Charvolant

People don’t stop reading an article in a newspaper or magazine to research a product displayed in an ad and they won’t stop watching a show on television to look up more info about something they just saw a commercial for. So why would they stop viewing something online just because there’s an ad next to it? The only difference is that the internet ad is clickable and ones in magazines or on TV aren’t, but the idea that someone isn’t going to leave something they like just to pursue an ad is the same on all platforms, even when the opportunity to do so is there.

So the goal of an ad online shouldn’t even be to attract clicks or entice people to take action now, it should be to make the person remember whatever it’s promoting so they will hopefully look into it more at some later time. Once that is established, you have to ask yourself what people are going to remember more, something they are interested in or something that’s just randomly there because it’s paid for? Naturally, people will remember whatever they like more, so the best place to advertise your product is to get it onto a “channel” that’s accessed by lots of like-minded people, something like a website or blog about a certain topic. The promotional value something gets in an article is much greater than any sort of traditional advertising.

Why don’t companies pay people to write about their products on topic-specific blogs and websites? Well, some do, but it doesn’t seem to be that big of an idea online yet. It’s the best kind of advertising (if it’s done right), though. Sure, you could make the argument that doing this could potentially taint the quality of the content or compromise the writing style, but a director who is aware of these issues could easily limit the article topics to those that are still perfectly acceptable for the genre of the site. Content legitimacy could also be maintained by making no promises to the paying promoter that the review or article will necessarily be positive and making sure that it remains true to the writer’s purpose, whether they aim to be objective or subjective. Subjectivity is best for the purpose of promoting a product, though, and this happens to be just how most bloggers write.

Of course, the paying “advertiser” would be taking a big risk by agreeing to pay for something that has uncertain effectiveness. But how is that any different than putting a traditional ad into a magazine or website or on a billboard? You don’t know how effective any of those will be until it’s been paid for and has been published, and sometimes not even then. Plus, the costs of those forms of advertising are even higher than what a blogger might charge to write an article about a specific product or company. When you also consider that a website or blog is much more targeted towards the type of person who would actually be interested in any given topic, paying someone to write about your product actually makes a lot more sense than paying for a full page ad in a magazine.