Content Suffocation Through Online Advertising

The thing about the web is, it's full of advertising. Tons and tons of the stuff. But do you really look at any of it?

I don't have the data to back up my assertions here, so I'm going to wildly assert away. That's what senators do and it works fo them, right?

While I've seen breathless accounts off .5 - 1% average clickthrough rates on web ads, I don't believe this to be accurate, or at least, not accurate anymore. If anyone has a real and current stat, devoid of marketing spin or cherry-picking, please let me know, I am curious... Now, back to the discussion.

Now, Let's Make up Some Stats
I would guess that you don't even notice something like 98% of all ads on web pages you visit. Maybe you glance over them to make sure there's not actual content which you are interested in, but I doubt your eyes linger long enough to even absorb what's being advertised, who the advertiser is, or why that little alien is dancing.

Every once in a while, you may absorb a bit of the message -- for me it's usually a beautiful car or striking photo or illustration that does it -- and then you are on your merry way. I would guess that of the times you stop to even look at an ad for more than a split second, you actually click the ad about 5-10% of the time. That means, in my completely fabricated-facts world, that you are actually clicking .001 - .002% of ads you are exposed to online. One- to two-thousandths of a percent.

Now, figure the average web page contains 5-20 ads each. At 5 ads per page, you would have to view 200 web pages to click one of the ads. At 20 ads per page, the statistic would be about 50 pages. However, as an interface designer, I believe that the individual value of each of those 20 ads on a page is reduced by the volume of ads present in total.

In other words, there's so much stuffed into the page because of all the ads, that you are less likely to notice or click any one of them! I believe this drives down your "click potential" on that page.

And here we arrive at a rule I try to keep in mind when designing any interface:

There is a diminishing return for the user in relation to the amount of options they are presented within a given interface.

So why are there so many ads on the web?!?!?!? Why do some sites insist on displaying more ads than content?

Where Are You Going with This?
I think it comes back to the same issue I witness as a designer working with a client: the "bigger, bolder" paradox. I think that design decisions made by business people, or at least people thinking in business terms only, are what drive the over-advertification of websites. The left-brained thinking that more ads on the page = more opportunity to collect visitor clicks is driving what amounts to a negative effect on the value of display ads. Simple Chart Time!™

As you can see in the simple chart above, I believe that the more ads which are represented on a page, the less valuable they become. There is a line somewhere in there —and perhaps it's different for each site and type of ad/editorial content— where the addition of more ads leads to a decrease in the overall appeal of any one of them. This also relates to another design observation I try to keep in mind when working on any project, and that is about the law of diminishing returns as it relates to the amount of information an interface presents to a user. More on that here.

We will take a look at a real-life example of content suffocation by online advertising in a future post.