Recently Dictionary.com has redesigned their homepage to include nothing more than a few links, the iconic Google-type search bar and now nothing more than a giant advertisement.
Some people hate the new ad space and have vowed to never visit Dictionary.com again. One of my biggest pet peeves are people who hate advertising just for the sake of hating advertising. Ads may be a necessary evil in a lot of people’s opinions but there is no doubt about it… they are necessary. That is unless everyone is willing to start paying a subscription fee to check definitions online.
I, on the other hand, think that Dictionary.com’s use of their homepage is a brilliant use of space and a superb plan to increase profit for a site that less and less people are using. It’s been years since I’ve used Dictionary.com – On my Mac I just highlight a word and “right-click.” On my PC I either Google “define: word” from my toolbar or I use Firefox extensions to look up definitions. Navigating to a new Web page and having to do a search is not exactly efficient.
As TechCrunch’s “MG” noted, the new homepage takover ad is a lot more tasteful than the ads you see on MySpace or the full page expanding ads you see more and more often on newspaper Websites and major media sites. The current Cheer creative is simple, beautifully designed and not at all annoying or distracting from the site’s content. When you think about it, there’s not much more you need to do on the Dictionary.com homepage other than look up your word – so why not free up all that space for some high CPM ads? All the functionality of the site is only relevant after you’ve searched. Makes sense to me.
Imagine if Google.com did this with all the white space on their homepage. I don’t even want to take a guess at what the CPM would be for that placement, but I can all but guarantee it would get some damn good click through rates. Albeit, the blogging community would scream “Evil!” and tear Google apart for it. It’s just a shame that people have grown to hate ads so much that they can’t appreciate when a site thinks it through and does it right.
