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Let the Simpsons be Your Free ISP
Anthony Fuentes writes "Looks like Homer and company are getting into the free ISP business, click here for details. Offer applies to win32 users only." Probably because Homer uses Windows - and Internet Explorer, of course, because that's the only browser you can use with this service.
Doh!
Does this mean that Bill Gates is going to show up with goons and "buy him out?" Can it allow me to download nude pictures of Captain Janeway any faster?
"Gee, they have the Internet for computers now! What will they think of next?"
It seems quite fitting that homer uses ie. Afterall, he will he get to "doh" at the ever present crashes.
On the same note, i wonder if homer recomends you accept cookies from strangers...
...what about apletts?
There are lots of internet ad-based businesses coming out now, but I don't think they're going to hang around a lot longer. People just don't look at internet ads, and very rarely do they click on them. There is some chance of making money at it with a website that is cheap to run and has thousands and thousands of visitors per month, but there is no way is this advertising worth the cost of running and supporting an internet provider. Advertisers will learn this sooner or later.
Follow this link for a good article on this.
I looked at the site, and didn't see any "Used with permission from 20th Century Fox" or similar boilerplate. Their little "bar" has a Fox link, but again, no licence information.
:-)).
:)
Is this ISP using the media and characters without permission? 1stup.com doesn't sound like a Fox affiliate, and could be in a bit of trouble if they've not worked out the proper deals.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content
Not that I condone that kind of activity.. I'm on a cable modem, after all
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The catch is you have to run an advertising bar. Worse, the advertising bar has a "health" meter that slowly decreases unless you interact with the ad bar. Run out of health, get disconnected.
Why do you have to have remote access services installed with NT?
Click-through value will suck mightily, as customers will be forced by the "health bar" to click through an ad or other button every once in a while, and will immediately return to their previous surfing. This will cost the advertisers money, as wasted bandwidth, not produce additional sales.
I wonder how they intend to stop hackers from hiding the health bar and sending it auto-click messages?
-- Virtual Windows Project
Well, in the free ISP biz, you get what you pay for...
But I have found 1stup.com to be one of the more reliable free ISP services.. and I have experience with a bunch of them. Of course, your mileage may vary based on your location, dialup, and network traffic...
I am using altavista's free ISP which is a co-branded 1stup.com offering. They have free tech support, and the one time after a new upgrade when I was having trouble with the behaviour of their software and the connection, the guy was very friendly, understanding, and helpful; they were also quite aware of the problem and it was fixed shortly thereafter. [note I do not work for them, have no connection with them other than using them as an ISP.]
Lately, (for a month and a half) it has been the most reliable free ISP out of all the ones I have tried. And I have tried:netzero, yahoo-bluelight, freei.net... I also have experience with a friend's free-pc, which is pretty good, but since they no longer are offering free computers OR free access to new customers, that is kind of meaningless at this point.
My personal suggestion is to try them all, starting with NetZero - NetZero has an easy 5-disk sneakernet install that is easy to download and install on a computer that does not have any access yet, and go from there..
I'll be using free ISPs until I save up and/or decide to dive in for the Cable Modem or DSL line. And yes, I'm using windoze.
And the points it makes are still valid (read through his more recent articles, and you'll hear him say "told you so!" several times).
/. is just such a one; it's the posters who create 95% of the value).
Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones.
And the vast majority websites which advertise make pocket change with it (I remember banner advertising network uses the slogan "it's found money!"). The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! A very tiny proportion of them actually support employees and such producing the content. Profitable websites are mostly ones which leverage the work of others (no offense, but
Consider the following: Bill Gates and Montgomery Burns, teamed up in the internet business....
Burns: Who is that man, Smithers?
Smithers: It's, ahhh, Homer Simpson, sir. The irresponsible network administrator responsible for the twenty system outages this week.
Burns: Ah, yes. Keep up the good work, Simpson!
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To continue, please press any key.... Which key's the 'any' key??
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Of course, one reason why they might not want to support Free Software like linux is that you could connect their bar to an X driver for /dev/null, and rig something so it would think you were interacting with it. Then you could use their service without viewing the ads, which would end up making their enterprise useless.
Plus, linux users probably use more bandwidth on average. Though I'm surprised macs aren't listed for this reason.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Bad studies rate advertising on the web as good for branding. They ask the user to look at websites they wouldn't normally look at, and with no purpose beyond "evaluating" them. The bored user looks at the most interesting thing on the page: the banner advertisements.
Good studies give people access to the web and let people screw around and do whatever they want (or at least give them realistic tasks to perform), while tracking which ads were viewed. The result: web surfers never even look at ads, unless they are really bored or the ads are cleverly disguised in a form the viewer hasn't seen. Believe the data.
Claiming that because studies disagree they are, as a whole, inconclusive is a well known logical fallasy (the name of which escapes me).
He mentions negative margins a lot.. And he's right.. You do run Internet Junkbuster, don't you?
:^)
.X10. No need to advertise, as most people will find the information themselves through a convienient search engine. So, if not to inform, what purpose do adds serv? They serv only to create want and need, and unless you're the mental age of a 10-year-old, they won't work on you.. Only the momentum of the "consumerism" of the 1950s through 1980s keeps people advertising in this day and age. I can't wait for it to die.
"Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones."
Which is much worse, as it forces users to load things without them really wanting to (in most cases).. Kinda like those popup windows you find on "shadier" sites, like Netscape.com. Portals? Basically repackaged push that doesn't require a special client.
"The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! "
This is why things like Cybergold or AllAdvantage are starting up. Paying a person for advertising impressions.. They are trivially defeated, of course, as you can't ever trust a client on a nonsecure machine
What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. Need some way of turning off lights remotely, and don't like "the clapper" ? Simply go and find a site about
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If I'm not mistaken, Gateway and others have, for a little while, at least, been giving a year's worth of "free" access with the purchase of certain models from them.
Like many others around here, I don't expect this trend to disappear any time soon. How many co-branded credit cards are there, anyway?
One positive thing about their service is that although you have to use Win32, you get a choice of email clients, which is more than I can say for MSN (yes, I fell for that trap). You see, I didn't like the way Outlook Express handled replies (the Right Way (IMO) is to put the reply and signature after the quoted text), so I downloaded Netscape and gave it a try. Imagine my surprise when it failed to connect and retrieve my email! I checked and compared between the MS and Netscape, and the only significant difference between the two configuration screens was an option for something called Secure Password Authentication. I later found a HOWTO-like document telling how to access MSN from Linux. (I became interested in Linux after I got my computer and fell for the trap.) It turns out that UUNet actually provides the connectivity. A couple items in the document explained things, though:
and (near the end): Things seem to be turning out all right, though, as I've just started a new job at an ISP (and get free access (even DSL after I've been there a little bit!)), and MSN has been unable to charge my credit card (tee hee!). (They haven't mentioned anything about the $400 yet. I've got to check my contract, though, after that Slashdot story a couple weeks back -- one of the postings told of someone in Columbus, OH who was able to get out of his contract with no strings attached!)Alas, I fear I've started to ramble. Perhaps a combination of sleep deprivation and caffeine OD.
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This post brought to you by the elements N, H, C, and O, and the alkaloid caffeine.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
But free ISPs like this one run banner ads. What they run is even worse than banner ads: they're banner ads with forced click-through.
A better example of effective web advertising is affiliate programs. Give people valuable content, then try to sell them something related to that content right there, integrated with the content.
This post is another example. I'm advertising the link at the bottom of the post, and getting a pretty damn good click-through, at that (my apologies, BTW, to people who anyone who went through the previous evil link, which I will now erase from my memory to go on with my life). Not by spamming, but by posting the best stuff I can come up with and still have something to say (my karma has doubled since last week).
In the last few days, I've put up more posts on slashdot.org than in the last few weeks before that, because I've got a new web page that I want to promote. Usually I have to slap my own hands to keep myself from wasting too much time slashdotting, but for the moment I consider it productive. (yes, there's a certain irony to this which you'll understand if you look at my site - my site with banner ads, and broken ones at that... ^_^ )
I keep hitting that reply button instead of the preview one...
"Believe the Data" was the title of the article, not a suggestion regarding the article.
The advertiser-supported ISPs are going to have a hell of a time staying in business. A quick look at the business model:
Income: Web Advertising rates. Common rates for a banner add are in the 1 to 10 cents per "eyeball", or pair thereof, depending mostly on how well-targeted the ad is. Absent very sophisticated (and rare on an ISP level) profiling, the ISP cannot really identify what the user is interested in, in order to carefully target ads. Moreover, the free-ISP user demographic is likely to be mostly internet newbies, which is the kiss of death for an e-commerce site. So it's very unlikely that a free ISP will be getting more than 1 cent per ad. Click-throughs can be worth as much as 25 cents in some cases, though it's likely to be much less, especially since a forced click-through doesn't signify real interest and is therefore less valuable to the advertiser than a voluntary click-through. Porn sites, which often use pop-up windows to essentially force a click-through, rarely get more than 3 or 4 cents per click-through. And porn is very profitable. Posit a maximum of 5 cents per click-through of revenue.
Expense: Based on Earthlink's SEC filings, and the data of other companies (including my own employer), it is generally accepted that about $13 per user per month is the minimum cost for an unlimited time or > 15 hrs per month dialup account. That covers only direct costs, not advertising. Moreover, that level of efficiency requires on the order of 1 million users. Cost per user looks more like $20 per month for most smaller companies. Further, it tends to cost about $15 - $20 in initial costs (including advertising) to get a user. 18 months is a fairly average length of time for a user to stick with an ISP, so the ISP *must* recover its initial investment within that time to make a profit. Given the annoyingness of ads, it's unlikely that a free ISP will have a better retention rate. Let's suppose J. Random Free ISP is doing about $15 per month, at best. Further, they need to recoup $18 (to be simple) in 18 months. So they need $18 per user per month to break even. Add another 10% to make it sufficiently profitable to bother, and you need $20.
That's 2,000 ads or 400 click-throughs (or some combination thereof) per user per month. At best. Our average unlimited-time user logs about 15 hours a month. At that rate, the free ISP needs to serve each user 125 adds an hour (or 24 click-throughs) to break even. That's a pretty weak proposition. I wouldn't put any money on it.
Steve Ballmer walks into Bill Gates' office.
*Ballmer* We've succeeded in grinding the competition into the ground again today sir. We've even added a half-dozen brand new annoyances to Windows 2000!
*Gates* Excellent Smithers^H^H^H^Good job Steve.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Some services are motivated by generosity, personal enthusiasm, and other altruistic goals. I'm not talking about those.
For-profit corporations do not willingly lose money. If they're not selling something to you, they're selling you to someone. Would you rather be they customer or the product? Which do you think gets better treatment?
yahoo.com averages over 300 million hits per day (at least it did recently; maybe they went downhill since google started?).
" You have to have MSIE because the banner software uses MSIE's libraries"
:)
Ahh, so it will be vulnerable to whatever proxy you set IE to use, ne? The problem with these programs that use the IE API for web stuff, is that the API doesn't expose the proxy setup to the program... A very trivial man in the middle attack is very easy to setup in this situation. The thing is, do you want to show your own little ads, or do you want to simply return a blank, transparent gif?
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It sure looks to me like they reserve the right to sell your name, address, e-mail address, etc.
Contrast this with the policies for NetZero, FreeI, FreeWWWeb. In fact, FreeI doesn't even collect personal identification data in the first place.
there is a thing like the birdies -- or indeed several of 'em. I don't know much about them personally, but my boyfriend uses them with his free isp and get-paid-to-click services.
:)
might be worth it with a script like that. now all someone needs to do is figure out how to emulate the software for linux/bsd/mac/solaris/irix/xxxx
I hacked up a quick program in Delphi (doing one in C++ now) to keep Alladvantage fooled for me. It takes about 30 seconds to make something that will move the mouse from the top of the screen to the bottom, click the banner, and start over. Works real well too.>:)
Kintanon
Shameless plug follows:
www.alladvantage.com
EBS-939
Sign up and kneel to the all powerful lord of rampant consumerism! All hail the dollar!
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What Slashdot said:
Anthony Fuentes writes "Looks like Homer and company are getting into the free ISP business, click here for details. Offer applies to win32 users only." Probably because Homer uses Windows - and Internet Explorer, of course, because that's the only browser you can use with this service.
What the actual ISP page said:
You must have a copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 4.0 or higher, to access the free Internet system, but you may surf the web with any browser. Click on the following link to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.
Wow... there's a difference. Slashdot reports that Internet Explorer is the only browser you can use with this service, where the actual page says that you can use any browser to surf the web, but you must have a copy of IE 4.0. Maybe because Microsoft bundled additional libraries with IE 4.0 in the form of a service pack? You think?
I object to this editorialization of "news". Why does the news on Slashdot have to be anti-Microsoft? "News for Nerds"? Or "News for Linux users"? Why don't we call it what it really is? I run Linux on a dedicated Linux box. It's really stable, hasn't crashed in 3 months. Linux is nice, I like it. But face it: it's a cheap Unix hack. That's all it was designed to be, that's all it will ever be, until they make it "user-friendly." "Intuitive". It's not, and no one can successfully argue with me.
So let's start being a little less biased in reporting "news", shall we?
- Burton Simmmons
mrwhite@d198-192.uoregon.edu (linux box)
Wow, this AC reminds me a lot of Homer... I doubt many others would spend nearly as much time replying to their own comments. I think the AC's a bit smarter though, Homer probably couldn't have gotten all the way through the whole alphabet ;-)
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Oh no! This is an _illegal_ sig! It has three dashes instead of two!
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive