Here is some exceptionally good news. According to Digiday, The Banner Industrial Complex Under Threat.
“From a publisher’s standpoint, there really is no choice but to go this way,” said David Payne, Gannett’s chief digital officer, of the move away from the banner. “I think we’ve all proven over the last 12 years that the strategy we’ve been following — to create a lot of inventory and then sell it at 95 percent off to these middlemen every day — is not a long term strategy.”
Digiday points out that the newly redesigned USA Today dramatically reduced its inventory volume. Instead of fitting as many ads as possible around an article, it decided to place a single ad unit next to each of the site’s articles and package the content and ad together in a pop-out lightbox. Naturally, this makes the ad more visible to readers and thus more valuable to both the marketer and media company.
