Why digital advertising is dead at Techday

By Cordelia Rollo

Wed 2 Mar 2022

Techday is phasing out advertising across our websites. Below we explain why:

There are four fundamental problems with advertising:

At Techday, about 48% of our readers have ad blockers.
The industry average is a 0.15% click-through rate for advertisements. That is only 15 people out of every 10,000.
Over 50% of traffic to news sites is from tablets and smartphones. So expensive take-over advertisements, which wrap around the website, don't work on tablets and smartphones.
Roadblocks or interstitials interrupt and annoy users and leave the advertiser's brand associated with annoying interruption.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Almost half of our readers don't see advertising. Of those who do see advertising, most are conditioned to ignore or avoid it.

In addition, most clicks generated from take-over/ wrap advertising are mistaken clicks since the whole screen is easily clickable. Furthermore, most clicks generated from roadblock advertisements are mistakes from people trying to close the ads.

Ultimately most readers don't see the advertisements, and the remainder are accustomed to ignoring them.

So what's the answer?

Native advertising is when an advertiser's messaging is weaved into the editorial content of the publisher's website. Techday's sponsored stories are one great example of incorporating a message into editorial content.

Native advertising isn't impacted by ad blockers and displays perfectly on all devices. Readers love it because they aren't rudely interrupted; they can either click on something of interest or scroll past.

Techday's latest solution

Techday has replaced our previous, more traditional, SuperTile adverts and Sponsored Links with an alternative hybrid offering called SuperLinks.

The new offering has a few key points:

It's native advertising, which gains better results than ads
Not blocked by ad blockers
Granular daily reporting to ensure up-to-date information
Shows to desktop, tablet and mobile readers
Easy to produce the required material for the advertiser
Automatic bot detection and exclusion
Advertising Standards authority compliance

SuperLinks overcome the challenges of traditional advertising while retaining and enhancing the best attributes of editorial integrations.

The service can be utilised to target our various audiences, including CIO & IT decision-makers, CFO and finance teams, security decision-makers, the wholesale channel and eCommerce operators and consumers. Links can be customised and adapted to suit the needs and markets of clients and showcased on any of our target driven sites.

Techday head of account management Lama Farhat says the new product will offer businesses a highly effective solution with excellent value for money. In addition, they say the possibility to market a wide range of content is endless.

"Our new SuperLinks are a very versatile solution that customers can use to drive enquiries, event registrations, blog reads or almost anything. We're also offering this new innovation at a very competitive price, that any marketer in IT can access."

Techday publisher Sean Mitchell agrees, saying the new offering is a culmination of the best solutions over Techday's 16 years in the tech media business.

"Over 16 years we have offered many different marketing solutions to clients. Our new SuperLinks is a combination of that experience and brings together the best parts of our previous offerings into something quite magical. This is the best advertising offering we have ever offered," he says.