Mediaweek reported last week that MSN is going to limit it’s veiwers pre-roll exposure to what it had currently been. I don’t think it goes far enough but it sure is a step in the right direction.
Until now, their system had been set up to feed you an ad that depended on the amount of seperate videos you had watched. That often resulted in seeing a :30 repurposed TV ad for a :18 news story. The new method will deliver those intrusive ads after a viewer has viewed three minutes of video.
The time proportion of new-to-commerical will surely be better. But what it is missing is context. At times, one most defiinitley doesn’t want their user experience to be conintually interrupted by and ad for some sort of headache pill or car. They’re clicking on to read about a natural disaster, a plane crash, or someting else vital.
MSN and others are going to have to come up with models that are more contextual, less intrusive, and frankly, less frequent. User experience online is different. And getting a new commercial every three minutes is still mind numbing.





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