There was a day when the best advertising real estate on the web was the portal, the preset homescreen of dial-up Internet access. The owners of those screens -- AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, MSN, Excite
-- all had the “cat's meow” of businesses.
Portals were the digital media darlings of the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were the “gateway to the Internet,” and
everyone wanted their ads on those entry points. Ads on those homepages commanded high rates. Those ads had high click-throughs. And the web portal concept was heralded as the future of all media once
all media became digital.
That idea was wrong, though. Just as “video killed the radio star,” search killed the portal. Portal owners were so focused on maximizing ad revenue on
those homepages -- you couldn’t go to the AOL homepage without being barraged with horrific, blinky, "punch the monkey” University of Phoenix banners begging you to click on your state --
that they forgot about the user.
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Ad-inundated users just wanted access to the world’s greatest treasure trove of news, information and entertainment, and they grew increasingly
frustrated at these bloated homepages blocking the way.
Enter Google. Search freed users from homepage bloat, got them directly to the pages they wanted -- and the portals died.
When I
hear about and experience the increasing ad load on connected TV homescreens, and realize that its owners are falling in love with its ad delivery capacity, I want to remind them that users (viewers)
are not in love with their homescreen. They are in love with the TV and everything that its sight, sound and motion can deliver.
Don’t forget that, CTV and streaming portal owners:
Enable a great TV viewing experience, allowing viewers to get to their programming as fast and seamlessly as possible. If not, the kids might all be singing, “AI killed the CTV homescreen
star.”