Sponsored links
Posted on August 04, 2004 @ 10:52 in Webdesign
Today I noticed something interesting in an article on Anandtech. Some of the words in the text, as you can see from the first picture here, are sponsored links. If you hover over them, you get to see a little advertisement and clicking on them takes you to the website of the advertiser. The most interesting thing here is that these links are added in dynamically, even after the page has loaded. If you look closely when loading on the pages of the article, you will see that the words "Radeon 9700 Pro" are at first unstyled and then, retroactively, are styled as a link. This is confirmed if you look at the source of the page. That link is no normal hyperlink, it is plain text.
At first I thought, wow, this is a brilliant way of advertising. It is very unobtrusive, just a link in the text, a little pop-up to warn the reader it's an advertisement. Of course, these links are pretty much like the "Smart Tags" that Microsoft at one point tried to introduce, but that it quietly abandoned after a big public backlash. The basic idea was simply to have their Internet Explorer browser actively insert paid-for links on certain keywords in a webpage, any webpage, that the reader was looking at. That plan was quite a bit more intrusive than one site implementing this advertising strategy, but still... I wonder if Microsoft patented that idea.
However, I soon also saw two major problems with this advertising strategy. The first is that, as you can see from the second picture, that Anandtech chooses to style the sponsored links exactly the same as their normal links. Apart from hovering over the link, there is no way the reader can easily distinguish sponsored links from normal, bona fide links. This is probably good for click-through rates, but I guess people will quickly become annoyed by it. This would be a whole lot more palatable if the sponsored links were styled different from normal links.
The second problem I find harder to describe, but inserting links this way messes with one's (my) perception and understanding of the text. Reading a (hyper)text and seeing many links, you (I at least) start to map out that text for a better understanding. Is this a text that references many outside sources or is it heavily linked to other relevant texts on the same server (by the same author)? In the first case, I'm reading a commentary of sorts that I may (or may not) understand without reading the external sources. In the second case, there is a good chance I'm looking at only a piece of a larger whole. Regardless of which scenario I find myself in, the links in the text, even if I don't hover over them or click them, are part of the way I make sense of the text.
The type of sponsored links seen on Anandtech change that. Most importantly, the links in the text don't function in service of the text anymore, they don't link to any information that the author of the article thinks is relevant for the understanding of his text. The sponsored links might be internal or external, they have no semantic function with regard to the text anymore. This is made worse because these links are dynamic, which means that they will disappear over time or maybe subsituted for a competitor's link. Whether intended or not, the lack of semantic function seems implied/acknowledged by the way these links are retroactively inserted on the browser side, so they will probably not show up in, for instance, Google's ratings.
All in all I'm not that enthousiastic about these sponsored links anymore. They are actually more intrusive than any banner ad you could place in or around the text, but they are more insidiously so. Not simply because the reader could click on them and be taken to an advertisement page s/he did not expect, but because these links undermine our collective understanding of what a (hyper)text is by eroding the intentionality and authorship implied by the text. That's not good, but unfortunately it is a point that will not at all be obvious to most readers.
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