With convergence of web and TV media, and more savvy online users just over the horizon…
…the usefulness of pay-per-click has unquestionably diminished. Banner blindness and even contempt have become problems. As ads become more obnoxious, some reactionary developers have turned to browser plug-ins to block ads or replace them with artwork or even personal photos. Nothing super innovative has happened in this space, until the UK start-up Rapportive released their Firefox and Chrome plug-in.
Unlike other systems, Rapportive contextualizes information on a given page and displays your social, relevant information. As of right now, this only works with Gmail, so I’ll use that as an example: If you are reading an email from a friend, the boilerplate banner ad typically would be advertising something weighted to be relevant to you. Rapportive, however, looks at who you are talking to and aggregates their social activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It then dynamically feeds up information and relevant links for that person, and even has special functions for CRM.
Although limited to Gmail for now, Rapportive shows serious chops and begs a massive question: How do we make online advertising more intelligent? An area my eyes typically spend a second getting away from is now a fixture in my day-to-day. If we devise a way to relate to people without obnoxious fly-overs, expanding banners, or dancing aliens, we may just find a second wind for banner ads.
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Another reason people use ad blockers is because the ads often take three or four times as long to load as the rest of the page, slowing down the browsing experience. Block advertisements speeds up page loading time and makes it more likely that we’ll actually bother to look at a page, rather than closing the tab or hitting the back button and moving on.