Search Engine Optimization News Blog

In a recent survey by a large digital marketing agency, It was revealed that a commonly touted concept was completely untrue. The storm of controversy surrounding the bringing of advertising to video and social networks and the dire prediction that it would effectively kill such site has been brought to a close.

The myth is debunked. According to the report, not only did 76% of respondents say that the ads they see on social sites like MySpace and Facebook didn’t bother them, a staggering 40% reported making purchases from those very ads.

Can we say, someone is doing an excellent job of targeting?? The former belief had been that users would become irritated and frustrated when confronted with such ads, and that user numbers on such sites would decline. Instead, the venue has opened up for apparently an extremely lucrative field – I’d take a 40% rate of conversion any day!

Of course, the respondents were in some part cherry-picked – they matched preset criteria as having spent at least $200 online in the past year, frequented a social site (like MySpace) and had made or consumed some type of online media like a video or music.

Still, these are who you want, right? The consumers who actually consume. The video sites had held even more warnings about displaying ad content – here too the response was milder than expected.

Users said that the ads didn’t bother them here either, but did express a preference for the banner style and ticker type ads over the traditional pre-roll video.

Sixty five % of those surveyed said they made repeat purchases from a site that sent them a recommendation based on their past purchases, probing that destination can still have an impact, and over 60% use widgets with regularity, raising the question of how to combine widgets with ads as the next step towards monetizing every aspect of the web experience.

Of all the information, the concept of social marketing naturally comes to the fore as the premier place for the average webmaster to direct some serious effort. The expected response of mass exodus from social sites upon the introduction of advertising was obviously a false alarm.