DSA Online | New Media Updates

Quality Site Vs. Page count.

If you have spend any amount of time surfing sites like Digg or Reddit you will know that lists, particularly Top 10s, are very popular for attracting visitors to a website. A writer at Cracked.com even referred to it as the golden formula in a list of writing techniques for Cracked writers.

I love lists too, but some websites have taken a sinister turn with this technique in order to increase their page count for site visitors. While many sites will list the 10 items on a single page or two, other nefarious sites break up each item on the list into its own page, turning a single article into ten pages. But what’s wrong with that? (Aside from the annoyance of waiting for 10 pages to load just to read through a single article).

Breaking a single article into multiple pages allows a website to tally-up a larger page view count, and each of those pages serves impressions- more page views means more impressions. The problem with this is that the amount of site visitors doesn’t increase, it just means visitors view more pages – which doesn’t really sound like a bad thing, but consider this from an advertiser’s perspective:

A person reading a list contained on single page will only see the limited number of ads served on that page, and depending how much scrolling is involved in viewing the list, they will likely see those ads for more than a few seconds. On the other hand, a list broken into 10 pages will serve 10 times as many ads.  Here’s the rub – an advertiser may have their ad shown multiple times, or only have their ad shown once, briefly, among 9 other ads.  Either way the advertiser loses in the 10 page version of the list.

On a list displayed on a single page, an ad will show for the entire time the article is read. In a 10 page list, your ad is quickly replaced as the viewer browses through the pages. This leads to one of two options:

• The ad is refreshed with the same ad, wasting your impressions by serving the same ad over and over to the same person. (Which is why you should always consider frequency capping when buying online advertising) Instead of serving a single ad for a long period in the single page list, you end up serving 10 impressions in smaller time increments. The overall exposure to the message remains the same, but the 10 page list will cost you ten times as much (because you are paying for each impression served)

• The ad is refreshed with another ad, and the likelihood that the first ad is noticed diminishes.

And so we learn an ugly truth about advertising on websites. TV advertisers know how many ads run during a time slot and how often their ads will run, but often web advertisers have no idea how many other ads are running on a site, or how often their ads are shown.  There are no standards for websites, and as such they can serve as many ads as they want, as often as they want. As internet advertising grows, advertisers need to become savvier about the sites they are running on. Most websites rely on advertising for income; by pulling ads from sites that use deceptive practices, we discourage those sites from using those tactics, and help move us all into a world where we know what to expect when buying ads.