Today I’ve reached across The Pond — British slang for the Atlantic — to recapitulate the results of a survey suggesting that B2B websites are better advertising vehicles than print magazines. Among noteworthy findings, the survey found that business decision-makers spent “almost an hour per day online for work purposes,” and “more than half (54%) had bought a product … as a result of seeing advertising on a B2B website.”
The survey was sponsored by the UK Association of Online Publishers, which conducted telephone interviews of 300 “business decision makers” in January. Though not wishing to be rude, the small sample size and self-serving nature of the survey require that the results be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that a B2B website, linking specialized news and targeted advertising, would make for a superior response and if I were selling ads, I’d have no hesitation in showing these results to a potential sponsor.
Before I continue, let me thank Paid Content for pointing me to an article posted by the UK web publisher Netimperatives. Since the UK site did a fine job of summarizing the results, I’ll suggest you bounce back over the pond, after you finish reading this, to drill down into the survey. Meanwhile, let me point out something nifty that I noticed on this, my first visit, about how Netimperatives packaged the info.
The first link from Paid Content pointed me to a Netincentives synopsis. A link in the synopsis pointed me to a longer article on the same survey. This tactic of creating low, medium and high-value versions of the same information reminded me of tiered-pricing notions advanced by thinkers such as UC Berkeley info-economist Hal Varian.
Sure enough, some digging around the Netincentives site led me to offers for a free email newsletter (weekly or daily editions) and an annual paid subscription. I chose the free weekly to determine how useful future offerings may prove — before I clutter up my email with their daily spew, or spend 99 quid ( that’s pounds sterling in Yank-speak) for the premium offering.
Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media