Final Post

This final week of blogging brings sadness with it. Previous to this, I had never blogged before, and considered it a waste of time. However, I have now embraced blogging as a wonderful outlet and release; to virtually scribe my thoughts and feelings from my head and heart onto paper so to speak. It doesn’t even matter to me if anyone is following my blog, because it is therapy for myself, even if they are assignments from my Marketing in the Era of Digital Technology class. Watch out Professor Acito, you may have unleashed a blogging machine. This week I was able to experience all the selections I had set out to in the previous post. These articles/videos/podcasts both re-affirmed my stance of advertising in today’s virtual world, but also provided many examples to disprove my beliefs.

My view towards ads is similar to the one presented in the article “Why advertising is Failing on the Internet.” Most ads are pushed upon users. 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. “Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest”. While this may be true, Google did generate 21 Billion dollars in advertising revenue last year. Do the companies that advertise log increased sales due to these adspots on Google. Well I searched “does internet advertising increase profits” using the Google search engine. The second hit was the link for “Why advertising is Failing on the Internet” and none of the other links on the main page show any evidence that internet advertising has a direct correlation to increased profits. Therefore, I still am not sold that internet advertising actually translates into profits and sales that offset the advertising costs.

Before reading the “Secret of Googlenomics”, I never realized that Google sells their adds via a high speed auction , aka adwords. . However, and this may sound silly, but I never really noticed that Google had ads that accompanied searches. The article stated that ads are located on the right side as “sponsored links”. So I did a search and of course, sponsored links popped up to the right side with ads. These links were text based and non obtrusive, the original intention of the Google founders, “Page and Brin also believed that ads should be useful and welcome—not annoying intrusions”. However, they are so non-intrusive, I didn’t even know they existed until now, and I consider myself very internet savy There must to be some way to create websites that do other services than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

Another interesting item to note is that I copied and pasted a quote from the “Why advertising is Failing on the Internet” article and the following was also pasted below -

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/#ixzz0pITTKv26

I’ve never seen that before. That is genius, almost better than advertising. I researched to see if there was any information about this on the internet but I couldn’t find any. I’m not sure if this is a feature I turned on from my internet explorer.computer, or if it is embedded in the code of the html.