“Classy” Companies Can Get Away With Crap Advertising

September 26, 2007 – 2:31 pm

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If you’re a big hitter like Forbes, you can block access to your articles by making people click on a “Welcome Screen”, which most sane people actually call “an interstitial ad”. If you were regularjoeswebsite.com, you could never get away with something as crappy as that. And therein lies a remarkable paradox. The bigger the company, the more they can appear “spammy” online without it pulling down their numbers any.

So if you plan on covering every inch of every page of your website with ads, you better make sure you’re a newspaper or something similar. Any of the old media companies can get away with, including displaying bestial popups and the like. So can you if you play your cards right.

The only time you’ll run into real trouble is if you have no online or offline rep and you try the same approach as the bigshots. You’ll look like you don’t belong. Since you aren’t known as a website where people find great info, you have much less leeway to get away with when it comes to monetization.

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