What is In-Text Advertising?
In-Text Advertising is where you allow a company to monetize words within the content of your site. It is also known as Inline Advertising.
The concept is that certain words will be highlighted, and when a user rolls over them a box will pop up with advertisements related to that word.
The ads which pop up related to the word can be wide in range. Anything from selling a product related to that word to having news stories related to that word (advertising the news provider) are to be expected.
How In-Text Advertising looks:
In-Text Advertising
(roll over a keyword and it pops up)
In-Text Advertising Advice for Site Owners
Only a few companies run this type of advertisement, most notably Vibrant Media and Skimlinks. Due to this, these companies have a great focus on their product and will really try and work with you to maximise your revenue from these products.
However, as it is The Online Advertising Guide‘s rule of thumb to not irritate users wherever possible, we cannot recommend this type of advertising. The amount of money that you can make from this from In-Text advertising is not enough to counterbalance how disruptive it is to the user experience.
You can make a reasonable amount of revenue from this In-Text Advertising (though significantly less than from banner advertising), so if you are happy to annoy your users to some extent this might be for you.
In-Text Advertising Advice for Ad Buyers
In-Text Advertising trades on utilizing users focus on content to make advertisers feel that users will focus on their adverts as much as the content they sought out. While this feels unlikely, the prevalence of In-Text Advertising at least implies that it is quite successful at doing this. Having said that, it is rarely more effective than display advertising.
If you are trying to make your product synonymous with a word, then this type of advertising may be suitable for you. It is generally quite reasonably priced, however that depends on the words you want to use. The sites you can advertise on is also comparatively very limited.
Either Vibrant Media or Skimlinks will usually give you good customer service so if you are looking for an alternative to display advertising, speak to them and test it out.
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