I’ve been fascinated by advertising pages in magazines. At one point I conducted an extremely unscientific study, attempting to determine the average number of advertising pages the reader is faced with before reaching the table of contents in various magazines. Esquire, of the magazines I examined, most extremely took its time in getting to actual content, but, again, this study was extremely unscientific, so don’t read too much into this. But more important than the number of ads is the relationship of those ads to the content of the magazine. Of course, there’s always a concern about news outlets reporting on the doings of their sponsors. But I’m thinking here more in terms of simple design. Ads need to be noticed; that’s their purpose. But a publication needs to maintain a separation between what readers want to see and what the magazine wants them to see. If the content is overshadowed, the magazine withers and dies.
Plenty of ink has been spilled discussing these issues, some of it (of the virtual variety, naturally) even on this website. So the questions becomes: as marketing budgets increasingly shift to blog and websites, how will these online publications handle this precarious balancing act? It’s a question that needs to be answered, maybe sooner rather than later if this BrandWeek article, by Todd Wasserman, on new exclusive advertising agreements on Yahoo! sites is to be believed:
It’s not uncommon for a publisher of a print magazine to give advertisers a heads up about upcoming themed editorial sections, but that’s still an unusual practice for an online-only site.
But Yahoo’s Shine, an online hub aimed at women between 25 and 55, has had some success drawing marketers to be exclusive advertisers for online “channels.”
In February, Walmart signed up for a channel called Make Home a Haven, and Procter & Gamble has sponsored other sections. The latest channel advertiser is the skin-care brand Nivea, which is advertising on a channel called Bikini 101 to promote its Goodbye Cellulite, Hello Bikini Challenge.
As someone who cares about the future of online writing, I think this is a positive development. These arrangements indicate a growing commitment to online publications of a high quality. I’m all in favor of that. But this isn’t the end of the challenge for Yahoo! It, along with all websites with ads, now needs to figure out how design its sites so as to maximize the value of these ads while preventing unneeded distractions to the readers.
If you’re considering the balancing act of content and ads on your site, you would do well to start with this article on A List Apart by Mandy Brown, a former designer for W.W. Norton & Co., the venerable (and independently owned) book publisher. There’s plenty of good advice there on designing sites that respect the reader, including this invaluable suggestion:
Many sites scatter related content around the article, instead of focusing it at the top or bottom, where it’s more useful and less likely to be a distraction. If you want your users to skim the page, then by all means, fill the sidebar with content all the way down. But if you want them to read—if the page was written and not merely filled up, if the text consists of carefully crafted prose rather than bullet points—then respect the reading process and move that content elsewhere. The middle of an article should reflect the solitariness of reading with a design that neither interrupts the text nor the reader.
How is your online reading affected by the presence of ads? How do you balance content and ads on your sites?
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