The End of the WebPage
I love Netvibes, and not just because I use them as my homepage. I love them because they get it. If you missed it check out the two vids from their CEO. He makes one bold claim — that web pages will begin to disappear over the next couple years to be replaced by widgets. He’s partly right, of course; there will always be good reasons to have information on a web page rather than exclusively delivered via RSS, but as we are exposed to exponentially more bits of information each day there will be less desire for us to spend more than a few seconds on any one story or piece of content. I’m not going to get into the social and cultural implications of that here; what interests me of course are the implications for us evil marketers.
Almost all online advertising right now is built for web page views. The structure, content, measurement, tracking — everything is designed with a web page in mind. If the web page goes away we’re left with a platform built of tiny bits of content and information grouped together on one page read by people who are trying to get through that content as quickly as possible. What’s an evil marketer to do?
Don’t panic my friends. Ads on web pages never really worked very well anyway. Oh sure, they gave us triple digit ROI, but that only seemed great because we were used to throwing millions of dollars at 30 second TV spots (shudder). But most ads get less than 1% click through and convert at about 2-3% once clicked. Embarrassing. Good riddance, I say. What we should be doing is pushing content to users that they want to see that is simply an advertisement in disguise. Sponsored feeds, incentivized and rev-shared product recommendations, brand love created by influencers designed for a specific niche audience. It’s all good, and it will all happen.
There isn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for all of this yet — RSS ads are really in their infancy and are still mired in the idea that we need to insert ads next to content. Have we learned nothing yet my friends? People don’t like ads that are next to their content. They absolutely hate pops because they obscured content. They skip TV ads because they interrupt content. They rebel against pre-rolls that make them wait for their content. See a pattern here? The only time they like “ads” are when it’s a trusted influencer giving them advice on what they should buy and hopefully giving them an incentive to do it. So let’s just make sure everything we do is with that model in mind and don’t fear the end of the webpage.
Love,
The Evil Marketer