Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet Advertising – Is Cost Effectiveness enough for Success of Internet Advertising?

The advantages and disadvantages of Internet advertising are many. Undoubtedly, advertising on the Internet is a comparatively low cost affair. However, is this cost–effectiveness enough for the success of Internet businesses? Over the years, the Internet has become a leading advertising and promotion medium for products and services. It has an edge over the traditional advertising channels like Radio, Television, and the Print media. This is one of the advantages of Internet advertising. Increase in global trade, and the global reach of Internet, has made it necessary for businesses to find innovative ways to advertise their products. This is another of its advantages: its global reach.

Advertising on the Internet gives your business higher visibility and the ability to reach out millions of potential customers at a fraction of the cost of conventional advertising methods. Internet being a powerful advertising tool, the advantage of Internet advertising is that it has a global audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.

Intrusive advertising

Cost effectiveness being one side of the coin, the other side, and a very notorious one, is its intrusiveness. This down-your-throat invasiveness is one of the biggest disadvantages of Internet advertising. With the development of Internet into the most potent advertising tool in the last 10 years or so, media buyers are under tremendous pressure to come up with winning formulas. With the ‘anything goes’ attitude, advertisers fail to grasp that this very intrusiveness works against them.

Advertising needs to be aggressive. But, to what extent? Do advertisers need to resort to such aggressive and intrusive advertising to reach their online audiences?

The pop-up ads, the spams in one’s Emails, and the flash advertisements are negative strategies. Pop-up ads are the most intrusive of all forms of advertising. They pop-up 3 – 4 times, if not more, while users are surfing a page. All these strategies distract the users from their legitimate online work. Spams fill up the inbox of one’s email and are a real pain.

In a nutshell, the advantages and disadvantages of Internet advertising are:

Advantages:
• Low Cost
• Fast and accessible
• Global reach

Disadvantages:
• Hard to tell if advertisers are creating a hype
• Too much information overwhelming the prospective buyer
• Intrusive advertising

If the more glaring negatives of Internet advertising are controlled, then cost effectiveness could be one of the reasons for the success of Internet advertising.