The business of display advertising can be fiendishly tricky. A recent report in the Telegraph revealed that even the all conquering social networks are finding it difficult to engage users attention with advertising clients.

Liane Dietrich, managing director of LinkShare, the affiliate network which conducted the research, said:

“Less than 10 per cent of our respondents are interacting with adverts across social networking sites…Online users are information shoppers – they are looking for buyer reviews – so adverts need relay more information to cater for this need”.

This serves as a good reminder to all that at its heart the internet is a service led business. The most successful sites are those that are consistently providing useful information to their customers.

This obviously is easier said than done and even Google can sometimes get it wrong. Recently I’ve been exploring their Ad-sense channel via YouTube and came across this particularly illuminating comment.

“Hey Google instead of these ads for your Google products how about you give instruction instead. That’s what people search YouTube for, not to see an ad”.

Wouldn’t it be great if more people actually searched for ads. Perhaps a good lesson for us all, remember advertising needs to be useful!

Brainchild of Chris McGill, former General manager of Yahoo News, Mixx is one of the lesser-known challengers to the Digg throne when it comes to user-recommended content. But just as Digg has pioneered in this space, Mixx is looking to stamp its mark in a number of ways, the latest being it’s new Sifter service, which lets people using Mixx vote for the ads they’d like to see - the stuff people like is given more prominence on the site.

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