Open The Dialogue

A tipster informed me that PRNewswire is using Vibrant Media's in-text advertising to market itself. Now I haven't spoken with PRN just yet, but thought it worthwhile to bring this up nonetheless as it's one of those mediums that people always have an opinion on. Needless to say, as you can see in this article in last week's Tennessean, the term "news release" has a double-underline, in green, that when moused-over, brings up the ad shown in the grab above. I haven't seen anything competitive from Business Wire just yet, and I don't know if we will or not, as the wires have tended to have different tacks when it comes to this sort of thing. I bring this up for a couple of reasons - one, I thought it notable that PRN had joined the fray, and two, I'm curious if some of the thoughts that I had back in 2004 still made sense to people, or if they had "grown" into accepting Vibrant Media's inline ads. Sure, there are plenty of companies that have bought in, and I'm sure - and have heard - that Vibrant Media's results are very positive, on the whole. But click-throughs, money changing hands, and positive user experiences are completely different things, aren't they? Or maybe I'm still stuck on the other side of the coin here as a heavy Web user, and one who'd been working in this space well before any of these technologies were put into play.