Reply to comment

This post isn't about Drupal development, or even web dev. It's about web browsing, something we do even more than the previous two activities!

The world of Internet marketing's head guru, Seth Godin, made a short post claiming Ads are the new online tip jar: if you come across great stuff in a blog, Seth recommends, give one of the ubiquitous ads a click to thank the blogger. In his words:

If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks.

"Uh oh", I thought, "that's going to raise a ruckus." And it did. You can see the immediate problem: the economics of Adsense and similar systems are based on advertisers paying for meaningful clicks that may lead to sales. If we all start clicking on random ads for purposes other than interest in the ad itself, advertisers pay for nothing in return. "[T]he economics of the web would change immediately", says Seth, and he's right – though a swell of critics charged that the name of the change is "click fraud".

Not surprisingly, Seth quickly made a follow-up post, Beating the status quo, to quell the storm. His text goes to some length to explain that the intent is certainly not click fraud, but rather a reward for good bloggers and more visitors to the advertiser's landing page, with the subsequent chance to catch a customer. The gist is "changing the status quo": creating a new, higher background rate of clickthroughs, to which advertisers will eventually adjust.

You'll rarely see me disagree with the brilliant Seth Godin, but I think his detailed explanation is still a hard sell, especially for advertisers. Yes, ads are generally matched to pages, and so even a "random" ad click still has a chance of being meaningful. But the advertiser is still paying for a click with (at best) lukewarm interest behind it. 

I think Seth's proposal could, with a simple tweak, become more palatable to all involved. Here's my proposed improvement:

If you like what you're reading, give ads attention.

We've all evolved ad blindness to some level. The main reason I don't click on ads is because I don't even see them, let alone respond. Under normal conditions, I don't even want to see them. 

But on a page with great content, why not at least take a look at the ads? That's what both blogger and advertiser want. I still don't need to click, unless an ad really interests me – which is just how it should be.

That's the whole of my small suggestion: not "to reward a blogger, click something", but "to reward a blogger, turn off your ad blindness for a moment".

Seems to me that that'd please everyone. What do you think?