10 January 2023
We were recently asked if advertising on our main website at plymouth.gov.uk was a possibility. Online advertising is common and some local authorities are now choosing to sell third party advertising space on their websites. It could be seen as an attractive proposition, in November 2022 plymouth.gov.uk received over 250,000 visits, why not use that space to try and generate some much needed income.
There are potential benefits. Selling advertising space could raise money for the Council which could then be used for vital services. It could also allow us to promote local businesses and organisations.
We have done some investigating and looked into how this might work. Some councils use an advertising network to manage their adverts. These provide ads from a number of providers which are then displayed on the site. Another option would be to sell and manage the advertising space ourselves. Both options would need staff time to set up and manage and investment in development time from our website provider.
There are other considerations.
What pages do we put advertising on? Is it appropriate to have advertising on bereavement pages or on Register a death? Would advertising confuse those who come to our site looking for financial support or benefits? People using our site will have different levels of digital literacy and what might obviously be an ad for some might not be for others.
People often don't have a choice when using our website, so it's important that people trust the information they read. Advertising could potentially damage the Council brand and website. We would need to think about the categories of advertising that we would accept and to make sure these fit in with our corporate values.
It is a legal requirement that our website meets government accessibility requirements. This is currently level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). We would need to make sure that any advertising doesn’t stop our website from meeting the requirements.
Over 65% of our website visitors are using a mobile device, we design pages with this in mind. Depending on where they are placed, putting ads on a page may mean that people can't easily get to the content they're trying to find, distracting and annoying them.
Our site is designed to load quickly, not everyone has access to Wi-Fi. Forcing ads to load might slow down page load times and degrade the user experience. We also need to be mindful of the environmental impact, websites are a source of carbon emissions and we don't want to increase ours.
More work is needed for us to find out if advertising on our website is viable and would bring in enough income. We would need to look at:
Is it technically possible to include ads without considerable development time?
How would users feel about advertising on our plymouth.gov.uk? Through our content redesign work we're focussing on what users need from our website. Placing ads on the site is a major change and we would want to be sure that they didn't get in the way of the user before we allowed them on our website.
We know from research that some other local authorities have included advertising and then removed it, either due to performance issues or because the income wasn't as expected.
We're interested to hear from any Councils who have either had advertising on their sites and removed it, or are making it work. We are also interested to hear from anyone who has experience of a public service website with advertising and wants to let us know what their reaction to it was. Please get in touch by emailing digital@plymouth.gov.uk