A sure sign a web publisher is having trouble with the medium
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
I read the the latest The Pulpit from "I, Cringely" today, titled " Stop the Presses! How Pay-Per-Click Is Killing the Traditional Publishing Industry". In it he states:
The densest web page will have one banner ad at the top, eight to 10 Google ads down the right side, and maybe another Google ad or two at the bottom. That sounds like a lot, but on a strict real estate basis, it is very hard to exceed an ad-to-edit ratio of 50 percent, and most web pages have three times as much editorial content as ad space...
–Stop the Presses! How Pay-Per-Click Is Killing the Traditional Publishing Industry
He basically says that traditional publishers are in trouble because websites can't maintain the same ration of paid advertising to editorial content as print. Well I enjoyed his article and I thought it was spot on. But, soon after, I discovered an example of a publisher trying very hard to beat the problem.
This is a screenshot of a complete webpage. I won't name or link to the source because there are so many culprits doing the exact same thing. The dictionary site I linked to a while back had the same problem. I found a link to an article that looked interesting but when I got there, I was so put off, I didn't even read the article. The green area is the article content, the orange is self-promotion or advertising. They had even split the article over 2 pages; each page was 5 screens long at my screen resolution of 1440x1024.
I mean, you'd have to be on drugs if you think this is a winning format!
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