When the economy eventually bounces back, or at least stabilizes, I wonder what the advertising world will look like.  As even more print newspapers and magazines fold or cut back, will web advertising pick up?  If it does, will it take a different form than it does now?  One of the disadvantages of web ads from an advertiser’s perspective, of course, is invisibility.  It’s too easy for a user to ignore an ad on a Web page, or not even see in the first place.  Even if it’s placed right in the middle of the body of text, our eyes have learned just to pass right over it.

We’ve all seen those full screen ads that take over your monitor the moment you land on a web page.  Normally, now, the user has the option to skip the ad by clicking through to the content.  I wonder if we’ll start to see this click-through option disappear so that users would be held captive for the duration of the advertisement (think Salon.com circa 2004). Sites with a lot of audio (Pandora) and/or visual (web broadcasts of television shows) content already do this kind of thing either before or in between segments.

Advertisers would love it, as it would eliminate one of the main drawbacks of web advertising.  DVR aside, most of us accept the need to sit through television commercials because all the stations have them.  What if all the major, advertising-dependent web sites start doing it?  Yes, other web sites perhaps could ban this kind of thing and try to use that fact to their advantage to grow traffic. But if those web sites depend upon advertising, would they be able to survive by standing up to what may become the industry standard?

I have no idea what will happen and certainly don’t have my finger on the pulse of the ad industry.  But routinely being forced to sit through a lot more web advertisments within a couple of years would not surprise me at all.

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