Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Where's the Ad? Half of Us Can't Tell

As I mention in class, the ads that Google and others run in their search engine results are often not obviously different from the natural (or "organic") search results themselves. Apparently, the FTC agrees and this week told search engine companies that they need to do a better job of identifying advertisements. I guess that barely visible light yellow background for Google's pay per click ads isn't doing the trick; a study by SEOBook found that almost half of searchers didn't recognize the difference. Full story at the New York Times.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The power of lists (and listicles)

Over at the Hubspot Marketing Blog, Dan Lyons has a (very) light piece on why lists have become a primary form of information presentation and consumption on the web. There's some lighthearted commentary as well as a few serious thoughts about how we've all become accustomed to casual skimming the place of actual reading. Like most lists, the piece is cheeky, easy to consume, and light on actual content. It's meta.

I don't know how much people truly read online, although Farhad Manjoo at Slate (also referenced in Lyons' article) has some real data about online reading trends that are pretty troubling if you value longer-form writing on the web. The long and short of it is that everything is getting, well, shorter.

One of the tips I give in the email marketing class is that subject lines with lists ("5 things" or "10 tips") are a nearly foolproof way to increase open rates. This isn't exclusive to online publishing; magazines have been doing it for years to entice you to grab an issue off the newsstands. (Websites initially embraced lists spread across multiple pages as a way to juice page views, but advertisers caught on to this, and now more and more lists are simply spread the length of many screens.)

Should we lament our susceptibility to this informational junk food? I don't know. We all seem to be wired to crave a quick fix, a simple solution. The web has just given us our best delivery method yet.