Ad-driven websites represent a great battle between business needs and user needs: How can one increase ad revenue (”More clicks!”) while streamlining the user experience (”Fewer clicks!”)?
This clash arose throughout our collaboration with MySpace, as we worked towards simplifying the bloated layouts and navigation. Because making more pages accessible in fewer clicks implied fewer opportunities for ad impressions, improving the user experience and increasing ad revenue seemed like competing goals. Could there be a way to make fewer pages more profitable than many?
Enter the “hero ad.” Blowing away the half-dozen ad slots that once competed for attention on the homepage, the new design made way for a single, powerful focal point. “The hero ad,” as my colleague Ryan called it, was inspired by the two-page spreads in Jack Kirby comics that “capture the attention, communicate volumes, and ultimately stand out more than your average, 9-panel page.” (See Ryan’s post for more on this.)
This widescreen feature creates opportunities for impressive, immersive homepage takeovers. Proving that experience and advertising don’t have to be at odds, it transforms advertising into an experience in itself. And by turning the homepage into a high-value, high-impact, and high-profit space, it liberates MySpace to let go of ad clutter elsewhere.
We are impressed by MySpace’s beautiful implementation of this design and its success thus far — as a recent blog post by Wired noted, according to Comscore, MySpace was the top site in online ad views last month — and we look forward to seeing the impact of this daring move on an industry fixated on page clicks.
To learn more about our work with MySpace, see Wired’s interview with Ryan
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