Our CEO happened to spot a mistrafficked ad on the Chicago Sun-Times website this past weekend when looking for information about the marathon winner. But what was really more interesting is what the page itself looks like from an advertising perspective, and the broader questions it poses for the future of newspapers and the online advertising model for those firms like many newspaper properties who were previously considered premium publishers on the Web.

First, when I reloaded the page from the link above, I found that the Westin 160×600 no longer was inside the top 728 banner, but it now was floating (see above) partially obscured by their SearchChicago classifieds widget. Eek. But more interesting were some of the other ads. The first is a content-looking box from ARALifestyle.com, discussed here by Jay Weintraub in a post. Very clever, “are you snoring yourself to death” of course is an “article” of sponsored content that reveals its sponsor very subtly at the end.

In addition, in the meantime there has been a popunder launched which has several similar-sounding ads to help with cellulite, flat stomachs, colon cleansers and the like. This is the company Adblade.com of course, although there is no longer any disclosure that we can see on the pop except for a very light “Advertisement” – there is no Adblade branding thereupon and I thought it was interesting that they chose to show the address bar with a Zedo.com adserving URL. No doubt intentional, much the way some networks hide they are doing pops.

It is interesting that premium publishers like Yahoo! have banned all advertisers like these from their network and yet they are still seeing a lot of action on newspaper sites. Further down the page there are a couple of other banners in rotation, at one point it looks like Pulse360’s text ads are there with more negative-option weight-loss ads showing up.

These offers appear to be where a lot of the online ad money is currently, and whether it works out for them or not, all kudos to Yahoo! for saying they don’t want to have these ads on their network (Microsoft has not yet done the same, by the way). It certainly doesn’t seem to perturb the newspaper sites. But moving along to the bottom of the page  we round out our quick analysis with one more shot showing a few more ads….

Another set of text ads at the bottom with a display unit way on the bottom – to bring the total for this page to:

1 x pop with 6 text+image ads

1 x top 728×90 display banner

1 x 300×250 “content-like” banner

1 x dynamic classified ad banner/link unit

1 x Left 120×600 with text ads

1 x Right 160×600

1 x bottom 300×250 with more ARAlifestyle ads

2 x bottom 728 x90’s with text and display ads

So at least 7 in-page units with a big popunder. Is this really that different from offline newspapers? Maybe not. But the main point here is that we encourage advertisers to think about the context in which their ads are being placed when they assess whether it is better being on a legitimate site they may not have heard of with two other ads versus being on a brand-name site like this with 6 or 7 other units stuck way below the fold at the same price. Or perhaps they shouldn’t care – both options are useful – at some price. It just seems unlikely that the so-called “premium” publisher today is getting the benefit of understanding the true value and the true tradeoffs they are making when selling their ad space this way, and we as an industry on the advertiser side need to do more to build tools to help bridge the information gap so we can get more of what we need and the publisher can be more fairly compensated for the audience they are able to deliver.