Advertising on Web 2.0
May 22nd, 2007 by Mike McKinnonBlue Lithium Labs did a research study comparing the conversion rates, the CTR and CPC of traditional media sites to those of user generated content sites like YouTube and MySpace. The report can be found here and is free to download.
The highlights of the study were:
- Ads on non-2.0 sites (classic editorial content sites) convert 31% better than ads run against user-generated content (see Figure).
- Ads on top-brand non-2.0 sites (defined as comScore’s top 250) convert 175% better than user-generated content sites.
- However, 2.0 media is so *cheap* (as of now anyway) that it’s still worth testing.
While the study is a cautionary tale about investing in advertising on Web 2.0 sites, I think it misses the critical point of Web 2.0. The study measures traditional advertising traffic on sites that are geared toward non-traditional users. Web 2.0 is about the user. Advertising is about the company. Therefore, it makes sense that people that are browsing Web 2.0 sites are not interested in the traditional advertising medium.
The strength of Web 2.0 lies within creating relationships, telling a story and two way communication. Using traditional advertising buys on Web 2.0 sites is almost like trying to get a square peg to fit in a round hole.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, web conferencing, SEO, Blue Lithium
May 30th, 2007 at 10:24 am
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June 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
I’ve been having problems subscribing to this feed. It lets me subscribe and it loads in the rss reader program I use (which is netnewswire for mac) but it’s not showing new posts. A few duplicates too. Am I using the wrong url perhaps?
June 9th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Hi Leslie,
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