Our Attention Is Just a Pawn in the Great Game of Silicon Valley

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Content inserts would not pop-up on the pages but are with the pages themselves naturally; the readers would enjoy and share the contents.

Net Star Advertising

Net star advertising use stars visibility and number of fans, naturally insert in the live video and net stars activities. This advertising is consistent with the situation at the moment. The spectators are easy to accept the product or service described in this kind of advertising.

All above advertising care about reader’s experience, i.e. trying to avoid reading interruptions and enjoying of the contents. All those bring a healthier and more harmonious advertising environment.

So Why readers don’t like advertising?

As a rapidly developing market, Ad networks with slow, heavy ads that disrupt the user experience while ignoring basic privacy, security and responsibility. Generally, there are four main reasons that readers don’t like ad: performance, privacy, security and experience.

Performance. The average page has dozens of ad tags, and ad providers are typically built with no regard to performance (loading hundreds of tags, images, megabytes of video, etc.), so preventing all of this from loading drastically speeds up the website.

Privacy. Most ad networks and tracking systems (like Google Analytics) collect information about user behavior and pages visited, which can lead to privacy issues. Ad blockers stop all of this and make it easy to browse privately.

Security. The display (banner) ecosystem is still the largest part of online ads, and has become a mishmash of technologies; vendors with lots of bolt-on additions like rich media to create more “interactive” and “engaging” ads with animations, video, audio and other elements. To enable this, ad networks have allowed for third-party JavaScript and Flash files to run in ad slots. However, both of these options allow for malicious code to be run, which has led to users getting infected with viruses and malware on a massive scale.

Experience. Ad formats have evolved from simple banners to rich media, and are at the height of intrusiveness today with things like outstream video (video instantly appearing in between paragraphs of an article) and in-image banners (banner ads layered on top of other images).

But it’s not all doom and gloom; the best part is that this is a completely solvable problem.

Solution - Value add

Create Value for readers

Readers need good experience when they are reading. Firstly the publisher needs to create and deliver high quality contents. And media need to identify high quality contents by algorithms and optimize the organization of contents for readers (Search engine result, Google News, Toutiao.com)

Secondly, Media and Advertisers need to improve the quality of ads

- Educate Advertisers to do more native ads to improve the user perception

- Educate Advertisers to design high quality ads (high resolution picture，clear topic, non-misleading，inviting call to action）

- Analyze the readers’ behavior and target core potential users to provide more relevant ads

- Analyze the readers’ response to an ads to improve the acceptance of ads

- Invite the third party to audit the quality and effects of the ads

After optimizing the Ads quality and ads performance, the readers experience will be improved and the publisher could get more profits. And then publisher will survive and have more resource to create high quality content.

Thirdly, media need to give more flexibility to readers to choose the acceptance of the ads. Readers could skip some video ads or remove some banner ads if they think it is not relevant. Then the readers will feel be respected. The readers’ experience will be improved significantly.

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In conclusion, the Media Platform – such as Google, Baidu, Facebook, etc. are now playing a more and more important role in the online advertising industry. They have to secure the readers – make sure the advertising can create the true value to them. In other word, media platform needs to understand readers’ needs and provide the relevant response to fulfill readers’ actual/ potential needs, and make sure these ads will not affect their using experience.

On the other hand, media platform also has responsibility to help Advertiser digging more value from the advertisement. Therefore media platform needs to analyze readers’ behavior to make sure that advertiser will not miss their target audience. The media platform also has to educate their advertisers to ensure the quality of advertisement is well enough to be accepted by readers.

After all, the online advertisement is one of the key element of a healthy internet ecosystem. We do understand that many readers don’t like the online advertisement, but if readers want to keep gathering high quality content from internet without paying the bill, they need to accept the internet environment with the existence of advertising. Of course, not only readers, but also each party has responsibility to maintain the health development of this ecosystem by providing high quality ads, user-friendly experience, analyze the user behavior, and so on.

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