The web’s free ethos has always been backed by the understanding that on the back of all that free stuff, advertisers would have free reign. That free reign accounts for more than $40 billion spent annually on online advertising. But there’s a fly in the ointment.

According to data coming out of ComScore, a whopping 31% of online ads are never seen by their intended targets. This percentage expressed in dollar terms is a whopping $12.4 billion in money wasted by advertisers. That figure is also generous on a comprehensive scale because when you drill down to the ‘site’ level, sometimes as much as 93% of ads are not seen. This fact hasn’t dented the hopes of advertisers though because online ad spending is already up 20% this year, and overall, online ad spending is predicted to surpass both print and magazine ad spending for the first time ever.

This fly in the ointment also highlights another problem, ad delivery and impact. According to ComScore CEO, Dr. Magid Abraham, the display ad market of today is “characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user.” This overabundance of inventory means that ad-selling entities can actually record an ad as being delivered (i.e. served) but that ad may never meet human eyeballs.

The coming years will be telling for advertisers as well as web users, and they could very well redefine the free ethos of the web.

Do you get annoyed by online ads?

(Source: sitetrail.com)

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