“More, better clicks” is the outcome – a better way to navigate the Web is the cause

Posted By David

Wednesday at 8:18AM EDT

2 Comments

Tags:

handlesystem, Navigation, online advertising, onlineadvertising, Usability

Categories:

Display Advertising, Navigation, Online Marketing, Usability

When Linkstorm decided to enter the Online Advertising space, we already had our product in place:  a new and better way to navigate the Web. Not one page at a time – a time-consuming process of click, wait, click, wait, click, wait – but instead, a way to preview all relevant destinations upfront, BEFORE the click. That way, when the click comes, it’s a click directly to what you really want – deep into a website right to the product you want, the answer to your question, or the information you need to make a decision.

You can’t achieve this by shoveling a couple of extra links into a flashy (no pun intended), attention-grabbing ad; you can only achieve it by providing a carefully-crafted navigation roadmap, designed by the party who best understands what their customers might want and how they might want to get to it, and that has enough choices to actually provide the paths relevant to a wide spectrum of customers with a wide range of information needs.

Putting our own company aside, we truly believe this is a better way to navigate the Web, and we welcome all thoughts and approaches to improving on it. Our company began with a close partnership with the primary inventor of the Internet itself, Dr. Robert Kahn, who co-invented TCP/IP, the protocol the Internet runs on, and who has a unique vision of a future linking system that transcends today’s URLs and DNS. His and our overall goal remains to provide universal, easy connectivity to information in the same way that the Internet itself provided universal, easy connectivity to all computers.

Linkstorm chose to focus on Advertising because there’s such a perfect alignment between advertisers who are hungering for proven ways to get more customers to click through to their content and products, and customers for whom advertising is ubiquitous and usually obnoxious, and who would be much better served if that advertising could somehow become actually useful to them instead of being an imposition on their time and attention. But ultimately we’d like to see our new navigation paradigm applied across all forms of linking on the Web, not just ad links – because who has time to slog through the Web one page at a time? There’s too much information, and life is too short.

We need to hear from both parties – advertisers AND customers – if we are to fulfill our mission. As Linkstorm’s CEO – but also as a regular person, parent, and participant along with all of you in these early days of the Internet revolution, who wants to see the Internet improve as a medium overall and in turn improve the lives of all people – I want Linkstorm to remain in the forefront of pioneering this new approach of customer-controlled navigation. Since our best ideas have always come from our customers and partners, please contribute to this blog so that Linkstorm can continue building solutions that will better serve you and the medium as a whole.

- David