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Flashback: Why Advertising Doesn't Work on the Web

Jacob Nielsen, Alertbox, September 1997:

"Banner ads are useful to the extent that they drive qualified users to such corporate sites, but there are many other ways of attracting traffic: a survey of people who had actually bought things on the Web discovered that only 12% of buying customers had arrived at the vendor's site from an advertisement - 88% of the shoppers had navigated there in other ways. Search engines and hypertext links are the most important mechanisms: offer content-rich pages, and other sites will link to you."

"Maybe we can forgive advertising agencies who don't know any better, but an old-media perspective is also characteristic of many so-called "new-media analysts" who take an incredibly non-strategic view of the Web and analyze it purely in terms of "eyeballs" and a television metaphor."

Earlier:
Flashback: Internet Is a Fad

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