Again - Advertising and AJAX

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 9, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Eric Picard comments on the impact of AJAX on online advertising. He covers the basics as far as what the difficulties are:

AJAX
stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and it's the asynchronous
part that causes the problems. In Web pages created using AJAX, content
is loaded asynchronously with no browser refresh. This causes big
problems with counting page views and impressions: if a page never
reloads, it's difficult to define what a page view is. And if the page
is never reloaded, deciding when it's appropriate to refresh or load
new advertising is left to the developer's discretion. Similar issues
exist around software applications that include advertising.

That doesn't seem all that problematic, right? We can use AJAX to asynchronously load new ads. Further, we can drive advertising content off of user activity. Well, there's more to it than that. According to Eric, if your applications don't comply with industry standards, you will fail your impression audit which will adversely affect your ability to charge for online ads.

His solution? Avoid time based ad refreshing:

I've talked a lot with
people about time-based page refreshing and what's appropriate. This
isn't a new issue and is why the language exists in the current IAB
counting guidelines. But it's never been a simple one to deal with. My
general guidance is to avoid any kind of time-based advertising
refreshes if at all possible.

Event-based ad updating can be OK, it seems, if it corresponds to traditional webapp page loads. Should we root for a rapid update of the standards? Won't AJAX make the ads more intrusive, just like popups used to (and still do, in some cases)? Or can we hope that people will use the new technology to provide us with more pertinent offers?

agile ajax

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