Our Attention Is Just a Pawn in the Great Game of Silicon Valley

“Online advertising, also called online marketing or Internet advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. Consumers view online advertising as an unwanted distraction with few benefits and have increasingly turned to ad blocking for a variety of reasons.”  Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising

Media Platform – They are Google, Baidu, Facebook, etc.  They provide the online platform for the advertisement by which way, they earn 90% profit,and key contributors are readers, publishers, and advertisers.  However, there are some technology to block advertisement since ad is not always welcome.

One is Ad-blocking, or ad filtering, ad will not appear on the readers’ page because there is software be installed to help screen out ads.  Many readers block unsolicited pop-up ads by default.  One more is Anti-targeting technology. Some websites provide the privacy modes where readers can hide information about themselves from publishers and advertisers.  

To better understand this industry, it is worth of looking at the demands of each party. In the span of a year, the emergence of new technologies completely changed all parties’ expectations for a given institution.

Readers - They will demand information that is provided to them in more concise, accessible, high-quality ways. That means general listicle-style articles and clickbait articles will start to disappear entirely. Besides, readers are accustomed to seeing embedded short videos, live video feeds, and multiple forms of the same content piece (i.e., article, infographic, video, etc.). So readers will prefer to get more diverse and more flexible media experiences from every angle, requiring multiple formats before clicking or even excluding some mediums entirely. Talking back to the ads, we normally think readers tend to fast-forward past them. But that doesn’t necessarily means readers don’t want to watch ads at all. Instead, they just want ads to be more entertaining or useful so the ads will not so annoying.

Advertiser – Social media platforms and search engines brought huge benefit to the advertisers nowadays. They have more flexible and fast ways to delivery their ads. However, the use of more social media and platforms also means that it is harder and harder to get attention from readers. So advertisers do want to target the right audience and position themselves as accurate as possible. Meanwhile, the main purpose of ads is to let readers buy in their idea, which will be rewarded with more visibility (and probably more revenue). Thus, how to make the ads effective and relative to the readers is also important. And to achieve maximum profit, the advertisers also want to control their cost.  

Publisher - They depend on advertising to make money, so they need enough flow (readers/attention) to attract advertisers and want those ads to be effective; but certain advertising strategies, like pop-ups and pop-unders, are so annoying that most publishers felt compelled to block or disable them for their readers. This posed a huge threat to publishers’ operating revenues. So the biggest demand of publishers is - how to attract and retain more readers and delivery ads in a less disruptive way to minimize the above conflict.  

As the bridge of above parties, Media Platforms play a key role. They rely on their huge user base and target to expand this base as large as possible. At the same time, to pursuit a maximum profit, Media Platforms spare no effort to balance the benefits to readers, publishers, advertisers and maximize the overall value for the eco-system.

Even though why reader do not want to see the ad. 

Before answer the question, let us look a bit about the change on customer behavior in the history.

o   Changes

        Customer behavior change

        Information inquiry change

Traditionally people acquire information from newspaper, journal, and magazine, because these hardcopies can be easily replicated and distributed, after years development, we can say there were dimensions of option for people to choose, in another word, we have customized solution on information acquisition from hardcopy perspective. Then Industry revolution brought us Radio, Movie and TV, which gave us totally different experience to acquire information.

But the internet’s emerging changed everything, we can interact with information, we can even create and distribute our own information say article, photos and even videos very easily. Magically, the smart phone popped up 7 years ago, this small but magic device changed the game one more time, and we can access all kinds of information at anywhere and anytime with this little device.

Same as the continuous change on information sourcing, people also changed on their behavior, they give up hardcopies and begin to depend more on accessing e-version on their all kind of devices; people are not satisfied with receiving content begin to create content and distribute content, but searching, pushing the information per their needs.

But don't forget no matter what kind of media we are looking at, newspaper, journal, TV and movie etc, advertisement always come with the demanded content. In the advertising network market, Ads are a fundamental part of the web ecosystem and have allowed for the massive growth in content and destinations. This is why Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube can be alive and even get stronger.

Competitors inside Media Platform Advertising:

We understand that above are the 4 main types of off-line traditional advertising, however, as long as the on-line advertising is under development, reader’s behavior has been changed from off-line to on-line, therefore, more and more attentions focus on on-line advertising instead of traditional advertising.  

Types of Media advertising:

Soft text advertising

Soft text ads are natural implant targeted advertising in contents. Such ads have a strong concealment and high dependent, as well as bring the less feeling of commercial purpose. Readers would enjoy the article and feel less sense on the existence of advertising.

Native Advertising

The content of native advertising is valuable for readers, rather than just advertising information, but the ad can provide to readers satisfied life style information.