Our ideas of the media are changing rapidly, the structures of old media are crumbling at the same rate. So what is causing such a shift in media concerns and what about the advertisers that are dependant upon media platforms?
The term media is changing. You may have noticed the curious suffixes that have cropped up in the last few years. Instead of the inclusive term media, we now refer to new media or old media. Not only do these words denote the contemporariness of one media over the other, they indicate that one type of media is archaic and dying. Newspapers, radio, television and billboards are falling out of use. With a steadily increasing rate, people are using the internet to quench their needs. Online newspapers are more popular than ever. Internet radio use is growing exponentially. But let’s focus on the monumental decline of television. Internet channels such as YouTube, alluc.com and podcasts ensure that the viewer can pick his or her programme with no thumbed TV guide in sight. Gone are the days of split-lips over the whereabouts of the remote control because the internet allows instant gratification without endless flicking of channels. In a world where reality TV is king, the soap is prince and documentaries or factual programmes hobble around in the darkened servant quarters, it is hard to find something decent to watch on television.
You may argue that the current state of programming is fulfilling the purpose and scope of modern television, if so, may your ITV filled life be a happy one. But if like me, your brain instantly combusts on sight of Big Brother or the unimaginable banality of Come Dine With Me, you probably search the internet for alternative entertainment. Quality of programming is only the beginning of the decline in television use in the UK and after all, is only subjective opinion.
The future for television
What are vital to this debate are the figures recently published by Ofcom in their second public service review. In it, they predict that the spending for ITV, C4 and Five will be a third of the amount in 2012, meaning 90% of all public service programming will be on BBC. These figures place public broadcasting in grave danger considering the current precarious position of the BBC. As a channel that relies on a £3.2bn payout from annual licence fees, this financial foundation is slowly crumbling away. Paying £139.50 per year due to threat of prosecution is becoming a joke to households. If the increase in internet use for entertainment continues, paying a transmission fee, a major use of the licence fee, will become void. This predicted dark period for commercial channels is already here. ITV recently stated that its advertising revenue was down 28% in the first half of 2008, and reported a loss of £1.54bn.
If the state of advertising revenue is already bad and predicted to get worse, we have to wonder, where are the visual advertisers going to do their work? The answer; the internet. With a rise in internet users, it so follows that the audience are switching allegiances, they are now sat in front of a computer screen rather than a TV screen. Already an established beast, it is not so easy to break into the online advertising market unless one understands the behaviour of the internet user. We know that to find a site online, whether it is an entertainment programme or not, the probability that people will use a search engine to ensure they arrive at that desired site is huge. Together with entertainment sites, search engines are used as the starting point for product purchase, research, publishing, broadcasting, establishing worldwide communities, and any other purpose you could possibly think of. Research has shown that more than half of all internet users search at least once a day. The human traffic using search engines is phenomenal. This is where the future of visual advertising lies.
How search engines are making their billions
When talking of search companies, one is almost certainly talking of Google. The unmistakable dominator of the field, Google took 77.4%, $3.40 bn of all search engine advertising spending in the 1st quarter of 2008. This massive revenue is a rise of 30% on the last quarter. Advertisers would not pay this much money if the search market was not reaching the targeted audience and producing a noticeable difference in sales. In the current economic down-slump, it is not surprising that this method of advertising is attracting mass numbers due to its tiny cost in comparison to old media. Transport, production and publication costs are wiped out, empty airtime no longer has to be paid for, and presenters are superfluous. But how easy is it to run an advertising campaign on the internet? There are currently two options for advertisers wishing to make their product or service known, pay per click advertising (PPC), where Google made their $3.4bn profit, or search engine optimisation (SEO). PPC advertising is exactly what one would imagine; Google will place the advert on the search results page and with every click, the client will pay a set fee, typically anything from 25p to £2, to Google. This type of advert usually appears at the top and on the right of the search results page. If Google are making billions from this type of advertising, vast volumes of people must use their search engine, and then click on the PPC adverts. People will only keep using a search engine if it is good, so the fundamental quality of the search engine is critical to large advertising revenue.
Issues of “relevancy” in search engines
To ensure that surfers are happy with the results, Google, AOL, Advista, Yahoo, Ask and any other search engine employs a system to ensure “relevancy”. Without the human factor of someone reading through millions upon millions of web pages to decide if a website is relevant, the search engine must rely upon devises called crawlers that scan webpages. Among many other things, keywords density, the number of inbound links to the site and matching the locality of the site and the surfer are factors that crawlers are programmed to analyse when deciding a website’s level of relevance. Google have over 200 relevancy checks, with no overall important factor. Together with this democratic configuration of factors, Google change the algorithms of the crawlers frequently.
It is easy to see that using PPC to advertise will make sure a website is seen, but most important for the surfer are the websites returned by a search engine. These results are termed “natural” and are websites that according to the engine are the most relevant to the search. Relevancy is not the only difference between PPC and natural search results. Being listed in the natural results is free, to advertise using PPC is expensive. Even in terms of the surfer’s eye line, the natural results are favoured. Gord Hotchkiss has shown in his eye tracking research that the vast majority of surfers will focus their attention on the upper left hand side of the screen where the natural results begin, rather than the right side where PPCs are displayed. All in all, PPC advertisement is an expensive short-term fix for increasing visibility and undeniably useful in short term promotional campaigns. Research has found that only 20% of surfers will click on these results, people prefer and trust the natural results. There is another option in attaining high visibility in a search engine, its called SEO. A method that shadows the search engine’s mechanics of relevancy, SEO cleverly constructs a website so the engine will deem it relevant, resulting in a high ranking in the natural listings.
Google have built their reputation on delivering relevant search results which is why there is no specific reverse engineering that can decipher the factors of relevancy. If a website is to rank highly in the natural results, it must be excellently constructed. It must contain a high density of information for the crawlers to pick out a high density of keywords. It must have an excellent basic structure in terms of HMTL construction, ensuring the website is seen by the engine as quality. It must also have a high percentage of inbound links, meaning it must be well recognised within an established community of websites. In these few points that pertain to relevancy, one can see the aim of Google is to provide quality search results. A noble cause, one that they voiced in their Stanford thesis, Anatomy of a Hypertextual Search Engine, “Our main goal is to improve the quality of web search engines.”
The effect of employing a system of relevancy in search engines
This ideal will certainly be beneficial to strive towards, however knowing there is a method that Google employ in deciding relevancy, it follows that there has been examples of abuses of the system. Using the methods of SEO to trick the search engine means websites which are not relevant to the search can be listed in the natural results. In 2006 BMW were penalised by Google for cheating the engine’s relevancy checks. The car firm had created a website that contained thousands of keywords that a search engine could see, but the surfer could not. This was done to boost their natural ranking, but as soon as Google twigged, they blacklisted the site and dropped it completely until BMW redesigned their website. Google are vigilant in detecting this type of abuse and change the configuration for their crawlers frequently. Episodes like the BMW fraud do happen, and once an opening in the crawler security is found, people will capitalise upon it. Linkbombs were designed by a group of bloggers to trick the search engine into thinking a particular website has thousands of inbound links. The linkbombs ensured that when “miserable failure” and “liar” were typed into Google, the websites for George Bush and Tony Blair were returned respectively. Opportunities to fool the search engines can only happen very rarely, since Google is constantly changing their definition of relevancy.
The effect of constant morphing in search engines and SEO technicians is a technological game of chess. Always attempting to crack the code of the search engine means technology needs to be continually pushed forwards. Yes, there will always be opportunities to abuse systems such as search engines, but the long-term effect of this game is that internet technology must continually improve. The antagonistic relationship between search engines and SEO methods create technological progress that will improve the overall standard of the Web
By Ruth Asquith.
