The web is a different environment. Users are a few clicks away from switching to a competitor. Fill your pages with junk, and you’ll lose eyeballs fast. Sites with obnoxious advertising will die off.

Print advertising does have the advantage of being far easier and less painful to skip, of course.

I think this is main reason that blogs etc have taken off in the last few years. People do not want to read something which has been sliced and diced by various people, they want to read real thoughts and opinions. I know this might seem obvious but I think it’s good to highlight.

Re. the advertising on Googles SERPS. Yes there are alot of ads, but ads are the currency of Google. People aren’t going to spend long on the SERP page so they (G) need to try to maximise there opportunity on this page. With a magazine, people will normally take minutes to sit down and read the content so there should, in my opinion, be less adverts than on the SERPS as people *should* be reading interesting and entertaining articles, rather than being bombared with ads for the latest fragrance, having parted with some of their own cash.

Just my thoughts…

As the entire economic model of the web increasingly comes to rely on this sort of contextual advertising, I think there is an honest concern over what effect this is having on journalism. There are also now direct economic incentives to write the sort of “advertorial”-like articles that will bring in the most Adsense dollars.

In short, while it might not yet be as overt on the web as it is in Fortune magazine, I definitely see the same economic pressures moving the web publishing business model in this same direction. However, I am very open to feedback from you and your readers: Are my fears overblown? Is there an argument against this, one that will assuage my concerns?

I’ll put up with the advertorials, it takes me about 3 seconds to skip through them and/or tear them out of the magazine so really I could care less.

So what makes you think that web advertising does not suffer from similar economic pressures? Look at Google, and their sponsored links above the organic results. There used to be zero links in that area. Then they started putting one link. Then two. Now three.

In fact, when you look at the whole page, you can count 3 sponsored links above the serps, and 8 to the right, for a total of 11 sponsored links. And how many organic links are there, on the same page? 10. So we are talking about a ratio of 11/10, or 55% of Google’s first page, filled with ads.

That really isn’t that far off of the 60% advertising figure you find in Fortune magazine, eh?

In fact, I might even be understating the case somewhat. What I mean is that, at work, I have a nice 21″ monitor running at 1280×1024. When my web browser is maximized, even though there are 11 paid links, the total amount of real estate taken up by Google ads is more like 35-40%.

However, when I am at home, on my aging 15″ monitor and 800×600 resolution, the layout optimization decisions Google has made make the ads take up almost 75% of my screen real estate.

Let me say that again: 75%.

Is this also not a blizzard of advertising? Whether you calculate the used real estate at 35%, 55%, or 75% (depending on whether your are counting links or pixels, and what resolution you are running at), those numbers all sound quite high.

What makes this different from Fortune magazine?