A few weeks ago I wrote ‘Newspaper paywall panic’ where I gave my thoughts on The Times’ doomed paywall scheme.  Well in the last week or so the results have started to be released and as expected they don’t make good reading, well not for Murdoch anyway!

So let’s cut to the chase, the number of people willing to pay the money regularly is 15,000, yep your eyes are not deceiving you and yes the general consensus is that this is a rather poor figure;  oh, but the bad news doesn’t stop there, the online subscription is a mere £2 a week which is pricing itself well below what is needed to counter-act the steady decline of the more expensive print product, not to mention the loss in advertising revenue they will undoubtedly be experiencing.  (Am I the only one that saw that coming, surely not!)

Okay, so there is the bad news; hang-on is there a glimmer of hope on the horizon? No! Apparently the iPad application has 12,500 subscribers paying £10 per month which in contrast to the web figure is quoted as being positive, this is due apparently to the relatively low number of iPads in circulation which interestingly contradicts Apple’s recent announcement that the iPad is now outselling its Notebook range with three million sold so far, sounds like wishful thinking by News Corp if you ask me.

I suppose I have been a little hard on The Times’ attempt to make money, I just find it hard to believe that the Industry in general still thinks it is because banner supported content doesn’t work; yet a high number of other websites and ad-delivery networks are experiencing good levels of user response with less intrusive and more importantly static support adverts.

Put simply, this is print minded executives trying to control the web which is the root of this problem; in my opinion, unless radical change takes place certain sectors of the news print industry are heading for the end.

I was contacted today by a colleague for whome I had recently designed a static banner, she requested that I animate it, when I asked why an advert with one simple message needed animating she told me that during a presentation to her superior she was reprimanded and told it should have been! – I was stunned that a senior member of our company should have such an uninformed view of online advertising, and worse still be preaching it to their staff!

As a fairly experienced designer of adverts from print to web I understand the balance between customer satisfaction and user response quite well, I also have equally successful examples of both static and animated artwork; unfortunately sales teams don’t have this wealth of experience and prefer something esthetically pleasing or dynamic to wow a client and make the sales pitch that much easier for themselves, while I sympathise with sales teams wanting to keep their task simple in difficult times I can’t help feeling that it’s ignorance that makes the pitch difficult, not the dynamics of the advert.

Let me explain why I feel ignorance is the issue – Banner advertising has been around for a number of years now and web users are more switched on than ever before, at the same time various web browsers along with off-the-shelf software make it relatively simple to block banner advertising, one click and a web site’s ads are gone which is not good news for companies that have a banner advertising website model!  This is where the ignorance of sales people and teams starts to become a real issue, their need to keep the sale simple will inevitably damage advertising effectiveness as users either stop visiting your site or just simply block your advertising content.

My ethos is ‘less is more’ – yep not the first time you have probably heard this, but as far as I can tell there are three clear types of banner advert -

1. The adverts with one clear message and minimal text
2. Adverts for brand awareness only and again minimal contact copy
3. Those with a few clear key messages. 

 For me the first would be static this is because the simple message is the important part of the advert, it needs to be on screen for as long as possible giving the message the best chance of being absorbed by the user, while the second is using general content with no clear call to action, this naturally could use subtle animation to draw the users eye without distracting them too much (colour blends and changes would work well), the third where content is an issue I would use interactive animation i.e. when a user rolls over the advert an extra element is presented. 

Using the correct advert type for the content you are presenting is key, but because of the fear some businesses have of the Internet coupled with a lack of understanding the industries most in need of these revenues may simply cut their own throats.  Many web design blogs and websites have adopted the static advert model and seem to be making money, maybe the media industry should pay attention to this!

To prove that this can be successful Fusion Ads delivery network deals in only static advertising and currently delivers over 20,000,000 page views per month to its design network – Seems this is working quite well and may just be worth keeping an eye on.

I think some animation is necessary and sometimes you simply cannot get around it but it certainly shouldn’t be the industry standard.  If you have to animate an advert to make the sell then the advert is probably not going to succeed!

Slowly advertising is going to change and banners will disappear, so adapt now it will make a huge difference to the future and life of all online services.

See related article – http://nasarik.com/is-it-too-late-to-save-the-web-from-over-the-top-advertising/

Adverts are an integral part of the web, without web advertising most sites wouldn’t be able to bring us all that wonderful content for free so it is a shame that this medium of advertising has become a problem.  Users now have to cope with the ever increasing on-slaught of banners, pop-ups, pop-unders impact ads and well the list goes on, surely webmasters have started to realise that their users will inevitably go else where?

Websites across the world have surrounded their content with animated advertising whether it be simple .gif files or more complex flash animations which are on-the-whole completely unnecessary; don’t get me wrong, flash ads can be intelligently created delivering a clear message in a slick manner but ultimately these type of adverts are distracting to the user, we are trying to attract new users not scare them off, aren’t we?

Companies littering sites with these adverts is not being helped by an industry that delivers facts stating that animated adverts receiving more response which naturally implies that animation brings response, however, in my experience this hasn’t been proven true, some of the most successful advertising campaigns that I have witnessed have been simple quality designs with limited or no animation.

“For some reason it seems to have escaped every body’s attention that if we annoy our users they will go somewhere else, now what use to an advertiser is a website with no users?”

All any website wants to do is increase its user base while at the same time making enough money to keep it afloat, if we keep cramming over the top advert animations into web templates eventually the users will leave which inevitably will mean the money will to.

Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall and even the New York Times are just a few sites that use static adverts well, while others, and we all know who they are treat their web pages like a fun fair.  It’s not just the sites mentioned that are moving to a simpler way to advertise there are a number of sites coming up with more intelligent ways to incorporate adverts so that it becomes a part of the design and not an added extra.

I am guilty of getting caught up in the easy sell to customers of animation, so I am willing to do my bit to make web adverts feel less ridiculous and to show those who request overly animated designs the way forward.  If you read this article, and agree with the concept that less is more then please try and do your bit, if we all do a little to help stop this over use of animation it will eventually force a good change within the industry.