Why In-Text Advertising Has a Bad Name

I cruise the web a lot using services like StumbleUpon. I recently stumbled on this site that apparently does some kind of web-mobile sms stuff. Like just texting from your phone, but with ads attached to your messages. Ok sorry thats a topic for another post entitled “Dumb as a rock business models and why they don’t work.”

At any rate, this guy is using AdBrite’s solution for in-text ads. I guess adbrite calls them “Inline ads” whatever. Check out his intro page:

That’s 8 words linked. Out of 62 words in the opening text, 13% of them are trying to get you somewhere else than the website’s original intent. I know you have to make money, all that but this end result is just unacceptable, from every point of view. As a visitor do I want to ever see this big pile of advertising again? As an advertiser, do I really want my message portrayed to the end user in this fashion? As an ad network, does AdBrite really make more money like this? As a website owner am I proud to show off this website? I can see linking all those words if they were all high value keywords, like if I was listing off a bunch of cool new gadgets like ipod,zune,iphone,digital camera I could potentially see the value in linking each of those. But AdBrite is linking words like present, sign, start, send. Let’s see what happens when you mouse over the word “send” :

Not sure what they are doing, but there is clearly very little relevance between the word they are linking and the ad they are displaying. Where is the value for anyone here? This is just unnecessary clutter.

Attention AdBrite Publishers! Use a real in-text advertising solution, ZinText. Relevancy.. every time.

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