Summary: An ad-supported internet allows free access to content, but it makes that content worse.
“Digital transformation” includes several components: business models, content creation, revenue innovation, analytics, new technologies, and a few other things. It’s all fun stuff.
But one aspect of digital transformation seems to have been neglected. We have not considerably improved the experience of reading an article on a digital device.
By neglecting that, we’ve gone backwards. And there’s one likely culprit in this story.
An ad-based site is designed to interrupt reading. The advertiser’s mission is something like “I want to find people who are interested in X, but I want to distract them in the middle of the article and send them elsewhere.”
This is particularly annoying and disruptive on a mobile device, where it’s often almost impossible to read an article without navigating several interrupters.
What’s a publisher to do?
Let’s say you wanted to test two pages. The first is designed for the reader and includes ads. The second is designed for the advertiser and includes text. Here’s the problem: how would you measure the winner? Probably by ad revenue.
I’m not knocking advertising. It’s a necessary part of the ecosystem. But ads are designed to interfere with the reader experience, which leaves content creators with an important question. Are you creating content for the sole purpose of selling ads, or do you want to inform and educate your readers?
You want to do both, of course, but an ad-based site will always trend toward the former at the expense of the latter, which is reason #412 to investigate a paywall (or regwall).
- Articles on the outside should be designed to promote a subscription.
- Articles on the inside should be designed for the best possible reader experience.
- Ads should come in third place.
