Online magazine advertising tends to be much more dynamic than ads that appear in printed periodicals, and can come in many different forms. Common types of online magazine advertising include pop-up ads, banner ads, and pay-per-click ads. Many of these advertisements are programmed to appear next to certain articles or in relation to certain user-generated search queries. As they do in print, magazine editors have ultimate discretion when it comes to which ads will be displayed. Online ads are not fixed, however, and can change on a constant basis.
Pop-up ads are among the most common on online magazine sites. An advertisement that opens in a new browsing window, usually on top of the window that was previously being viewed, is a pop-up ad. This kind of ad must usually be coded into the website’s internal architecture. For an online magazine, this means that the magazine’s web team has inserted code into its site that allows the pop-up to appear either when the site is first visited, when certain articles are viewed, or when a user navigates away from the site.
Another common type of online magazine advertising is the banner ad. A banner ad is an ad that takes up a specific amount of space, either in the header, footer, or margins of a website. It usually incorporates both graphics and text. Different banners can appear on different pages, and the content can also change when the page is reloaded.
Many online magazines also feature pay-per-click advertisements. In a pay-per-click scenario, the magazine agrees to host a number of certain sponsored links for free, with the understanding that the advertiser will pay a certain amount each time a reader clicks on the ad. User clicks will usually open up a separate window, but depending on the coding, they may also redirect readers away from the magazine.
Advertising revenue makes it possible for many magazine publishers to offer some or all of their content for free online. In order to be profitable, however, the ads must be relevant. For the most part, the content of online magazine advertising is not very different from that of print advertising. Companies with specific products to sell usually seek to place ads where they know consumers are likely to see them. Sportswear companies tend to advertise in health and wellness magazines, for instance, while business service providers often look for ad space in trade or news-centered magazines.
The Internet has opened up a plethora of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. Rather than just placing pictures or words in print, companies can tailor the ad experience to the content of certain magazine articles, the geographic location of the reader, and even other sites that the reader has recently visited. This sort of dynamic marketing allows companies to target certain demographics much more comprehensively than they ever could hope to in print.
In order to secure advertising space in an online magazine, companies must usually provide layout templates and disclose their triggering algorithms to the magazine’s editorial staff. Staff approve the ads, then either insert them permanently into the site, or put them in a queue of rotating appearances. Online magazine advertising in the rotating category is often far less expensive than fixed print ads, as it allows companies to pay for a certain number of page views without dominating the space. In this way, magazines can sell the same ad slot to multiple advertisers at once.
