to block ads.
- Secondly, the skyrocketing number of commercials sent online force people to their threshold.
Obviously, this news is bad: Websites need commercial revenues to keep on delivering their service. When you see leaders of the industry, especially Twitter, struggling to generate a strong business model even though they have developed a large audience show well what is at stake. But while the Internet allows companies to segment better their audience and deliver an accurate message, the spring in usage of the Internet as a media turned companies to consider this tool as a mass media.
And that is the issue. Indeed, I remember having read while ago the book of Seth Godin Permission Marketing. The idea of the book was clear: customers would allow businesses to use their data in order to deliver them some valuable information about their products. As the number of media exploded (especially at this time via email marketing), there was a need for businesses to be responsible in the way they handled their push marketing campaigns.
Right now, the Internet is on a very important moment of its life. It needs to better use its data and rethink the way to use commercials. Because Internet users will not bear to have such a high exposition to ads. I am the firts person to complain while I am watching some videos on Youtube to see I am stopped every 5 minutes by a commercial. It is unbearable, and will turn people off the service.
Therefore marketing professionals need to focus on the way they use the Internet of ads.
