Ban Banner Ads

I never liked them and a couple of weeks ago, FDTimes decided to totally eliminate banner ads. They were annoying, ugly, and slowed the website to a crawl. We only ran a few, seldomly, and only for trade shows. But still…

It was gratifying to read Farhad Manjoo’s article “The Fall of the Banner Ad: The Monster That Swallowed the Web” in the NYTimes today. “Twenty years ago…a team of well-meaning …coders…inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting world one of the most misguided and destructive technologies of the Internet age: the web banner ad.

‘It’s almost like a prank that was played by the technology industry on the media industry 20 years ago,’ said Chris Dixon.

“But what’s so bad about banners?

“…Banner ads perverted the content itself. Because they are so ineffective, banner ads are sold at low prices for high volume, which means to make any money from them, sites need to pull in major traffic. This business model instilled the idea that page views were a paramount goal of the web, thus spawning millions of low-rent, me-too sites bent on getting your click.”

It would appear that FDT has been on the right track. Vetted content, informative articles, supported by discrete links to our beneficent patrons’ logos and names. And have you noticed how much faster our home page loads?

 

Leave a Comment

2 Responses:

  1. Jon Fauer says:

    Oops–there’s still one banner ad lurking on our page — trying to remove it :)

Tags: