Do you wish television commercials were longer?

When you read a newspaper ad, do you find yourself yearning for more before you move on to the next story? And if you see an ad roll by on the side of a bus, do you chase after it in hopes of finding more information on the other side?

I didn’t think so. Advertising is supposed to chase us, not the other way around. We tolerate ads and appreciate them when they’re done well, but rarely will we go out of our way to see some more.

So here’s the real question: Why should advertising on the Web be any different?

Content sites have taken a beating from investors who fear the time-tested model of ad-supported media might not translate to the Web after all. Some of these jitters stem from the growing ranks of failed dot-coms that will spend their remaining venture cash on bankruptcy lawyers instead of banner ads.

But a number of analysts question the viability of online advertising based on its failure to do something that isn’t even possible offline: convincing people to “click through” to even more ads.

An ad’s click-through rate measures how often the people who see it actually click it with their mouse to visit the advertiser’s Web site. If you didn’t realize you could click a banner ad, don’t worry you’re not alone.

In the days when banner ads were still something of a novelty, about 5 percent of people who saw them also clicked them. These days, the average click-through rate has dipped below 1 percent.

This decline is cited as evidence that banner ads aren’t working.

Content sites in trouble

And that, in turn, has meant trouble for the content sites that rely on them. Popular sites like Salon have been forced to scale back their staff, and banner ad agency Doubleclick saw its stock tumble 31 percent earlier this month.

Even Yahoo!, the king of content sites, isn’t immune to cooling attitudes toward online ads. A third-quarter report that met the market’s earnings expectations and surged past revenue estimates somehow sparked a 21-percent plunge in the company’s share price. That’s like spanking a kid who brings home a perfect report card because you don’t like the classes he took.

The ongoing dot-com slump may well cause short-term problems for content sites. But anyone who doubts the long-term prospects for online advertising just doesn’t understand how advertising works.

Simply put, companies want their ads where people will see them. Since the online audience is growing by millions per month, popular Web sites should become even more popular with companies that want their products to be popular, too.

This truth would become self-evident if the industry addresses two real problems with online advertising: the ads themselves and the expectations that come along with them.

Let’s deal with the expectations first. Like investors who believe dot-com stocks will rise regardless of profitability, advertisers are looking for too much return from banner ads. Just because people can click through doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it. It ought to be enough that surfers see the ads, which is the same thing advertisers pay for in other media.

The Web still offers considerable advantages over traditional advertising namely, the ability to target and track customers. No offline media, for example, can match a search engine’s ability to display a travel agent’s ad when someone searches for “airfare to Bermuda.”

Thinking big

But ad-supported Web sites need to break out of the banner and give their sponsors more bang for the buck. The standard ad banner is simply too small to deliver a significant message to surfers who aren’t likely to click through for more. Ads should be larger much larger and displayed more prominently than they are today.

That might seem intrusive, but similar techniques are taken for granted in other media. Stories on the inside pages of newspapers are generally outnumbered by ads, and many magazines bury their table of contents behind a few dozen full-page pitches.

By scaling online ads and their anticipated returns to real-world proportions, content companies and advertisers alike could profit from the relationship that has served them so well offline.

Click-through rates would still be low, of course. But when advertisers said Yahoo!, they’d really mean it.

To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL, 60611.