Advertising in the online press: formal aspects and similarities with journalistic design

The online press is currently one of the main information channels. Advertising is the main source of income for most of these media and, in addition, represents one of the main elements of its graphic composition. This work is focus on the formal aspects of advertising in the online press and try to identify the similarities with the design of digital media. For this purpose, a quantitative study implemented in two parts is carried out. The first, based on data from secondary sources, describes the advertising landscape with a significant presence of advertisers that lead the ranking of advertising investment in Spain in the telecommunications, motor, and retail sectors; the format most used is video and the ads have a distribution among the Home, Sports, or Business sections, along with a clear seasonality of advertising investment in the months of June, October, and November. In the second part, a content analysis is carried out on 403 ads collected from a sample of 20 journals. The results reveal that advertising is dominated by images as opposed to text, color in images, hypertext, and interactivity, but multimedia elements and color are hardly used within the textual elements that do appear in the design of newspapers. The conclusions suggest that advertisers do not take advantage of the multimedia and chromatic possibilities of the media in this medium, attributing it to an economic issue or to the search for differentiation with the editorial content as possible explanations.