Home Depot To Sell Ads On Site

July 19th, 2006Home depot announced July 18th that they would begin selling ads to their vendors. When customers click on an ad they are taken to a vendor branded mini site where they can view product demos, streaming video and other information.
With 4 million visitors a week this is a targeted opportunity that should prove attractive to Home Depot vendors. I also feel that this will improve the content on the Home Depot site. Providing detailed descriptions about products is expensive – particularly when you have tens of thousands of products. I think having mini sites paid for by the vendors will mean greater product detail and in the end, web users benefit. It will also force many manufacturers with poor sites and online marketing to start paying attention to the power of the web when it comes to marketing their products.
This trend will continue as other retailers follow Home Depot’s lead with the spillover benefiting web media developers everywhere.