ON GLOBAL PORTAL ANIMATION DIVIDE

BLINKETY BLINK

It hit me as I was surfing the Indian portal for the Times of India.  There were a lot of flashing, animated, blinking, things on the home page.  They were flashing both on the editorial and advertising segments of the page.  Mini-phrases like "click me" and "click here" were flashing away reminding me of neon signs in Times Square. 

Not to mention the half a dozen or so pop-ups that were blocked by my built-in browser defenses.

That evoked a sense of deja vu.  I'd seen this before...racked my brain, and of course...I've seen this on a number of Asian portal home pages. 

Quickly opened firefox tabs for Chinese portals Sina.com, Sohu.com, 163.com, china.com, along with South Korean Daum.net, and then to double-check another Indian portal rediff.com.

ALL OF THEM had blinking, flashing, animated elements beckoning you to pay attention and click.

Why did this strike me as unusual?

Of course!  Most of the time, I'm on US portals like Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and the newly out of the closet, protean-portal, Google.  And most of them may have the occasional banner ad with some mild Flash animation.

And NONE of them have anywhere near the blinking animations of their Asian counterparts.  Well, occasionally, you'll see an animated banner ad or two, but nothing like the Times Square bling of an Asian portal on an average night or day.

Why is that?  Do Asian users prefer the animated stuff more than US users?  Do they click on the ads more? Do advertisers demand animated inventory in these countries, more so than here? Are the click-through rates higher for editorial and the advertising content?  I don't have the answers, but they struck me as relevant questions.

Is it because the broadband penetration has been higher earlier in Asia than in the US?  Well, that doesn't apply to China and India, who are behind US broadband deployment rates.

What about the Asian versions of the US portals?  What does their bling factor look like?

I checked it out the grand-daddy of expatriate US portals, Yahoo! Japan...and sure enough, it looked like the static, buttoned down Japanese twin version of its US namesake.  But the local, Japanese portal Goo, did have some animated ads going, although not as many as its Asian counterparts.

What about Europe I thought?  Where do they stand on hyper-active portals?
Sure enough, both Free and Wanadoo in France were distinctly animated, imagine that.

The German T-Online portal was static and sedate, and properly behaved.

Not sure where all this anecdotal, non-scientific comparative global discussion is going, but I daresay, US portals will likely follow the lead of their Asian peers, as broadband penetration in the US goes higher from the 55% of households today.

Mind you, I'm just talking about portals and not search engines here.  There Google remains the spartan example to copy world-wide, whether its emulators here like Icerocket, or overseas like Baidu in China. 

You don't mess with super-success...unless of course the next Google shows us the new way.

Comments

[Salman FF]

My theory would be that US consumers, who are generally pretty demanding, may play a role in the difference - that, and competition in the US: I imagine that the simplicity and success of google, as you pointed out, and the effectiveness of google sponsored links, have had a huge effect on the US market in general, beyond search. And as Google’s effect on the rest of the world may have a lag, I hope that the rest of the world will follow the US in offering simple and non-intrusive ads, not vice versa.
I tend to find the more animated ads annoying and less effective and I just pray that this has nothing to do with broadband penetration in the US.
My only worry would be that this is a generational thing. It would be interesting to know if younger users (eg teenagers) in the US find animated ads as annoying as the rest of us do. Perhaps teenagers around the world are becoming more alike, and we are just getting old.

[Rajesh Patil]

I think the broadband penetration has nothing to do with the pop-up and the flashy animation ads. On the contrary I think the US audience already went thru this phase of flashy annoying ads etc..
Here are a few factors that I think are responsible for that kind of web pages/sites that you just described.

a. Maybe the Asian portals are still in the infancy stages as they don't generate much eRevenues.
b. Asians don't like so much bland sites, they like to see colorful pages.
c. US based portals like Yahoo have a generic home page for each country which is why they all look the same. (not flashy, as the base home page is designed in the US)
d. Higher the per capita income, more the elegance. (In general this applies to most things)

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