The comic Jackie Mason once mused that if a newspaper were introduced after the computer, consumers would be overjoyed that they could read the news without having to plug anything in and could enjoy a lightweight, disposable medium that they could take into the bathroom.

Mason might have added another selling point: With a newspaper you don’t have to click on five pages to read one story.

One of the most irritating experiences of reading online—aside from those horrible takeover ads that block what you are trying to look at—is the widespread practice of cutting information into little pieces to gin up ad revenues.

Some publishers have gotten particularly adept at this by providing the top 50 of this or that with a separate page for each entry. TMZ also runs features like “Memba Them?!” which shows an old picture of a has-been star and then compels the reader to click to the next page to see what that star looks like now. Though all this clicking may be a tedious waste of time for the reader, it is the natural outcome of the online advertising industry’s reliance on impressions, which I’m afraid is here to stay.

A story broken up into five pieces yields five more impressions than a publisher would have gotten otherwise. This is based on the universal belief that more is better—more impressions means more opportunities to sell ads.

Where did this belief come from? It’s a mistaken metaphor. Publishers have interpreted the Web as an extension of print when it’s really something totally new. The analogy is carried out further by calling the URLs “pages” and, in the early days, by referring to entities like Slate and Salon as “Webzines.”

While time spent on a site might have been a better measure of a consumer’s engagement and exposure to ads, the ability to measure raw numbers has proved too enticing. Initially, the only way to measure traffic was “hits,” meaning any single access to a Web server. From the start, the measurement was problematic, though, because highly graphic Web pages counted as multiple hits. By 1996, publishers were awash in alternative potential Web ad metrics including page views, uniques, impressions and click-throughs.



All the measurements are blunt instruments. While page views are self explanatory, uniques refers to the number of unique users, impressions are the total number of ads a browser views on a page and click-throughs are how many people actually click through a banner ad to get more information. Click-throughs were soon seen as the holy grail—a way to track how effective the advertising is. But an overemphasis on click-throughs meant that branding fell by the wayside while ads proclaiming “See how I lost 30 lbs.” predominated.

Nevertheless, CPMs based on impressions has stubbornly refused to leave center stage, which is why publishers persist in using sneaky tactics to inflate page views. In the long run, they are creating an annoying experience for the reader and not really doing advertisers any favors either. Unfortunately, for online ads, more irritating may equal more effective. Carrie Frolich, managing director of digital media for mediaedge:cia, for instance, says though consumers may be exposed to a lot of ads for a story that runs across several pages, it’s unlikely that the ads will really register. She proposes instead to run all the information on one page and have one persistent ad scroll down along with the copy—a method that is more annoying than a standard banner, but at least gets the reader’s attention. Another way to go it is to take the approach of VideoEgg, which charges on a cost-per-engagement model so advertisers only pay when someone interacts with their ad in some way which ranges from completing a survey to watching video, but that naturally leads to ads with bells and whistles trying to draw your attention away from what you’re trying to read or view.

When it comes to measuring overall effectiveness of exposure to online ads, Microsoft is probably on the right track with its Engagement Mapping, which tracks exposure to search, display, video, etc., and assigns value to each ad based on the role it played in the consumer’s decision to buy the product. But such a solution will never be 100 percent effective because—sorry to break the news—but marketers will never get complete knowledge of what prompts a consumer to consume something. What if that person’s purchase decision is driven in part by ads he sees on the subway? What if online ads really did convince, but our consumer goes to a store to make the purchase and the advertiser never knows? At any rate, it’s hard to see how such an egghead solution is going to fly in the marketplace. The rank-and-file will prefer hard numbers they can understand to Microsoft’s voodoo.

For that reason, though it’s possible that a TV-like “sponsored by” model may emerge, CPMs based on impressions are probably here to stay. Soon technology will make Mason’s schtick irrelevant—after all, it’s possible to read the news on your iPhone while otherwise engaged in the bathroom—but publishers will continue to do their best to make us jump through various hoops to finish the damn story.