profiting in a banner blind worldOctober 27 will mark the birthday of the first time banner ads appeared on the Internet. These groundbreaking advertisements appeared on hotwired.com in 1994 and generated a CTR of 78% that created a $24 billion business. They were simple ads, one for AT&T and one for Volvo–the latter’s banner didn’t even send the consumer to the car company’s website but rather to a questionnaire on what type of automobile they’d be interested in. Seventeen years later, online advertising has grown tremendously, yet the average CTR of banner ads today is a fraction of a percent: a measly 0.1%. So how does one generate ad revenue in a world where online consumers have adapted to so easily turn a blind eye to banner advertising?

First, we must ask why the CTR of banner ads drop so much. It’s a two-part answer; banner ads are ignored and when they aren’t, they don’t convert a high rate because the advertisement is delivered at a relevant time. The solution to these issues is to reach visitorswhere their attention is and when they’re ready for it. In-content advertising allows advertisers to do just this.

In-content advertising is similar to product placement that you regularly see in movies or television shows. This advertising method is contextually relevant and tightly integrated and works for two reasons: Online consumers see and interact with these advertisements and they experience these advertisements when they’re actually looking for the information.

The easiest way to get through to your viewer with in-content advertising is with link insertion. Link insertion allows the viewer to hover the mouse over a word that will then pull up a pop-up to link to the relevant site. Kontera Technologies is one of the leaders of this technology with a decade of research and development. Their technology is able to predict intent by understanding the meaning of the pages and how users interact with the page. INTENTclick, part of Kontera, utilizes this technology while focusing on businesses and websites that have SEO driven making money or saving money content focused around purchase intent.

Read more about in-content advertising and link insertion in the eBook that I recently wrote,Content Monetization.