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Why advertising is failing on the Internet

March 23, 2009 |

According to Wharton Professor Eric Clemons traditional advertising cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars.

Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania argues in a TechCrunch article that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. ?The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,? he writes.

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him.

The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

Get the full story at TechCrunch

Read also Danny Sullivan's reaction to the article at Search Engine Land

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