Spiersblr

Yes it is the same thing, and it’s just as awful. It’s just as annoying and intrusive in print as it is online.

The purpose is to make it appear to blend in with the editorial so much that it is barely perceptible to the reader that it isn’t actually copy. I don’t agree with you that everyone notices the “advertisement” in the quarter inch high box above every post, including the editorials. The eyes are not trained to look there, the reader is draw to the headlines. The very idea of putting the ads in that way is to trick the reader, just as it is in print, otherwise it would be a traditional ad.

I’m not even saying there is anything wrong with this, people producing web content are criminally underpaid, but I think we can think of more creative ways to generate money.

Gawker isn’t financially successful because they have great ads, it’s because they know how to generate traffic for their ads.

(via soupsoup)

If I agreed with you that it was barely perceptible, I’d concede the point. But I think it’s only barely perceptible if you’re illiterate—in which you’re not going to read the post anyway.

And you underestimate the extent to which non-display forms of advertising are important re: Gawker’s revenue generation.  Thanks to banner blindness, media buyer boredom with the usual IAB-compliant spots and CPM declines across the board, non-display advertising is more important than it ever has been. And all the traffic in the world doesn’t make one iota of difference business-wise if you can’t properly monetize it (see Post, Huffington.)