An Example of Advertising Content Suffocation

{obvious}Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are just one example of the over-advertification which has reached epidemic proportions on the web now. And I don't expect it to get better anytime soon.{/obvious}

The greatest thing about the internet is that it offers us incredible ease-of-access to a ridiculous amount of information. While that information's not always accurate, I believe in many cases it is gaining a high level of truthiness™, but that's another discussion.

Some of the sites I frequent for facts and reference are Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and UrbanDictionary.com (explicit!). It is the Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com which I want to discuss in this article.

I find their content outstanding and informative. I am an early adopter, I've been using Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com for many years. They are usually reliable for finding a definition or good synonym/antonym for a word. I use them to educate myself, as a reference, and as a creative guide in the case of Thesaurus.com. What I don't use them for is to browse, shop, or find businesses offering services that match up to my search query.

While many websites are scrambling to stay in business, pay back angel investors, and prove their online business is profitable,  we users are having a diminishing user experience with content and websites because of the intense and growing presence of advertising within the pages we visit.

Let's look at my example, Thesaurus.com. Here is the web page for a thesaurus result in the site. If one looks quickly, they can see where the actual desired content probably resides on the page. Somewhere in the middle, right? As a first time user, you will probably also expect the navigation somewhere across the top or down the left side.

Below is a screenshot where I've highlighted just the content portion of the Thesaurus.com page. This is the stuff I wanted to find, the reason i came to the site and typed in my search query. It accounts for about 10-15% of the entire page.

Now take a look at the screenshot where I've highlighted the ads. About 70% of the web page is occupied by advertising. 15% content, 70% advertising. This ratio, almost 5:1 for ads to content, is in my opinion, out of whack.

One can argue that I've cherry picked this page with a result that only has a small amount of content. But also consider that for this page to even get close to a 1:1 relationship of ads to content, we need 4.7x more content on the page to balance it out!

And then consider, that's only to achieve a 1:1 ratio. I don't know about you, but I visit websites to consume content, not ads. And as a web visitor, unless the content offered by an over-advertificated site is exclusive, unique and unmatched, I will eventually go elsewhere for my content where I feel that my presence as a user and my experience interacting with the interface are respected by the website's creators.

So, that hasn't happened yet for me and Thesaurus.com, but it may. My recognition of how ridiculous web advertising has become happened on Thesaurus.com. So time will tell if this trend continues here or elsewhere, or if clean and useable interface design is able to affect a better solution.