News Home > Online Advertising
Niche Websites Better for Online Advertising than Major Portals
A new online marketing report from Addvantage Media has shown that consumers tend to ignore advertising on large portal sites in favour of smaller niche product websites.
The findings go against commonly held beliefs that paying more money to buy top advertising spots on the major online portals secures greater traffic and brand awareness. Conversely the opposite appears to be true, with consumers disregarding ads on bigger websites, preferring to click on relevant adverts on smaller websites.
Of the 2,232 British people polled by the advertising company and YouGov, 88 per cent said they rarely if ever paid attention to online advertising on major portals such as MSN or Yahoo! homepages. Only ten per cent of respondents claimed to pay attention to ads displayed on big portals, down from 37 per cent last year.
Nearly half of consumers said they were much more likely to click on adverts on specialist niche websites. Only 38 per cent of consumers would look for information they needed on the web from the big portals, whilst 21 per cent would look first on social networks such as Twitter of Facebook for the answers they needed.
Marketing partner at Addvantage Media Harvey Sarjant said: “The fact is that while about 20 per cent of UK sites, the major portals, may have exposure to a wide market, to reach a genuinely responsive market segment, brands need to be aligning themselves with relevant, niche interest sites.”
Mr Sarjant added that the relevance of major portals was reclining year by year, and that specialist sites were the best option for advertisers to spread their message online.
Online Advertising news posted by Frank Hudson on 08 February 2010
