Banner Ads are Slowly Going to Go Away

It looks like banner ads might not be long for this world:

Even if you’re not familiar with the terms, chances are that you’ve seen direct and conversational media in use. Direct media, in short, refers to “in-stream” advertising that aligns with the content of a chosen site. Twitter accomplishes this via sponsored tweets, Facebook via sponsored stories and some websites will run pre-written “advertorial” content, usually with a disclaimer at the beginning.

Conversational Media (CM) is a bit more tricky. It aims to align an advertiser with a topic, rather than having the advertiser itself be the subject of the post. We happily and heavily use Conversational Media on TNW because it allows us to write the content ourselves, while providing sufficient visibility for the advertiser. You can check out this article on small business tech trends for an example. In essence, CM is content that we’d be writing anyway, but with a “brought to you by” statement at the top.

Disclaimer: Federated Media sells a large portion of the advertising on this site. As they move away from banner ads, so shall we.

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