Slashdot Mirror
Non-banner Ads Coming to the Web
Masem writes "NYTimes has summary (CT:El Lamo free registration required) of how on-line advertizing is going to change in the near future. Banner ads have been found to be effectively ignored, so the next step is to visibly replace the content with ads for a brief period of time, as is currently done on radio and tv. The three methods described are pop up windows, redirect links that take you to an ad with the link to the final destination (aka "interstitials"), and a new technology that downloads the ad while you read the content, then displays the ad when you leave the page (aka "superstitials"). Unless you're running an ad blocker proxy, it's going to get really hard to ignore ads on the web soon."
Banner ads contribute to my page download times, which is significant because a lot of my Internet access is over a 28.8K modem. This extra time is important because many ISP's still have time-based connection charges. A 25K animated GIF can take a significant amount of time to download.
The only ads I tolerate are the ones on Slashdot and the hunger site (http://www.thehungersite.com/). When you click a button that says "donate free food", you are taken to a page that displays between five and nine small, static banner ads. The advertisers on the hunger site pay for basic food to feed the hungry in poor countries. These ads load quickly and also seem to cache well.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
You should get a VCR that strips commercials out and tape everything before you watch it.
Actually, this idea, with a few refinements, is a good plan. The idea is to have the browser ask you if you want to see this pop-up, and then remember what you selected, so once you've told the browser to reject popups from geocities.com, you'll never see them again. The ideal dialog box should have the choices:
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Unfortunately, lack of examples does not a proof make.
Granted, I too see JS used for trivial or annoying purposes more ofthen than for legitimate ones. However, there are very good uses for it, and I bet there are pages you visit that use it to make a better experience without you even knowing it.
Even in situations where the functionality can be implemented on the server, moving it to (or duplicating it on) the client end when possible *will* give a better user experience. For instance, if you can do a form validation instantly on the client end and save the user the 1-20 seconds it could take to get the same response from the server, the user is much better off. Plus you save some server processing time as well.
I absolutely agree that all content should be deliverable under lynx, but JS's usefulness extends beyond that of just content delivery, though that is usually where it is abused.
Whenever possible, I try to make it so JS will only enhance the site and is therefore not required. However, there are some user interfaces that just can't be done well with scriptless HTML and HTML forms (I'd include an example URL, but the ones that I can think of off the top of my head that I've done aren't visible to the public). In those cases, while any browser (lynx as the normal test case) can be used to access the site, the user's experience will be significantly less rich and perhaps even frustrating because an adequate interface for doing what the web site needs to do can't be implemented effectively without using client-side processing.
iCab (Macintosh only) can filter a page's images and cookies based on pattern-matching the URL (http://*.doubleclick.net/*) and also has separate options for turning off aspects of JavaScript such as popups, status bar text, etc.
I am the Raxis.
Liberty in your lifetime
Personally, I'm happy enough browsing with javascript always off and simply turning it on for the few sites that may require it. I've found that it's often not worth the trouble of leaving it, as I usually and it's a major pain when it crashes.
---
Well, someone will just have to code a browser like Moz that can selectively disable javascript features like popups (that would be GREAT!), while allowing other features.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I pay quite alot of cash for my 24/7, unlimited
time internet connection (its a dial-up).
I also pay quiet alot of money as phone-bill,
although I am allready receiveing major discounts
due to the large sum of money that is spent.
Forcing me to view ads before entering a site,
and when trying to leave it will only add more
to the final bill that I will have to pay.
This means: advertisers get cash, I loose.
This is happening right now, with ad-banners,
that load on my expense. But usually they are
small and I can allready view the site when they
load, so it doesnt matter. But the new system
will force me to WAIT before entering the site,
by this wasting valuable time.
Another important factor for me on the internet,
is speed. And i'm not talking about transfer
speed: I'm talking about ACCESS speed. The time
it takes from the moment I clicked on a link
until I get the information I wanted to is
VERY important for me. If someone will try to
slow me down by forcing me to view irrelevent
and unwanted information before letting me
view the information I want, then this will
just cause me to work less efficently, and in
general cause me to loat that site or service
to the bone.
Advertisments are obviously necessary for
economical reasons, but they have to do it in
away that doesnt make the web a place that sucks.
Bah! That would have never had happened on
Gopher..
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/3/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/2/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/1/
http://www.whatever.domain.com/
The catch? The damn thing is only available for Internet Explorer (at least at the moment).
If software for Linux is so easy to install and configure, why did id Software (Quake folks) drop out of the market? They said that it was a support nightmare. If Linux apps are just as easy, or easier, to install and configure as Windows apps, Linux users must just not be as smart (flamebait) if they have so much more trouble installing and using an app than their Windows counterparts.
While I appreciate rpm and think that Windows could learn a lot from it, the fact is that I can upgrade from Win95 to Win98 to Win98SE to WinMe and not break my apps. I don't need one binary for each version of Windows.
Besides, Webwasher and The Proxomitron are wonderfully powerful apps that are a joy to use and configure. The same cannot be said of the competing products in the open source arena.
It's not just web filtering software that makes the choice. It's just about everything. I exchange Word documents with my clients. I'm not about to use some Linux product that CLAIMS to be compatible and only breaks in the heat of the job or, worse, produces a file that they cannot use. If I want top-quality games, I have a wealth under Windows. If I want office productivity software, again, Windows is the way to go.
I'd love to see a serious competitor to Windows on the desktop, but until the Linux community gets its act together and standardizes, it's hopeless. As I've said before, pick Gnome or KDE and stop the silly infighting. Either one is adequate. The same can be said for so many of the tools for Linux.
I am dumbfounded at how far some marketeers will apparently go to annoy their target audiences. If I bought a shirt, spilled coffee on it, then returned it the the store claiming "This shirt was stained when I bought it," then they'd happily take it back. I've seen stores take back some questionable items. The principle at work here is that it isn't worth pissing off future customers over what are effectively nickels and dimes to a large corporation.
But with spam and web advertising this doesn't apply. Spammers creatively alter subject lines to get past filters. Now really, does this make sense? People who get annoyed by spam are filtering it out, so are they really going to be receptive to you getting around filters by adding a comma after each letter? Much web advertising is the same way. Trickery like preventing use of the Back button and popups that appear when you leave a site is *annoying*. This is doubly true for people with modems--the majority of surfers. Having your connection grind to a halt because some stupid Java application is popping up windows and grabbing images is the worst negatively publicity you can imagine.
Okay, that's not true. Making modem users sit through animated ads before viewing a web page is even worse.
Everyone is this thread basically say's turn this or that off, and that would be great except that the technology being talked about here won't allow you to really do that. I happen to work on a project for this, and what we can do is redirect your session at the local ISP level to another server, show you an add for 30 seconds, then push redirect you again to the place you really wanted to go. The other option is to have a pop up window that the box, again at the ISP level, monitors. You shut the window down or minimize it, you get no conectivity. This is being done for the most part by people offering free conectivity to help pay the bills and make sure that you see the add. You can turn off anything you want, but you are still going to see the add in one form or another. This may seem a little harsh, but nothing is really free, you pay for it one way or another...
I own a programable machine and I'm going to use it. I surf with images and java turned off. I'm not going to use a browser (like MSIE) that does not give me control of what I download. Advertisers are just going to have to use alternate obnoxions to reach me (hint, they don't work either).
There's nothing immoral about it, because there is no force involved. The world knows what it's paying for and the price will fall in line. I do resent ignorant people clogging the net with trash that's better suited to broadcast, but they will learn.
Reclaim your neighborhood. Wrap the nearest steel billboard in magnesium strips and let her burn!
This comment provided free of charge. I like bashing trolls.
no coordination required.
alt-f4
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There's lots of talk here about the importance of advertising to the revenues of various companies and how its so integral to the business model of ebullshit.com, or whatever. I screen out as much of this dreck as I can, and the rest I ignore. I have trained myself to have some kind of visual blind spot for banner ads.
/. crowd, I might note that Linux and the open source movement grew up just fine in the non-commercial internet, completely seperate from profit-mongering corporations. Call me a "socialist" if you like (and that's not necessarily a dirty word to the world outside the USA). It seems to me that, instead of a brand new method to schlepp your schlock on the public, the primary purpose and innovation of the Internet is (or should be) the sharing of information. Like, for example, the sharing of information that has been happening in universities across the world for hundreds of years. How many of the past millenium's great innovations in science, thought, art and technology have been from corporations? How many from the universities?
I remember when the Internet was ad-free. It was a better place, on the whole. Yes, it was smaller, and yes, you couldn't order your groceries online, and yes, you couldn't do [insert useless crap here]. You could, however, get information without the inundation of commercialism. It's really disgusting. How much of the "content" on time.com, for example, has any intrinsic worth? You are paying (via advertising) for "premium", "branded" content, not intelligent thought or discussion. Does anyone here remember the USENET of days past? Is it better or worse now that it's 95% spam?
And for the
So, I say good riddance. Goodbye priceline.com! Goodbye theglobe.com! I was happier here before you came.
Sorry, but i have happened across sites that require those popups to navigate through them... And my guess will be that the number will grow and grow as more and more people upgrade their browsers. Besides which, Netscape, let alone Mozilla, has the definite minority of the market right now, so those steps really won't help too much.
Past that, i'm fairly certain that advertisers will think of more certain ways to get your eyeballs than something as easy to ignore as a javascript popup... They're annoying, but easy to ignore.
I'll pay $25/yr for Slashdot if you'll turn off the ads. Make it an option. I pay that much for most magazines I get, and Slashdot is generally better. I hope the avertisers don't think my eyeballs are worth that much -- I've only clicked a couple of ThinkGeek ads in the last year, and have yet to buy from them. So turn off the ad, maybe add a few features, and charge me $25/yr. I'll pay, and won't even complain about the privacy problem -- and those that really care can just use a disposable credit card number. Anyone else willing to pay for your daily dose of slashdot? I want to see it as an *option* first; I'll also bet this crowd is more likely to pay than many. Show the world it can work. Maybe offer a $3 monthly also for new users, or whatever. Lemme know when I can send you my credit card number.
Brainclone.com says it will be releasing beta software that will redirect shared music listeners to web sites... read the Press release and FAQ on... www.coolvirus.com. I think this will be the beginning of a different form of marketing... and probably will happen. Mabidex
Well formed HTML - using HEIGHT and WIDTH properties to allow the rest of the page to load (of course, maybe they are already doing this, and it is just the ad server overload that is slowing the thing down?)...
You are correct in your assessment though - I guess overall banner ads SUCK!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I believe you're making a category error. The "text-worshippers" were making a claim about images taking up too much bandwidth in an era of extremely slow connectivity. They were not saying that pictures were undsirable, or that they would never willingly look at a picture. It was just that they could not reconcile waiting 5-10 minutes for a 100k .gif or .jpg to download. Once faster bandwidth became widely available the text-worshippers all but disappeared.
The anti-advertising crowd considers ads that slow them down from achieving their end-purpose of using the internet as wasteful, because it forces them to waste time doing something that they don't want and never will want to do in order to achieve something that they do want to do. This sort of waste will always be waste no matter how fast a network connection you have, and no matter how cheap bandwidth is. Your own personal time is, if nothing else in the equation is, money. And you should feel indignant when it is intruded upon by advertisers who refuse to respect your desire to be left alone.
If the end-user is *paying* for bandwidth, one could argue that the folks responsible for sending the unwanted stuff are liable to pay for the download time taken up by their junk. Didn't AOL lose a class-action suit over this very issue?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I would love those features. But what happens when developers see their business models on the trash due to these features? Will they start developing just for Internet Explorer?
Nothing is free! Everything offering is accompanied by an expectation! That might be money, a person's appreciation, information pertaining to your buying patterns, ad exposure, or anything else.
Although, the commercialization of the net has yielded wonderful tools, a line should be drawn to prevent the Internet from becoming the InterTV. I don't mind paying a reasonable price for something I want or need.
Before entering the mainstream, although not as flashy nor as vast, the net was a great resource. A comfortable balance between free and pay-for-use content is needed. Costs are traditionally associated with money, but convenience has a value too!
What is convenience worth to you?
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Here's something I don't get...
Everyone who knows what they're talking about says that you can't block/filter "offensive" content (ie violence, sex, sedition). Why are ads so much easier to categorize and filter against?
I'm for blocking ads, if the user doesn't want to view them, he has a right to try to block them. I'm against censorship imposed upon a user by someone else, but not against someone voluntarily filtering "offensive" (to them) material. But what makes one so easy to identify and the others so tricky that most attempts (Surfwatch, Net Nanny, etc.) have such awful error rates?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no example of a company failing and having to switch to an ads-only model (or succeeding and not having to switch) that I know of.
Would it be fair to characterise your understanding of what I originally wrote this way? If so, please reread it! Otherwise, please do explain why comparing a situation where a subscription-only company switches over to an ads-only model is relevent to understanding the potential success of an ads-or-subscription choice?
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
no matter what they do, they'll have to realize one fact.
People put up with those annoying javascript popups because it gets them to compelling content. Pr0n.
Until the other sites provide some equally compelling content, pushing annoyances like javascript popus on their users will only chase the users away.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I believe I may have seen something like this at MSNBC, a site which is notoriously hard to browse for users who've disabled cookies and blocked common ad sites such as Doubleclick. Recently I noticed that news URLs were being redirected through Doubleclick, apparently with an advertising payload attached (though this wasn't visible to me).
The article speaks of an acceptance of advertisements on TV and radio by many. Speak for yourself -- I find broadcast media ads intrusive to the extreme, listening exclusively to NPR at home, and tolerating commercial radio only in short stretches while driving with my fingers dancing over the pre-sets. The analog another poster made to Bradbury's 451 is apt -- I find ubiquitous advertising to be annoying and offensive in the extreme -- I am not a 24/7/365 marketing opportunity, thakyouverymuch, and will take my business away from venues in which I'm treated as such (Safeway, you listening?).
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I am the Raxis.
Liberty in your lifetime
Advertising is what makes this medium affordable. How else would a webmaster with a popular non-commerce website be able to pay for server space, bandwidth, application software and site maintenance? It's the same reason why magazines aren't $25 each, why newspapers are only a buck and why cable TV doesn't cost thousands a month. Let's put it this way: would you rather put up with a few easily ignored banner ads, or pay $3.00 each time you wanted to read your favourite website or do your email? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - let's just keep quiet and let the advertisers pay the bills.
The issue here is not to deprive advertisers of their ability to advertise, but to discourage them from doing so in an obnoxious and potentially disruptive way. So banner ads have been deemed "ineffective," i.e. the proprietor of www.toejambiscuits.com is incensed that he doesn't have 1M hits/day after circulating his banner ads, so what? Roadside billboards are in essentially the same situation, but you don't see advertisers placing banners on sawhorses that block in the roadway in an attempt to catch drivers' attention.
The truth is that forcing people to view ads that fill their field of view will only guarantee a sharply decreased customer base, causing service providers or site administrators that use such advertising techniques to be skipped over by the mainstream of net users. And then where will the advertising revenue come from?
sounds like a job for the /. trolls...
Make Thousands NOW!!! Trolling for Dough.
Trolls for Hire?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Really, you can't blame the advertisers. They too are simply products of their environment. Our current society rewards those who do well at accumulating money. This has caused corporations to be the dominant species since they have traits that are advantageous in this environment, such as indefinate life spans, multiple intelligences (employees of various expertise) and in some cases better legal protection than most people. It's simple biology and evolution. Corps have found advertising to be an advantageous trait, so those that do it best are rewarded (more money). So you can't blame biology. You could, I suppose, blame people who are unaware of this effect and where it is leading. The only actual way to change this behaviour is to change the environment totally, i.e., one that does not simply reward the greatest accumulation of money. Unfortunately, this is hard to do and still have a stable economy. So far the only people I know of that have solved this is that Technocracy group (http://www.technocracyinc.org).
or maybe you should stop using obnoxious functions, and rewrite your code.
Because rule #1 is if you annoy your customers, your customers will go somewhere else. Then you'll be flipping burgers, not writing code.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Whenever consumers control programmable devices for displaying media, ads will get filtered. This is already happening with internet banner ads and the digital VCR's with 30 second fast forward buttons.
The only way the advertisers can survive is to make the ads part of the content. Ads on TV and the web will disappear, but there will be constant product placement and explicit references to sponsors. TV shows will effectively be long advertisements for a variety of products, with witty dialog and plots added. News will be the same thing.
Imagine: a "Friends" episode where they all agree to vote Democratic, except for some redneck loser in the coffee shop. A Simpsons episode where Lisa convinces Homer to drink Brand-X coffee "because the growers use ecologically sound practices - and it tastes better too!" Barney will start serving Bud instead of Fud. The CNN host will wear shirts with big GAP logos, and have a Folgers coffee mug on the desk. There will be Microsoft and Dell logos on the computer behind him. Web sites might end up being Flash only... and they will keep the format proprietary and protected by the DMCA so you can't reverse engineer it to filter the ads from the content.
Oh yeah. What a great world that will be.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
You're right about the Web being like a big phone book. And guess what? There is no advertising in the phone book because it just doesn't work. Advertising works in the Yellow Pages when I'm looking to buy something (provided it's relevant to what I'm looking for), it works on TV when you've got a captive audience. It doesn't work when I'm trying to get something done.
The reason why banner ads don't work is quite simple: the expectations are wrong. In magazines advertisers are looking to increase brand awareness or provide information (prices etc). They don't expect you to drop everything and rush out to buy their product as soon as you see the ad. Yet that's exactly what they expect to happen with banner ads. And of course it doesn't happen, because we're trying to do something else. So I don't think mass advertising on Web is ever going to work regardless of the quality of the advert. Advertisers will have to figure out how to target me with relevant ads, and they'll have to do it without any personal data collection because I don't want them building any sort of profile on me, and if they do they guarentee I'll never buy any of the products they advertise.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What you need to learn is that some people think that non revenue seeking sites have the most useful content. Those sites will continue to provide. You don't need revenue to share.
If ATT would change their stupid no serve allowed liscence, I'd have a few things to share and would not have to go beg Geo Cities for disk space. Apatche is easy to set up, but right now I can only serve myself. Yep, I'm paying for bandwith right now, but commercial interests would rather keep me from sharing with it. Why? Because they think it's worth add revenue. They can go to hell.
-Legion
Turn off Javascript
this will fail, too
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
On the other hand, I haven't had much incentive to use proxies because I really don't find banner ads all that annoying. With this new scheme, I suspect that proxy use will skyrocket!
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Just don't use those sites.
I'm already much more likely to avoid sites that I know have large amounts of annoying advertising on them. This isn't a deliberate decision, just that those sites are not worth the effort.
It will just make the sites less likely to be visited by the people they want to advertise to.
Sig is taking a break!
More reason to run Mozilla. Hack the source code to detect and nullify javascript that pops-up adds. Won't be perfect, but you could probably cut down on most of the crap this way. Use RegExps for a tasty treat.
Blar.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
I won't see any popup that requires JavaScript: I surf with it turned off because I'm concerned about its security. I tend to avoid sites with popups at any rate.
Looking at the sheer number of gaming networks that are failing, advertising is not working in its' current form. Advertisers have figured out that paying for banner ads is a waste of time, so they no longer do it. What does that mean? Hobby sites that have a cash incentive (Hey look, I can run a quasi-interesting site and pick up an extra Grand in spending cash) or sites that are fairly serious and require full time attention, are basically non viable under the current model. Only if you have corporate backing (ie someone to pay your rent) can you afford to engage in sites like this.. and I question the altriusm of any company that purports to do that out of the goodness of their heart. Think of how many sites you visit have been down because of various advertising network shakeouts. Now think about those sites going away permanently. That very well could happen if their bandwidth usage continues to be in the gigs every month, and their advertising revenue dries up. I say kudos to the first company to come up with an interesting, viable, and effective form of advertising on the Internet.. they will be doing everyone a favor. Alex.
No, it doesn't. History proves that many people allow themselves to be manipulated. There's a difference.
Good propaganda, from Common Sense to Mein Kampf
Many people have read and rejected both.
to the spinning of Gulf War I to the big lie that George W. Bush has a legitimate claim on the presidency
You don't seem to believe it...
And right now, some Madison Avenue sucker-of-Satan's-cock is filing you under the "anti-advertising" demographic.
I'm not "anti-advertising". I simply see making a purchase as a way of acquiring a needed commodity. When I need a bottle of rubbing alcohol or a bar of soap, I go down to the store and pick up some. I don't buy stuff because I've been told to. I have never in my life made a purchase not based on need. Now, when I make a necessary purchase, I may choose a certain *brand* because of advertising (as in, "What kind of soap should I buy? What kinds are there? Well, the only two I've ever heard of are Ivory and Dial. I guess I'll pick one of those.") This is *not* the same as someone tricking me into thinking I need soap when I really don't.
"He says he's too smart and willful to be manipulated. So we'll do a campaign that plays on that, like those 'Image is nothing' Sprite ads but about twenty IQ points higher, play like we're giving him straight facts to make a logical decision (but of course we spin them our way) but put it in a framework that congratulates him on his logic for making the `right choice', which of course is us..."
I think you're giving them way too much credit. I think that most people are not so foolish as to believe the "facts" they see on TV. Sure, they'll try to get me to remember their brand name (that's their job, after all) but they can't somehow force me to "need" their product.
For example, I don't smoke. I have never smoked. When I see an ad for cigarettes, no matter how nicely done it may be, I don't suddenly get a craving for cigarettes. I don't drive down to the store to buy a pack. They can make the name "Camel" memorable, but they can't make me a smoker.
good suggestion spitzak. the reason why this generally won't work is that sites using javascript for the onClick events tend to set up their scripting so that it is difficult--and sometimes almost impossible without a knowledge of programming [even sometimes with it]--to get to the link without knowing the specific uri. for example, a js coder might set up an encoding system for their javascript URIs so that a user can't tell by viewing the page source just what the javascript links actually are. however, a simple mod to the code in, say, mozilla, to detect the simplest types of javascript onClick browser redirects probably wouldn't be a bad thing, and would probably come at little expense to the processing engine (if that is what it is called; i'm not fully up-to-speed on the terminology within the project). the mod could simply do the redirect without javascript when it is certain (or pretty certain) of the link in question, and let the user choose what to do in the other cases where the mod can't figure out the link. this would probably be one of those features that would end up in the Edit -> preferences -> advanced options -> for javascript protestors -> and /. geeks like me menu.
www.pogo.com
So lets try this on for size
Ad supported sites give me an option, I can use the free-to-me site plugged with banner ads and doubleclicks digital peeping tom software. The site remains free to me, albeit a little more obtrusive depending on the type of ads, and slashdot can still pay their OH.
Or, I sign up for some digital cash site that I pay into every month. When I visit slashdot, Im treated to a bannerless page that debits my account the amount that would have been generated by the banner ads (BTW, those of you that are guessing at $.02 are being WAY optimistic, think tenths of pennies). Of course the security implications are there, but these are the same concerns that we have had for every online transaction. This would be a huge thing for companys like ecash, not because they would see usage, but because they would create mindshare. Digital money will go nowhere until it gets its own killer app. This just might be it. Jason www.cyborgworkshop.com ...and the geek shall inherit the earth...
www.linux-skunkworks.com
Guess what guys...
Being ad supported means having Ads!
You can pay for net services by veiwing ads or you can pay for them out of your own wallet, but any net service that can't turn a profit is going to vanish.
You would think at this rate, someone would actually use a DoS for a good purpose- --------------------------
and take out some of those ad servers....
------------------------------------
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
So what if someone thought your post wasn't worth the high mod, get over it. Calling names at anyone who thinks differently just makes *you* look like a kid.
Like I said it's a humor thing (i.e. Slashdot should cache mods for 30 minutes or something and then apply them) watching the social effect like that. I'm not karma whoring otherwise I wouldn't have posted my followup (which you replied to), however it's just fascinating!
Risk, you ask? Why yes, I answer. (okay, nobody asked, but I thought I'd expand anyway)
Information and spin are just two sides of the same coin. Information is when you are empowered, spin is the same thing when the seller is empowered. Spin has much more appeal to sellers.
In an effort to expand the power of spin, I expect an even greater insinuation of corporations into the media (and into each other). This is nothing new, of course, but I think it will come to reach new heights as the media becomes increasingly monopolized. Like the "news" magazine TV shows that have the "inside looks" at new movies. Like the Mindcraft study. Only more so. Everywhere.
Of course, the skeptical few will still be able to figure it out. But while the masses are able to learn to ignore banner ads, spin is much harder to ignore because (when done well) you don't know it's there.
Any efforts to treat the net like a tradional mass media will fail.
Stupid neo-ludite marketing goofs
Not everyone wants to use it pirate DVD's
Granted and I apologize if I conveyed that. I think it's more a thought process that some people have. It's like rolling paper : Lots of people use it for legitimate purposes, but that doesn't mean it isn't assumed that you're rolling a big joint.
;-)
#!/usr/bin/perl
/^\s*$/)
$PORT = 31337;
use Socket;
socket SOCKET, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 6 or die "no socket: $!\n";
bind SOCKET, sockaddr_in($PORT, inet_aton("127.0.0.1")) or die "no bind: $!\n";
listen SOCKET, 5;
while (accept(CLIENT, SOCKET)) {
$timeout = time()+2;
$fd = "";
vec($fd,fileno(CLIENT),1) = 1;
1 while ((select(($x=$fd),undef,undef,1) != 1 || <CLIENT> !~
&& time() < $timeout);
select CLIENT;
$| = 1;
print "HTTP/1.0 200 Go away\015\012";
print "Content-Type: text/html\015\012\015\012 ";
close CLIENT;
}
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
> But, people have a will.
Some people have a will. Most don't seem to. I like to consider myself pretty immune to advertising, but the fact that it still exists as such a huge industry says that it actually works on most people.
If you go on TV and say "Here, buy this," you're not going to convince many people.
But, get their favorite sports star to go on TV and say, "Here, buy this!" and you've hooked a few more.
Go on TV and explain eloquently to them how buying your product will make them popular and happy, and you've hooked a good part of the American Public.
It's a sad, sad world.
What I object to is the theft of my time. If you want to put a little banner ad on my screen, go ahead. When I had PSTN modem access, I blocked them but now that I have cable modem, they come down so quickly that they aren't such an annoyance. But if you want to make me sit through an ad for feminine deodorant spray, Preparation H, or even priceline.com in order to get to your web site, that's my time you are wasting. If you are going to be that inconsiderate of my time, then you have no right to complain when I use the computer equivalent of the VCR fast-forward button.
they're all finding that the advertiser supported model simply doesn't work on the web where there are so many cheats
What is a "cheat"? Is the guy supporting his family on $150/month in Russia a "cheat" if he skips the ad for the Chevy Blazer on your web site? Is the European who pays by the byte a "cheat" because he elects not to download your 200K+ Flash ad for fax machines that won't work on his phone system? Is the guy in the office who doesn't want blaring music from some ad on your site a "cheat" if he circumvents the ad?
Of course a bunch of socialist, no-clue-what-they-talking about little fucks would undoubtably start ripping content and posting it somewhere else
And then a bunch of capitalist, no-clue-what-they-are-talking-about big fucks like you come to Slashdot and read the content that's been taken from elsewhere, posted, and summarized here. Please, spare me your self-righteous, hypocritical rantings.
Just because someone runs a web site with expenses does not mean that they have a moral right to be supported by their readers or that the readers have an obligation to view ads that the site owner tries to put on their screens. There is no contract on the part of either party. You may think that the entire Internet moving towards the AOL model of more ads than content is a good thing but I do not.
P.S. Before writing me off as a "socialist... little fuck", be aware that I am a 39 year old software engineer working as a sole proprietor in the aerospace industry.
Advertising is what makes this medium affordable. How else would a webmaster with a popular non-commerce website be able to pay for server space, bandwidth, application software and site maintenance? It's the same reason why magazines aren't $25 each, why newspapers are only a buck and why cable TV doesn't cost thousands a month. Let's put it this way: would you rather put up with a few easily ignored banner ads, or pay $3.00 each time you wanted to read your favourite website or do your email? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - let's just keep quiet and let the advertisers pay the bills.
At least until they all start, it's easy enough to just ignore sites which do this (and possibly even send a polite note to the webmaster explaining why).
>Firewall-like controls:I'd like to be able to tell Netscape/Mozilla to "block traffic from doubleclick.net", or whatever. I can do this if I mess with the firewall, but I'd rather leave it alone.
:)
For windows users, there is another way to block doubleclick.net from tracking you. Go to the Start Menu, click on Find/Seach and search for the word "hosts". At least one little file should pop up called "hosts" (with no extension). Double click on that file, and then select notepad to edit it. Paste into that file the following text (you can add your own too, this is just an example):
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 ad2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads22.focallink.com
Then your computer will stop downloading the ads (technically, when a web page requests an ad from ad.doubleclick.net, your computer will just fail to find the ad because it is looking in the wrong place).
And viola! you had ad blocking without a firewwall
Download your mp3s any way you want, and support the artist via FairTunes
You know when I was a bit younger I was a huge socialist. Here in Ontario I was a major fan of the NDP (a socialist party) and decried anything that "the man" did. I'm not saying that the perspective was juvenile, but rather that I'm not giving my perspective having grown up with the silver spoon because I most definitely didn't. (hehe...I have pictures of me having my bath in a big black barrell in my back yard when I was a kid)
Having said that most proposed systems that people advocate couple their perfectly envisioned,hypothetical system versus capitalism with all of its warts and scabs. It should be obvious which is going to appear superior. If anyone brings up examples of applied socialism (BTW: Capitalistic greed is responsible for most of the technical advances that you're talking about) then they will immediately be decried by the socialists as poor examples that didn't work because XYZ and XYZ...but if the world followed THEIR example...
It's a big world with nations all over the globe with varying systems and standards...yet where is the #1 area on the planet to live?
You're an idiot. Didn't i just say that my code NEEDED these functions?
man, those guys really do suck.
Oh darn, we might lose Jay Stile.
Then you'd only have people like me, who run sites because they want to get information to people, and don't bitch and whine about "revenue." What a dual tragedy if I ever saw one...
-Legion
not viewing adverts is inconsiderate?? at least with TV I can choose to switch the channel when there's commercials, and there are rules governing those adverts. There is a maximum time for adverts on TV (I think 15 minutes for each hour), but I can still switch. on the web, I can't switch until the banner ads are gone, and their are no rules for those ads or the amount, but I can filter them. I don't force you to take down your ads, you don't force me to watch'em
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I've been bothered by the eGrail thing too. I went to the site looking for examples, screen shots, even a listing of sites that currently use eGrail. It was bothersome to say the least.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
On top of that, soon after I paid extra for digital cable, which includes an onscreen guide, they changed the guide so half the screen is ads, a much smaller portion of the screen is the guide, and the picture elements of the ads and the other gratuitous eye candy cause the guide to render on screen extremely slowly. I want my old guide back. I shouldn't have to put up with ads on a service I PAID FOR.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Fine then. Just prevent opening of windows in onload and onunload while leaving them otherwise functional.
Nope I don't believe he's kidding... Consumers are the product (a paradox yes, but think about it) that advertisers are buying. Not too many of us know this, but once we become aware, the realization that we actually have a choice in whether we can be bought and sold in this fashion follows naturally. This choice is exactly why an alternative to banner ads is being sought. They don't work because people choose to ignore them.
cat
Yes, none of them are as consumer oriented as the Windows product, but then Linux users aren't average consumers. That doesn't invalidate my original point.
As for your suggestion that Windows applications are generally easier to install, that's pretty laughable. Windows installers require human interaction as a rule and perform very unpredictable changes to the system. RPM and other Linux package systems are much more efficient and easy to use.
By avoiding ads, we're making the system inviable? So what? The system is not viable anyway. Advertising must always push the barrier between advertising and non-advertising, it must always encroach on real information, because people naturally (without even thinking of it) see advertising for what it mostly is: lies. Not always straight-out lies, but lies nonetheless. And so people filter it out. They will always filter it out, because the human mind is good at that. And so advertising is always on the edge of becoming useless. And so the advertisers push harder. This can only end in the destruction of the medium itself, or the destruction of the minds and will of the advertising victims. I'd rather see the medium destroyed.
And I see no reason to apologize for that.
You never thought it would happen. But the answer to annoying pop-up windows and continually interrupting ads which switch you from page to page is Microsoft!
Think about it. How many times have you opened a "Free Pr0n" link and had it spawn half a dozen other windows like "CmdrTaco Nude!" "Hemos getting nailed!" et al. only to have your system Blue Screen of Death with a Page Fault.
Not even Joe Sixpack will stand for continual re-boots.
Yes people, the future is here, better living and less commercialization through crappy software.
"Microsoft: Where do you want to go today, Oh, I'm sorry, that page popped up two more windows and now I'm going to Page Fault. Enjoy our BSOD!"
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
The people who create this ads are truly talented. Many of them have years of experience in design and engineering. But the restrictions are high: low, low budgets; two-week turnaround time; 12K maximum file size; clients who are much more concerned with televison ads and ads that will appear in the New York Times - cursory input is given to banners.
We're looking into new technologies and new ways to present things that people will enjoy more. We work with Java programmers to create things in small files we've never seen before (the HP banner with the butterfly), sponsorship of more interesting sections of sites, games, and others. It's hard to convince clients to buy this when the ad doesn't say, "Buy all your books at barnesandnoble.com NOW NOW NOW!!!" But we know the experience will be better for the audience.
I myself grew so tired of producing these ads I have asked to be transferred to the database marketing group, and I have been. I still sit in my old cube and watch my old team slave away on these tiny products. But now I work on CRM solutions where I hope to advertise things to people that they are actually interested in, in a way that they appreciate.
Don't get too angry at us! Were it not for advertising how many companies anywhere would still be around? We're trying to make it better for everyone to look at and, someday, for people to actually appreciate. Give us some time.
They won't design there?
Well, I won't design there either.
Look how bad, unreadable and unusable the big portals $ have got. Yet, guess who gets the most hits ? The user-nightmares portals.
This is obviously so because clueless new Internet users don't know how to look for information without, or because their browser's startpage defaults to BiGPoRtaL.com, whatever. My point is, if the biggies start to use the "annoying" (to say the least...) advertisement technology described in the article, we're in for some interesting fun. My opinion is that the average luser of these would actually be annoyed by this crap, but is too sheepy/clueless to start looking for an alternative solution.
It is possible to create content you know, you don't have to get it all from somewhere else
You miss the other points I was making:
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hyjacking sites loose eyeballs. They don't come back. The sooner the advertisers discover this the better. Have you ever abandoned an e-mail account because it became a spam repository? Even essential services will get replaced to avoid excessive slowdowns in productivity. Sites that depend on numbers of unique visitors and repeat visitors will be the first to fall off the radar. Free ISP's will be loaded with cheap people who don't spend any money. Anyone needing fast access will move on to an ISP without it. Lottery, gambeling, and 1-976 sites may end up the only advertisers buying this ad space for that demographic.
The truth shall set you free!
I got a very surreal image from that, in the UK, A&E means the "Accident and Emergency" department at a Hospital, although given the somewhat more market driven nature of USA healthcare, maybe that meaning is correct <Boggle>...
--
Actually it is rocket science...
Unfortunately, the rating system doesn't work as I intended it unless you have javascript turned on. I'd rather have the message there so lynx people know that there is a text only skin in existence. If you have javascript turned off in a browser that supports it, thems the breaks.
--
Perhaps it's just the accuracy of the response rates [for internet ad's] that's upsetting the advertisers. Unlike magazine ads or commercial television, they actually have an accurate indication of how many people showed an interest in response to the ad... And these numbers are very unpleasantly low, in their books.
But, to be honest, I don't think I have ever bought anything as a result of a television or magazine advertisement in my life! I may have visited a store because of an advertised 'extreme sale' or somesuch, but only to browse and usually only to buy a loss-leader item and leave thereafter. [I am an extremely conscienctious consumer, dedicated to buying the best products at minimal cost.]
---
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Ah, I can hear the familiar call of the classic capitalist. "You don't get things for free", "it is remarkably fair" "don't think the world owes you." The traditional voice of the privileged.
What do you mean it is "fair and workable", "a funny and remarkable thing"? Do you mean for yourself? If you want to talk about these ads, you should first note that the majority of the world's population is excluded from the internet because they do not have the means to purchase the tech and do not have the time because of work. Well, one might say, you don't need the internet to live. True. Unfortunately, this "funny and remarkable" system does do a good job of distributing things people need to live, like food. More than 50% of the world population is malnourished, underfed.
That might seem offtopic, but if you see people excited about getting a good thing like web content, and then disappointed by the more crass forms of web commercialization like these developing ad technologies, don't simply repeat the logic of these advertisers. You don't get anything for free? That isn't a natural law, it's something you've accepted because you're in a privileged position. What about the Linux developers, like Torvald, who appear quite comfortable with giving away something for free? It seems to be a quite successful way to go. Free things are a significant part of what will enable most of the world to eventually experience the Internet. Don't get angry if some people want to be involved too, without stomaching vapid advertisements.
I would like to tell the advertisers to keep the advertising money. If I am not shopping, the ads are useless. If I am shopping, I'll search for the best deal. Stuff in banner ads is rarely the best deal. I did not follow a banner ad to find bulk ink for my inkjet printer or toner for the laser printer. I searched for it. (found great prices too)
The truth shall set you free!
Any open source project udergoing ? Didn't find anything on SourceForge...
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Maybe it IS time that we went back to gopher :)
Is internet advertising the way corporations are getting back at the hackers who put the internet together before they had even thought of such an idea - never mind patented it...
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
I can sing all the bass and baritone parts of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular plays, and sing 'em well. Does that count?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The main reason why people don't like spam (aside from the general annoyance factor) is that spam has a cost which is borne by the recipient. Spam costs the user both time (time spent downloading unsolicited messages and sending "remove" e-mails) and money (your computer has to be on that much longer, which increases your power bill).
These are some of the same reasons why people dislike banner ads, especially people who use analog modems! It's annoying enough to wait an extra 10-15 seconds for a page to load because of the banner ad. But what's really annoying is being unable to load a page because you get an error from the banner ad server. Compare this to an ad on a billboard near the highway. You're not going to fail to get where you're going because of a billboard, nor will it suck gas out of your car.
I certainly understand the necessity for websites to have a source of income. But banner ads have problems other than just being annoying. Like spam, they also shift costs to the recipient.
Other people have mentioned that they don't mind seeing banner ads on their favorite sites because they want to support those sites. I've also seen services (such as the "This is True" newsletter) which have two versions: a free version with ads, and a subscription version with no ads and more content. So here's one suggestion: some websites could have a public-access version, and a private paid subscription version with no ads and more content. Certainly this would work for the more commercial sites. Smaller "homegrown" sites are less likely to pull this off, but they're more likely to have visitors who tolerate banner ads too.
Okay, so this won't work for every site. But between the problems with banner ads and the numerous ad-blocker technologies out there, you'd think that someone would try to come up with a better way to advertise. As far too many people in this forum have already said, pissing off your customers doesn't help. You have to find ways to work with them.
"All this free content isn't going to continue to be free unless users pay for it somehow, and the payment is advertising," Mr. Tchong said.
But ad man Tchong's premise is wrong. What if we don't want "all this free content"?
As a subscriber to numerous print magazines and two newspapers, I couldn't care less if the commercial media stopped the flow of its content onto the web. That wouldn't affect me at all. Shut it all down now, if you like; in fact, please shut it down quickly so that we don't have to listen to lackies lecture us about the need for bigger and better ads.
What I want from the net is precisely what the Tchongs of this world don't get: I want stuff that didn't come out of the commercial mills. Stuff that people produce because they are driven to do so, nearly always at their own expense of time or love, or because they were pissed off or just burdened with an idea. That is the beauty of this medium -- and not its ability to become Fox News' ad-regurgitation trough.
Get a clue. The problem is banner ads are ignored. Duh! I wasn't shopping most of the time. Don't waste the money on advertising that does not work. The adverts should be all stuck in some kind of searchable yellow pages or just properly show up in searches. (Yahoo, Excite, Google & others can drop me at your website with the proper short keyword list if I am looking for the best "insert product here") If I want an airline ticket, I'll search for it. If you want top of the list placement in yellow pages, plan on paying for it. If you want to be found with a budget ad in the yellow pages, have the best deal. Most surfers avoid the best financed ads as they never have the best deal. Lets face it, not all web destinations have shoppers looking for a deal. How many people on Slashdot are here shopping for something? A company I worked for got the best results with a yellow pages ad. It was tracked by a unique phone number. It was responsible for more than 80% of the new traffic.
The truth shall set you free!
And yes the TV ads today are about how cool/friendly ect. a vedo is, but that's because that's what works. Ads have to target the largest group of people, who by nature are the most easily influenced.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
tools->internet options, security tab Internet Custom Level:
Disable Everything except for
+file download
+submit non-encrypted form data
?Prompt for java applets
Then, any site I like, I add to my Trusted Sites list. (tools->internet options, security tab, Trusted Sites, then click the [Sites...] button. These are the sites that I allow to run java, cookies etc.
No Popups, no funky javascript, fewer security holes. I also run Adextinguisher to kill the ads, but that's not required.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I can tell you ignore the banner ads. Most of them would not work with coupons you could take to any local brick and mortar store. Most I've noticed lately are for credit cards, MP3 Player from one online source, computer stuff, gambling, and something I don't know what it is.
The truth shall set you free!
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I agree on not going back to places that make it hard to get to the content. I made the mistake of looking for MP3's by searching on Yahoo for free MP3's. I got everyting else. Mostly music sites with content in an non MP3 format and for a price. Talk about useless search results! Not only did everything cost money, most everything was incompatible with my MP3 player. Everything went to NAG screens or pages of links going to pages of links & Pop Ups, but no content. There was zero links that took me directly to a free MP3. Needless to say, I don't look for MP3's with Yahoo anymore. The search result was too trashed to be of any use.
The truth shall set you free!
Don't people pay for cable TV too? And they have just as many ads as broadcast television, and just as stupid.
That doesn't mean it's good. It only means that people can't do anything about it and are forced to put up with it.
I don't deny you your right to watch ads if you want to. In fact, it's nice to be able to sift through ads -- when you want to -- to find something.
But give me a Tivo. Or said differently, when people do have a choice not to watch ads, or a technological solution, they'll take it. Too bad Tivo's aren't so cheap as to be considered a common accessory to television. Wonder what will happen when technology makes it cheap enough to buy Tivo-type devices for, say $99?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I leave javascript off when I browse, most sites don't raise a fuss, and it kills all popups and window resizing.
What really pisses me off are those websites that use frames for the sole purpose of showing an add thats always there. Just using netscape's open-frame-in-window menu gets rid of those, but It's tiresome to have to do that constantly with some pages.
====
All things in life are subjective. At least that's what I think.
====
"white bread, redneck, chicken-shit, motherfucker" -- Dr. Dre on "Straight Outta Compton"
Webwasher owns.
=)
i have been very impressed with its capabilities since i dropped it onto my office workstation.
i feel that there will be nothing but advancements in this type of technology.
and what about sites like slashdot? i severly doubt that legitimate sites will go to such lengths just testing how much garbage they can throw at users.
It's a free download for students and other non-commercial users.
So what happens when it is legislated that thou shalt not circumvent advertising?
low-down, dirty, communist hackers.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Hmm Amazon.com is like your comparison for a store. I guess tons of rude salespeople from the example would work better it the setting was the woods at the beginning of deer season and all the jackels started poping out from behind trees. They (intrusive junk) would make it hard to find the deer (content) you are searching for. In this setting, it is even more hated. Ad blocking proxies is like shooting anything that jumps out from behind a tree. The hint is "it's not welcome".
The truth shall set you free!
tell me you can't see this one happening.
if pepsi will pay a near a million dollars to get its product in a key shot in a movie, how much would it(or any company for that matter) pay to have a continious banner streamer on a popular tv show.
money makes the world go round, and it only a matter of time before things like this start happening.
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Give the Slashdot community the power to rate the ads as Informative, Offtopic, Flamebait, etc.!
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
Yes, I believe that was my point: "it is sad that although the majority of Americans did not vote Republican, a Republican President was elected".
Although on a second reading of my post, I think I could see how you could read it in the opposite light: "it is sad that the majority of Americans did not vote Republican". Although that's not my viewpoint, of course :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Good point - I should have been more precise, but somehow "majority" makes more of an effect than just "plurality".
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
'Course it's no problem to wipe every reference to down1oads.mp3.com, then reload the list...
Then there's other sites that have started using Shockwave and Flash banners (Intel, ZD's TechTV), as well as .asx/.asf banners.
Ow! My eye! Which one? The one on the floor. ---Action Quake2 exchange, after catching 5 M4 rounds to the head.
What about web servlets? It is very easy to build java and mod_apache 'servlets' which can attach 'headers' to all web documents served - This is the method which I see these forms of advertising to eventually take.
... imagine if I wasn't hyped on caffiene!
That is, they output a different page to the client - for the same requested URL - dependent upon the referring URL. If the referring URL is a non-advert page, it displays an advert page or pops up an advert window before redirecting through to itself once more, with the new referring URL. Once the advert page has been displayed (ie. the document has referred back to itself), the true page is displayed.
And these are my thoughts at 3.00am
I am advocating a choice, whereby someone can pay to have adverts turned off.
Aha--OK, now I understand you. I didn't get that from your original post
Actually, many shareware programs that include ads use the model you're talking about, including Opera, which is the browser I'm using to compose this. Others include PKWARE (PKZip), VisioSonic (PC DJ), and GoZilla!
(Disclaimer: the company I currently work for makes SDKs that enable just this kind of thing...)
Companies!!! pleaase do not listen to this man!!! Show me more swimsuit-clad girls crawling all over most anything.
thank you
ej
I don't really disagree with most of your post, but I think we're talking about two different things. You're saying that banner ads are never going to work because the expectations are wrong (ie, not like magazine ads) and because they're poorly targeted. I'm talking about what will have to take place in order to get banner ads merely to the level of print ads, which can't be clicked at all (barring some demonic CueCat like device), and can only be targeted to general readership.
However, I do disagree with your claim that ads don't work because the web is like a big phone book. Parts of the web are like a phone book - much of the rest is like a magazine, and ads in magazines seem to work just fine. My point wasn't that people will never respond to ads on the web, no matter how well targeted, polite, and well crafted they are. I suspect that people will respond to ads once they improve that far, although never to the "click-through" level advertisers seem to be looking for. And for even that gain, it'll be likely to take a new generation of display technology - and restraint on the part of advertisers - to get us there.
I would recommend some non-commercial radio. If you are in the Philly area listen to WKDU 91.7Fm or over your 'puter at wkdu.org. It's a college radio station and extremely rough around the edges. It rocks. You won't hear top40 or mtv music on it. And if you request some, they'll laugh at you.
Then if you have bandwitdh or live near the Rochester area, listen to WBER 90.1 at wber.monroe.edu. They have commercials but it's done in an interesting way plus they don't play much top40 music.
I know the thread was about Unix, but I feel compelled to mention that it it seems to use a lot of memory and generally fragment the hell out of memory on Windoze systems. (Perhaps because it's just a quick port, as opposed to being written for windows)
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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My impression of banner ads is that they are not for products I care to buy. Nor are they always products I care to see the ad for. If you want click throughs, you have to show me something worth taking 10 minutes out of my day to explore or something that I will instantly want to buy. People's time is worth more than their money and all net adds require a time investment prior to a financial investment. Taking people's time turns them off.
-- $G
They apparently figured out that one can detemine the sufers location on the planet based on IP number. So when you go to their site, it immediately checks your IP number and redirects you to a page they deem suitable for your needs! Even ifs a search request! www.usatoday.com uses the Lycos search engine to search their site... except it only works for the americas, because everybody else will be redirected on their site... bloody idiots.
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
YOUR Internet revolution. How you dream it must be. That does not have to be how it actually turns out. A lot of us (most of us?) don't want all that add crap all over the place. If that means you, and people can afford to be there, well to bad for you. Goodbye. And when you leave something else will emerge. That which needs to be there will be there.
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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You don't get anything for free... Actually you do, but not much since there are to many greedy persons like yourself - one day though... While I don't like banner ads, popup ads, or even advertising on television or the radio, You should move over here, there are no adds on TV. However, if what happens to TV is what is likely to happen to the net, namely that advertizing money goes for the largest possibly groups, resulting in endless amounts of brainless crap (witness your infamous tv) then I say BE GONE ADDS - with what ever that entails. If someone can't afford to run a site, well too bad, good bye. the people who provide the content that you rely on (for example I have no problem with the banner ad on Slashdot here. If I had some moral objection I simply WOULDN'T COME TO SLASHDOT. It would be moral theft to use Slashdot's hardware and programming without allowing them a chance at financial returns) have to make money It's moral theft that they are stealing my money ,the money I have to pay for the internet and phone connection to download the banners. If they need money, turn it into a paysite - if not, don't whine.
Capitalism is a funny and remarkable thing and it's very unfortunate that it is put into such a bad light
capitalism n. economic and political system dependent on private capital and profit-making.
profit --n. financial gain; excess of returns over outlay.
What people of low cognitive abilities(such as your self apparently) fail to see, is that the reason capitalism is cast in a bad light IS because it is bad. Instead of a system based on sharing, its based on a system using. So if it leaves the net, it's probably not so bad.
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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I was just adjusting my user preferences (some AC has been acting up again), and I saw that you could adjust the posting preferences -- the format for your post. There was HTML Formatted, Plain Text, and "Code". (There were a few others, too.)
I don't quite know what it does, perhaps you've already tried it. But I just wanted to point out that it does exist.
BTW, I'm going to give the code a try. Thanks.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The only systems that would work better than capitalism, rely on modern technology, and other conditions that never existed in the past.
:)
Over the years, this made the popularity of capitalism grow as the only system that works.
But no other system was researched with modern technology in mind, hardly anyone ever gave much thought to creating such ideas, as if it should be trivial. Out of all widely-known ideas, basically just generic socialism, communism, and capitalism, I agree capitalism is best.
My point, however, is that different systems can exist. I agree capitalism is the reason behind a lot of developments in technology, but does this make it any better than the systems this technology allows?
We have the required modern technology with such availability for less than 10 years.
Its reasonable to assume the technology required to automate an entire market should become rediculously cheap in another 10 or 15 years.
Almost all true innovations of regimes/systems were created with new countries. Maybe I shall set up a new country, and see how long the US holds as #1 in anything..
Some of this is already solved:
I don't think that I was necessarily talking about web content. My favorite site was an ftp site, which archived a usenet group. There was plenty of traffic and updates were hourly.
"One more point; in the old days, bandwidth wasn't as expensive as it is today. "
Nonsense. Bandwidth is like most computer technology a lot cheaper than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Its just that we use a lot more it. My favorite site was entirely ascii driven. These days I have just downloaded the entire thing to my hard drive, because bandwidth, and disk space is now cheap enough.
Phil
It doesn't matter. As long as the advertising executives can convince the advertisers that advertising is a good thing, then it does not matter at all what the public think.
Public beliefs might be a good way of convincing advertisers that the adverts are worth while, but this this is a long way from suggesting that consumers control the adverts.
Phil
Make your friends sing with you!
Oh, you don't have the time either? Quit lecturing.
It's not likely that any of these methods will make it "hard to ignore ads on the web." Sites that make use of these intrusive techniques will soon find themselves ignored.
The simple truth is that this method of advertising actively changes the state of a user's workplace. By changing the state of a user's workplace you force the user to undergo a series of context shifts. These will nearly eliminate the user's ability to actively view the original magnet content.
If joe user finds himself unable to focus on a source of content (due to the unbearable conditions in which it must be read), I don't think it an irrational leap to believe that he will simply stop visiting that site. It is very easy to ignore something with which you are never faced.
None of these methods will be serious problem in the short term. They are all hampered both by the medium and by the interface to that medium. The first important part to remember is that the web, unlike television, is not a serial medium. The browser interface to web content allows for a degree of parallelism in the tasks. Most web users, even the broadband sort, have simply grown used to reading in one window while another one loads. We tend to have many windows open at once. These ads, by there very nature, serialize the user experience, forcing the user to refocus from his chosen task of the moment by blocking his access to it. This is a serious flaw in design. (The browser popups are especially bad in this regard, since no current browser can accomplish that operation without a noticeable delay.)
This sort of product is the technological equivalent of a three-year-old's shouting "look at me!" As such, it will be avoided.
His .sig is from http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
The thing is, as ads become more annoying and obtrusinve, more people will start using this software, thus decreasing the advertisement's effectiveness. "Effectiveness" (ie: click-through rates) is generally what the sponsor pays for. Ad companies (DoubleClick et al) are already under fire for not delivering real revenue for their advertisers; with these new ads they could be putting the last nail in their own coffins.
I wish everyone would stop making bad comparisons with Internet advertising and TV/radio advertising. A TV or radio is a whole lot more difficult to ignore, especially since the broadcasters often schedule them at the same times, thus foiling the channel flippers. Because of the nature of the Web, it's difficult (if not impossible) to create some sort of advertisement that can't be filtered either by proxy software or by the user's eyes themselves.
Make no mistake, companies that make the bulk of their money from selling advertising space are going to die off in droves over the next few years, as they have been doing already.
"more websites will be forced to close"
Plenty more where they came from. The internet will survive despite lame adverts, not because of them.
It costs money to keep up good web sites, especially dynamic sites like news sites. Either you are going to have payments per story, monthly subscriptions, or ads. The ads will get harder and harder to avoid. Redirects to ads served off a server near or the same as the content server are hard to block.
Of course you can disable your browser. If you really hate graphical ads you can go to lynx and deal with text based ads. Do you really hate ads that much? If you watch TV or listen to the radio you are already dealing with ads. What makes the web different?
-- soldack
niceFire.com - Humor and Lego's or Lego's and Humor or Some Combination of
The problem is that consumers don't want to be bothered by adversisements in any medium. The only reason it's such a big deal for web surfers is that we CAN and historically HAVE gotten away without the constant interruption of ads. Realistically, though, when has anyone ever been glad to see the station logo pop in the middle of watching Sheridan fly a white star through the roof og the Shadow capital, with the possible exception of the biological need to 'recycle' the big gulp you drank with (or in some cases, AS) dinner
Creating content is not free. Some content creators fund their enterprise with advertising(which I prefer to paying a subscription) Shouldn't people who advertise on the web have a reasonable expectation that their ad is being viewed by people who visit the site they sponsored.
My other sig is extremely clever...
I agree that flipping text into banners or popups are a big lose. Instead, advertising networks should be moving into audio and video ads in streaming media. That's going to be the only (halfway) reasonable way to present in-context advertising.
I understand that these people need to be reimbursed - but I think micropayment is a MUCH better option than intrusive, high-bandwidth ads.
Yeah. Webwasher also lets you set a maximum expiration date on cookies. I leave -all- cookies on now, but excepting a few preferred sites, I make Webwasher expire all cookies within 48 hours. This makes it impossible for evil companies to do any meaningful analysis of my browsing habits.
Can someone post some links to filtering proxies? Specifically, some that can run on the NT desktop? (I know, I know...)
This doesn't seem like rocket science, and I wrote a prelimary one in Java just to try it, so there should be some out there. It seems like you should be able to just start the thing up on your desktop, point it to whatever proxy you currently use, point your browser to its port on your local machine, and then be able to filter content based on a variety of criteria. Someone somewhere must have written one of these. It would be a great and empowering good in the world.
Yahoo does this to a degree, but not to the degree they need to. Every single ad has to be relevant to every single piece of content.
I went to Yahoo and searched for "Eminem" and was rewarded with a banner ad for ink jet labels. Now see, that's wrong. About half of the searches I did turned up ads relevant to the content. That's good -- but not good enough. If I were in their shoes, and not beholden to the financial communities that they are surely beholden to, I would GIVE AWAY advertising until every single ad was relevant to the content. I find an asparagus wholesaler and give them ad space for searches for asparagus. It would increase the worth of the rest of Yahoo's ad space by more than double!
Here on /. the ads are the one thing that is not editorially controlled, i.e., the Slashdot community has no say as to what ads appear up there. Now see, that's wrong. Sure we understand the reason for it, and since advertisers here probably desperately want to appeal to the /. community, /. ads are better than 99% of the ads out there. But we are here for the community, and since the ads are not a part of the community, there is a significant disconnect going on.
Furthermore, interstitials and the like are part of the traditional media thinking -- again! -- that the web is like TV. Every single time they think like that, they fall flat on their faces.
Lastly, the value of sponsorship has not been explored. In the olden days of the US, every mom and pop store had a sign that was half theirs, half Coca-cola's. Fifty years later, those signs are almost all gone but they're still a cultural icon. Similarly, Nike should be spending a million bucks to sponsor kids' soccer league web sites. They could give away hosting space and the web tools needed to make such sites look good.
--
If people want adverts to work (at least, for me ;) then, as is hinted at in the article, the content should start to take precedence over the manner in which it is presented, much like any other form of advertising. The last banner ad I clicked on was probably the first time I realised that advertising had progressed from crap animated gifs to tiny Java applets - not very impressive, but hey, it caught my attention. Especially with the eternal advent of broadband, can we expect to see more innovation, in terms of the technology used (interactive 3d?) to attract our gaze? Or have they been around for years, but I keep ignoring them? (Fun with Mozilla's image blocking...)
In a related press release, AOL (NYSE:AOL) today announced that all customers who visited their astrology forums would be automatically signed up for the superstitials.
BTW, a here's a better link to the article, without the annoying popup window ad.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
And they think TV ads aren't ignored? Bah! I ignore them all the time, including the money begging on (formerly non-commercial) public TV. The big difference here is that TV has totally saturated the mass market, and regular use of the Internet is still done mostly by the more intellectual, who don't succumb to these ads.
TV is also different in the sense that you intend to "participate" without any control. It's fed to you in time sequence, and a chance to take a bathroom break, or grab another cold one, is appreciated. The web lets you do those things any time you want. A banner and a couple boxes here and there don't bother anyone as they are easy to ignore. Popups will be bad, but only until everyone figures out how to prevent them (it won't be all that long, either).
Maybe it's time for sales people to realize they have to be kindler and gentler, or else it's just not going to work out for them. We will prevail.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The reason people mind having pop ups and other interactive stuff happen while they are browsing and interrupt their activities, but don't bat an eye when it happens on the radio or television is because a radio or television is not capable of doing anything but blindly pouring forth some streamed content from elsewhere. On the other hand, a computer is an active piece of hardware. It is in essence running a program that is basicly hostile to the individual user, even if for economic reasons it's necesary. Even users who don't understand at the technology level seem to have an instinctive grasp of the idea that the advertisement is _taking control away_ from the user, very much against the whole philosophy of the personal computer movement. Some program, set up by some nameless entity at the other end of a communication line, with some obvious ulterior motive is taking control of the user's own PC, which they payed damn good money for so they would have control of their own machine. How does that sit with the individual?
I think that the way to handle this is just the way it's handled in print... Have you ever picked up a copy of the New York Times Magazine, the glossy insert they have on sundays, right? Okay, if you go look for the cover story which is usually about 10-12 pages long... Instead of being in one 12 page block, it's spread out in 1 or two page blocks, interspersed with the high-paying glossy two-page-spread ads for cars and expensive designer clothes, etc... If you want to follow the cover story from page to page, you have to thumb through multiple pages of ads, and to keep you from seeking to the correct page, the pages with ads are not numbered...
Some sites already do this, they will have an article split up into several pages of html with larger than banner ads in between sections of text, and it works fine. It's just like reading a magazine. Anything more intrusive or active than what's done in print will perminantly scare off users.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
In the article a Michael Tchong is quoted:
"Rudely interrupted? Hey, we do that with radio, we do that with any serially served medium...It's accepted in other media because they grew up with it"
That's as may be for other media, especially where the technology involved is an on button and a volume control. But we haven't "grown up with it" on the web. In fact, advertising is generally so un-intrusive that it's ignored by most people. There are a number of usability and technical issues to be dealt with before intersitals become popular, let alone the standard method of advertising on the internet.
In the end it will come down to whether that kind of advertising becomes "accepted practice" like banner ads did. Some sites will try it, but unless big traffic sites (and I'm basically talking Yahoo and AOL here) start using them, so-called intersital advertising won't work.
my blog: good times, man, good times
Who is going to pay for all this "Free" content that people want to view? It really does cost a lot of money to keep servers up, networks running, etc etc. Those things have to be paid for somehow.. and without ads it looks to be:
Pay to play (ie you cant view slashdot without paying to join)
Taxes (eewww slashdot is subsidized by US citizens and content to non-US citizens is then pay to play with a "content" tax.)
So we are the brilliant ones.. what is the alternative to paying for your free crap?
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
You can already kill popups with Javascript, in a short period of time there will be ways to deal with these others as well.
Aidrocsid Liah Lla! Sire Liah!
In "The Hitchhiker's trilogy," Douglas Adams sent all of the telephone sanitizers and ad executives to an alternate destination when the human species changed planets.
Sadly, the alternate destination was Earth.
By censoring stuff it thinks may be advertising, isn't this program interfering with the free flow of ideas that makes the internet so great. Occasionally I find interesting stuff in ads I see on the web.
My other sig is extremely clever...
If sites start putting in full ads before and after content, it should be pointed out that we're paying for the download of the ads. Might be fine if your on an unmetered system, but this still imposes an extra cost to the users.
If they're going to try to use the TV metaphor here, then it should be pointed out that technically TV is free (just raise an antenna to get a signal), were as this strikes me more of the junk fax type thing.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
If you think the ads are annoying, then pay for the content. Banner ads do work - I wouldn't have known about thinkgeek without them! Annoying people more isn't going to work any better. At the same time, google has to maintain those 5,000 linux boxes somehow. The OS may be free but the hardware sure isn't!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
These ad execs and marketroids haven't come to the conclusion that conventional advertising methods are *not* going to work on the internet. Maybe they'll have to (gasp) think of a NEW way to make money and sell their wares than putting corporate logos in front of everyone's eyes.
The answer is obvious: subsidized time! I can see it now.. the Year of Depends Adult Undergarments, the Year of Glad Wrap...
Oh wait, nevermind, just read Infinite Jest.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Hopefully I'm right, because I can't see how web users will accept advertizing if it becomes so obtrusive as replacing content or a forced popup on page exit.
Sure advertizers may entice web sites to try these types of approaches if they pay enough, but I think the result will be people staying away in droves. There's enough choice of information sources on the web, that no-one has the monopoly power to force users to put up with crappy ad-laden web sites.
Agreed - it's frightening to realize that something like that could be enforced via law.
But, here is something interesting (IMHO) - if international broadcasting laws permit the interchanging of commercials on TV (quick explanation: in Canada, NBC and Global show the same programme - when I switch to NBC channel, I actually get a copy of the Global cast which has Canadian commericials) would this be applied to the net commericials?
Certainly the net knows no boundaries, but neither did radio/tv broadcasts, and yet tv is apparently being regulated in this manner.
I know that the re-broadcasting of tv over the net was a big legal issue in the States, how much of a similar regionalized display of internet ads be affected?
Just asking...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Do we need it? heck no. Stop wasting gov't money, send it all to NASA!
drive stainless!
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
From the marketing angle, this does not make sense. Effort in online marketing should be spent on permission e-mailing (NOT spamming, certainly not!!), affiliate programs and syndicating. These are proven to be the most valuable means of attracting customers, as opposed to attracting their attention and the losing them 'cause you annoyed them. The last seems to be the risk in the desribed new approaches, and it seems more likely customers will boycott you instaed of buying your product.
This supposedly is invented since bannering is dead. But it isn't, really!! Bannering is much cheaper in cost per mille than conventional (off-line) communications media!. The clickthrough ratios have only fallen because there was more offered. A TV commercial doesn't have the same effect as it had when there was only one TV-chanel.
If a company would choose to allocate their off-line campaign budget to bannering, they'd make the biggest imptression in internetmarketing so far. If they would spend it on customer-agreeable sollutions (i.e. something the customer actually needed or askd for), they would be the hit of the town!
In online marketing conferences, you see a tendency towards listening to the cusomer more often and not just porting TV or other conventional media methods to the web. Maybe we'll get there someday
Maybe the situation in the US is different from the Netherlands, but I think the principles apply globaly.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The other reason ads get ignored is because they are one of a dozen on a website. To kiss a little Slashdot ass here, at least their one banner ad per page pertains to the content and is the only one. I will never ever begrudge someone from making an honest living and support ads on websites so long as the website isn't one big billboard.
Why don't people click on banner ads? Because they have come to a website for the content and aren't interested in being sidetracked to a different site. If they are just surfing around, they might click on a banner ad but that also signifies they really aren't interested in making a purchase.
When I am shopping on the internet, I already know the sites I am comfortable buying from. Ads are more about awareness which is almost impossible to calculate the efficiency of. Just because I didn't click on the banner ad doesn't mean it didn't have an impact on me. When I started to explore tools for a professional content site, I recalled a banner ad for eGrail as seen here on Slashdot. I didn't originally click on the banner ad but only know about it because of the banner ad.
The same goes for many other banner ads I have seen.
Know, with that being said, I guarantee any website that superimposes ads on content or forces the surfer to click through the ad space to get to the content will suffer a dramatic decrease in traffic. Even if the content is golden, anything that complicates the now very simple process of getting that content now, will deter visitors.
The web is not TV. It is not a medium that gets fed to the people. Although it could be forced into that mold, it would be cutting off a significant portion of its potential. Because of that potential we must explore more passive ad placement, not more annoying ad placement.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
People enjoy the web because it isn't completely ad infested (yeah, there are banners, but as was stated, they are easily ignored).
Now, I'm one of those people that find pop-ups to be the most blatantly annoying pieces of garbage in existence, especially those that pop-up after you close a window to "show you more". So, what they are basically going to do is piss me off to the point to where I will refuse to frequent sites that do this.
The first time I come to slashdot, get a pop-up, get pissed off, close slashdot and get another pop-up is the last time slashdot generates a page-hit from me. The web was cool in 95, less cool in 2000, are we looking to totally destroy any enjoyment at all by 2005? Great, another good idea gone bad due to "marketing potential".
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<sarcasm> /dev/audio is constantly playing Sibelius' symphonies -- you mean I might
actually have been missing some audio adverts? God forbid that I use my soundcard
for anything other than what the webmaster intended!!
Whoa?? You mean all this time I've been missing content from ad-filled webpages?? No wonder I find no interest in returning to those sites! My
</sarcasm>
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mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
But there is one downside to one of these new advertising techniques - they refresh. I've actually seen this done before - client pull technology is nothing new. But I have one objection to these - they can slow things down. For example, I was playing a game at FreeArcade, when I suddenly lost all control of the game. I was about to give the computer the three-finger salute (it was a Windows box), when I realized that the system wasn't locked up at all - the browser was just pausing while it went out and got a new ad to show me. I ended up losing the game. This is a *great* way to tick people off...
Another thing that annoys me greatly - pop-up ads. (They can, however, be rather amusing - I was using twm, and it has me manually place them. I click to put it wherever; and then I go to close it. But it has already retreated to behind the main browser.)
In short - I'm not one of those people who whine and moan about ads all day. But I do wish people would give a little more thought to how they will affect users - if they unexpectedly go out and get content, it can slow down whatever you're doing at their site. Imagine trying to download a complete Linux distro while being bombarded with refreshing popups!
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suwain_2
I use Opera, and all of those crappy windows open up inside of the program. I'm reading along, and all the sudden there's like, twelve, of those boxen scattered on my screen.
Besides, some people actually do look at banner ads. I personally am ten times more likely to look at the banner ad than a pop-up, which I just close.
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Everyone's favorite retailer amazon.com is already doing a popup this month plugging their "fast cheap shipping". It looks like they set a cookie so you only get it once per browser, but I think I've seen it several times so it may be a very short cookie.
I think some other big online stores are doing this too, but I can't think of any specific examples at the moment.
Aw, c'mon guy's...pop up windows are the best platform-independent version of 'whack a mole' out there. I've gotten good at nailing them before the script can execute the next window pop.
With open source software it is very easy to circumvent such schemes and just ignore the pop-ups etc.
If they really want to make sure you see this stuff, they'd have to control your browser, such as through active-X plugins etc. The plugin might use an encryption scheme to ensure to the advertizer that it is really running, of you fail to authenticate (i.e. fake the plugin) then you won't see the page.
If they are serious about this, I envision a WEB where more and more content will only be accessible via Internet Explorer on Windows.
I understand that quality information can't be completely free. I'd rather have pay-for-use sites instead.
> Stop applying print and television metaphors to the web!
Sorry, but the web is now CB radio. Breaker, breaker!
You may as well tell people to stop watching football, or ask Americans to stop voting Republican.
I have one site that is ad supported. I generate about $3000.00 per year currently, and hope for that to grow. I have another site that I hope to generate revenue from in the future.
Many of us receive "free" tech rags that are fully supported by advertisers. We give them a small bit of information (what we are authorized to buy, how much, how much money our company genrates), and we get a magazine this provides us with useful information at no "real" cost to us. It cost millions of dollars to put these rags together, print and distribute them.
We read these magazines. we mostly ignore the advertising. We don't bitch about it. BUT the advertising works -- or companies wouldn't pay for it, right?
So, how do we put ads in our web pages that a) work and b) are non-offensive to the users?
That is the real problem.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
Can't access this banner ad
Cookies not turned on
F**king boneheads selling advertising that only works with cookies .... who thinks up these useless uses of technology, oh I forgot management!
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
Right now I have animation shut off (Also easy in Opera). This means that the banner ads are nowhere near as obnoxious and that much easier to ignore.
Not only do they not realize that we have more control over the web, but do to technology we are gaining more control over Television also (you can almost hear the media cartels blanching).
Right now I will often video tape something, and do work, or play on the computer, just so I can zip through the comercials later, instead of being held captive by them. Alternatively I usually get a few pages read in whatever book I am reading, or I practice my flute, on the comercial breaks instead of watching them.
If I get a Tivo (which I have been concidering more and more each day), then I will only need to set it to pause for lets say ten minutes, and then watch it in a 'tape delayed' fasion where I can fast forward through the advertisements.
Right now TV advertisements have been getting more anoying and stupider with each passing year. The exceptions are usually sharp and funny, or at least considerable. How many people thought the Amazon.Com Acapella ad was cute the first time, but thats it? Now, how many would tune in the Snickers 'voting booth' ad that was a dead-on satire of both candidates and kept me laughing as much as Comedy Central's "InDecission 2000" election coverage?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
The Guide's definition of the advertising execs at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:
A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
The Guide's definition of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation advertising division---as quoted in a copy of the Guide from the future----:
A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.
"You're a jerk Dent. A complete knee-biter."
The argument could be made that this kind of advertising is an unauthorized use of your computing resources. Maybe supporting somebody like the EFF to counter-lobby isn't such a bad idea.
Here's my revolutionary advertising proposal: Word of Mouth (WoM). It works as follows:
First inject n clones of your favourite salesman into the populace. They tell people in bank lines, movie theaters, public laundromats, etc. about how good their product is and how it has changed their lives. Nothing is more convincing than an earnest approval of a fellow citizen. (This process is called "recruitment"). Afterwards, the recruited people spread the word with some exponential decay. (This process is called "spread"). Eventually a sufficiently large section of the population knows about your product, and others are forced to start using it to remain hip. (This process is called "pressure"). In the final stages, remove all creativity from the development process, fire all the salesmen, increase production a thousandfold and rake it in. (This process is called "preserving the status-quo").
Now please excuse me, I have to go make some money.
We're there already. But its not even a few lines of a song that people are singing.
Its... "Wazzzzzzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuuup?"
Baz
I have cable, and I don't want to deal with 2 MB ads constantly. Living out in the middle of nowhere, we still get charged based on usage. Any time I'm forced to download something I didn't ask for (banner ads, pop-up windows, flashy animated gifs...), someone is charging me for the privilege of showing me ads. If these ads become larger and more invasive, you can bet the farm that it'll piss me off. I have zero interest in paying for someone else to show me their products.
These people believed that, due to the few available options, they would gain some marketshare. Well.. The truth is that people seem to dislike ads. and this whole concept turned out to be a failure. Remember; here we are only talking 2 parties; one big (expensive) monopoly and one (cheap) firm who finances a lot with ads.
The Internet is a totally different story. When I go to Google and search for something chances are that I get a "zillion" results (esp. with the more popular items which will function as a magnet for ads). In other words; much more competition. If one site would start this webspam and another won't then I think I know the outcome. So its either all or nothing, and I truly do not see that happening. Unless they completely band together but... on the Internet? I don't think so Tim ;-)
I would gladly pay 2 cents to read the article immediately via an efficient micropayment system. However, I will not waste 2 to 5 minutes signing up to read the article for free. My time is more valuable than that.
*EVERYTIME* I got the popup I wrote NYT and said don't do this. If even 5% of the people that read the NYT on the Web did this, they'll either make their paper's email unusable or they'll quit doing it.
I haven't seen that advertisement in about a month, so perhaps they got the lesson. We'll soon see.
--Multics
If this web advertising gets any worse, I can only predict a stronger resistance to it. We, as humans, always tend to resist what we do not like, and we fight it as best we can. To some degree, I believe, this constant presence of some form of advertisement could be an infringement of some sort (in fact, I'm sure it already is, but we just haven't found the right means of combatting it yet). What was it that Thomas Jefferson said, that we "are endowed with certain unalienable Rights," and that among these are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? How the hell do I pursue my happiness if I'm going nuts with these damn ads every fourteen seconds?
The internet, if used properly, has tremendous potential to serve the world well and provide quality information and whatnot. But what are the chances that any government would not be willing to sell out to the highest bidder?
And really easy to stop visiting web sites that use obnoxious techniques for displaying ads. Once visitation metrics start plummeting, the ads causing this change in behavior will disappear.
Why is the web different from radio or TV in this respect? Because audience behavior is so easily quantified.
adds a whole new meaning to the phrase ad nausium...
[...] said Peter Petrusky, the director of new media at PricewaterhouseCoopers. But with some of these new ad formats, he said, "There's a level of intrusiveness that advertisers and publishers are going to have to manage."
Spoken like a true marketing type. How about the level of intrusiveness as it relates to the marketees? Marketing as it exists today is like feeding a city's population by dropping 1,000,000 lbs. of food all over their houses. The smart marketers of the future that actually want to make money will find a way to help them to the grocery store.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
This isn't likely since advertisement is what pays for the company to put out content. If everyone used ad blocking techniques then many of the sites would have to go to a pay service or go out of business.
If the company uses the site to actually sell something, then you aren't liekly to run across advertisements to begin with. It's only sites that provide free services, such as web search, news, weather, and discussion forums, that rely on advertisement revenue to pay the bills. If you don't view their ads, they aren't paying their bills, so they won't miss you.
Welcome to the free market economy.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Browsers should come with a feature that allows users to turn off pop-ups, but keep java enabled.
I really don't mind banner ads, but I would have to agree that pop-ups are just a little more than annoying.
The situation with advertisement gets really comical. From one side, advertisement is meant to sell you something, i.e., to convince you that advertised product is better than alternative. Or it meant to make you consider buying this product, i.e., to convince you it's something good.
On the other hand, most people are really annoyed with current advertisement, and are actively seeking means to get rid of tehm, either with mental measures (such as ignoring all content that looks like banner or advertisement) or passive filtering (switching channel on TV, scrolling down web page, turning off the radio, turning the page of the newspaper) or active filtering (TiVo, junkbuster proxies, Mozilla image loading settings, spam filters). So, advertisement agencies become engaged in war with the same people they have to please and make them love the advertized material. What do you think average user will think when new wave of the advertisement appears and he'll be unable to block them? "Oh, they do it so good that I must buy it?". Hell no. The reaction will be "I need better protection measures, those spammers got me again".
So, the question is - why businessmen continue to pay advertisers to wage war on consumers? Shouldn't they instead vote with their money for more consumer-friendly (and less annoying) ways of advertising? I don't believe that it's impossible to find - if people are able to make 1Ghz processors and Mars landers, why aren't they able to think out advertizement that won't be hated by the consumers? The only thing needed for that is active wallet-voting from the side of the advertisers.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Has anyone else noticed the _huge_ ad placed on the right to the article (on nytimes.com)? Not only is this extra huge and in flashy colors, but the text also appears word for word, making it highly annoying.
A little ironic that this is placed next to such an article IMO.
Moz.
see a Text Widget
I noticed that the more someone uses the Internet, the less attention are paid to ads.
:)
I just think that ads are like those commercials on the small tv channels, those who try to sell you any kind of crap and just makes you laugh.. the people who watch them (and buy their product) are not the smartest..
with all the respect, I think the 'average internet user' IS just like the 'average human' - basically stupid. The proof is that the product which becomes a standard is almost never the one who is better - it's the one who is better advertised. VCR docet (=teaches)...
Among all the people that come online, a great part of it is *stupid*. Let them follow their ads, there'll be always a clever way to stop banners. And the money they get from those banners will help 'non-stupid' services to be up.
now flame me
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I'm a bit confused. I thought "micropayments" in
the historical sense (last year) meant that if a company
wanted to you read a spam email or look at an ad
of theirs then they'd pay you.
Somehow in the past year this seems to have reversed.
How did the idea of company's paying a person to look through their drivel disappear?
If these company's wanted to pay me a nickel for
each ad they wanted me to see, I'd look at them.
But as has been mentioned by other comments,
users have been deluged with these cheesy things
and nobody really cares anymore except newbies and aol users.
Where's the beef?
Yes, we have more control, but the general public doesn't. The average slashdot reader is well aware of the various filtering proxy options, even if we choose not to use them. All this is likely to do is tip the balance between using a proxy and not using one. For the general public, however, the issue isn't so clearcut. The only option they have is to not go to sites with annoying ad content. That may in itself be enough to prevent it becoming widespread, but I suspect not. Never underestimate the stupidity of the masses. After a while, the majority of the content will be presented with annoy-ware ads, so they'll accept it as the norm.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Besides, they do this at sports events and stuff -- still pictures stuck on the boards of the hockey rink or whatever -- and it seems to work well enough to pay top dollar for...
And with creative use of frames [shudder] you could periodically load a new static picture -- once a minute, say. They're small enough that it wouldn't suck nearly as much bandwidth as animated banners (to say nothing of in-your-face javascript).
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Advertising is very tricky stuff, and it's easy to let the technicals get in the way of the underlying principles. The purpose of advertising is to help a business (or other interest) reach their intended market with information on why their goods or services will be of value to members of that market. For this to be effective, you have to:
Targeting an ad can be very difficult, and sometimes the placement of the ad can not only destroy the positive value of the ad -- it can make it negative. Examples that come to mind of unwise placements include beer commercials in the middle of a Mormon Christmas Special (not to say that non-Mormons wouldn't be watching it, but, still, you're hitting a market that's largely uninterested in your product -- a football game would be better), or ads for feminine hygiene products during the Super Bowl (which has happened).
Different media have a different nature when used for advertising. Print media have the options of display ads distributed through the content of the magazine or newspaper, or classified ads that are less expensive, more dense, and easier to search if you're seeking a specific kind of product or service, all of which are easily ignored by a determined reader, yet which can be very effective at putting the information you need in the hands of your potential market. Radio and TV ads replace the content of the station which are broadcasting them, providing a higher chance of attention to a given ad than in print, but facing hard limits on how much advertising can be done on a specific station.
The web is a different kind of place. It is inherently non-linear and unorganized (although it can be linearized in places, and is also organizable to some degree). Advertising models based in print have proven more applicable than radio/tv ads, because the web remains inherently a text/document based medium (albeit hypertext). Trying to ignore that nature isn't likely to prove all that effective -- in part, because of the technical work arounds which would inevitably pop up, and which are already being discussed around here.
I think it'd be helpful if web advertisers reviewed exactly what they're trying to accomplish in their advertising, and get more realistic about what is likely to happen. Putting an ad on a popular site isn't necessarily going to result in a boatload of hits from people in your potential market. And hits don't always turn into sales by any kind of linear relationship (where more hits means necessarily more sales). Ultimately, you have to view each advertisement as an opportunity, and you'll have to have a way to determine whether the cost of that opportunity is justified by its yeild or not. Very basic stuff, but it seems to be missing in the "put up an ad and get rich" expectations people are having.
The web is not inherently about business or business opportunities. It's about sharing information, some of which will be about business and products and services, and it's based in the idea of freedom for the web user. When people find that they can't get what they want on the web without having to go through advertising they don't wish to see, they will stop coming, and the value of the web will diminish. This is a goose laying golden eggs, friends -- let's please not kill it.
thats why i love iCab, one can turn JS fun like that off, and selectively enable it on a site for site basis on sites u need the popup on
Hmm...
If a url redirected to an ad, and then to the real content? If this became widespread, I would whip up a java servlet that would parse the ad page and get the real page, returning it to me. Yeah, there's probably much neater/faster ways to do it, but Apache and JServ are free, and I know how to use them.
Of course, by the time I'd gotten around to doing this, someone else will have already done it in a much neater and faster fashion, so I'll just use that. This would be a white-hat hack. How long do you think it would take a benevolent hacker to work something like that out?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
> How are 'normal' users going to feel when they wonder why their
> computer is so sluggish while browsing, so they close the browser, only to discover 40 windows frantically flashing advertising
> and "special offers" at them? How many people will be chased away by these policies?
All the right people will be chased away: the ones the bonehead ads are aimed at.
Many of us technologists will filter them.
The rest will have to suffer until this medium, too, fails to thrive.
Actually, I don't think everything should be free. I pay for HBO. I subscribe to quite a few magazines, and even Consumer Reports web site (which only charges you if you access it). Charge me 10 cents, or a quarter every time I read an article, or better yet, charge me that for every day I access it, which is a fairer standard.
It's a measure of intrusiveness. Here I am, doing something, and it's interrupted by a pop-up. For example, SciFi channel tries to make their commercial endorsements part of the content, and even will go looong stretches without advertising. CNN (not the web site) throws out advertising when something interesting happens. They realize that sometimes the revenue generation methods must sometimes take a back seat.
It's the commercial-channel metaphors (ABC, NBC, CBS) that provide the most advertising, the most intrusive advertising, and the least content. Channels like Comedey, Cartoon, HBO, SciFi, all are somehow making money, but I mind their commercials less, the commercial placement less, and enjoy the experience more.
As for adverts in print, I never look at the ones in newspapers. Some of the ones in magazines, I look at. As for blow cards and tear-outs, I go through a magazine, remove them all, then begin reading. Blow-cards = pop-ups = intrusive.
I quite realize these companies need to make a profit. But selling advertising space isn't the be-all end-all method of making money. I know that, with print, my subscription really just pays for creation and delivery, but that advertising pays for writer/editor salaries.
The funny thing about that commercial is that he was enjoying he snickers so much, he voted for Bucchanan.
-no broken link
weather.com had a really intrusive ad for pepcid ac a couple of days ago that included a little javascript chef guy who walks into the browser from the left edge, over the zipcode box and into the ad area. Clicking on him brings up a popup window.
I think it's going to get annoying, but less annoying than not having weather.com.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
--
www.scorbett.ca
I was thinking yesterday, while watching TV, "why is it that TV commercials are more effective at getting me to buy things than Web adverts." The fact of the matter is that I will see a commercial and will often decide I will buy the product/go to the restaurant/etc/
The miggest thing I could see is that I enjoy TV commercials. Many of them are at the least cute, if not downright funny. I've even paid to see commercials, by going to the World's Greatest Commercials showings at the movie theater.
Even if they aren't funny, then they are pleasurable to watch. Most restaurant commercials have my eyes glued to their great looking food. Gap commercials have fun exciting people doing fun and exciting things. In short, TV commercials fit into their medium because TV is meant to entertain and TV commercials entertain.
Contrast this to Web ads. I find it rare that I even notice an ad on a web page. Market researchs have also found this for average web surfers. But there isn't enough bandwidth to make an ad as entertaining as a TV ad. So, a very large number of ads have tried to do the "flashy catch-you eye" thing which isn't entertaining, it's annoying. When you do look, you feel gypped and you move on, forgetting the whole thing a few seconds later.
And that is the best case on a website that is meant to be entertaining. Remember that I said TV ads fit their medium. The web allows for more than entertainment. You can have informational resources as well (I don't feel that TV allows this, because TV can never cover the right amount of information. What you get is infotainment or entertainment news). A web ad also cannot project enough information about a product within the limitations of the ad.
What I envision more and more is a rise of full articles that are actually ads, like those in magazines. Ads will try to blend in more with content, because content is what we look for on the web. But the ads can be out of place. You can't have a paragraph talking about an Isuzu Trooper in the middle of the Onion. Editors won't want theri reader to get the gypped feeling because they may stop going to the website all together.
All and all, I think the most important thing to consider is that the Web is a new medium, and as such we are still learning how to advertise effectivly. I highly doubt popups are it. They will just annoy more people, and you don't want to annoy your ad viewers, you want them to want to see your ad.
-no broken link
Okay, I turned Javascript off... Now I can't access my bank (Anouther rant, I used to turn javascript off after their check and everything worked, not nothing works because they changed things for no good reason)
Come to think of it, the only time I'm not using lynx is when the site requires java, javascript, or images. I've accually seen one site that required javascript and could not possibably achive the intended result with out it. (Some sort of reaction time test done by a psycologist). Otherwise images are the only useful thing about netscape.
That might be an interesting idea to have sites such as slashdot charge say $5.00 for a year's subscription in exchange for no ads. It should be easy to setup. Just add in a field on everyones account "ads-enabled:0" who subscribed. Then it would pull up the page w/o ads. Of course, for $5.00 I would expect more than just "no ads" but I'm not sure yet what more I would want. Maybe an email alias at slashdot.org or something.
What do you guys think?
witty sig goes here
Internet junkies make great haste in ranting about banner ads, popups, etc. but as usual, noone can provide an alternative. What will we all do when Google goes down because they cannot stay alive without pop-up ads? How many people here would pay for search engine access? Or Slashdot?
Generally, the most vehement opponents of banner ads also won't pay for subscription services either. Much of the internet can remain free, but the NYT won't run their site if they cannot get either subscriptions, revenue, or ads. I think that the pay-per-page approach is viable. I would pay 1 peso to see that article on NYT. I can subscribe with some service who bills me monthly, or maybe via my ISP, so that NYT doesn't have to know my info (or wastefully bill me every month for 5cents).
http://404.cjb.net/ is the worst. Not only does it have TWO popup ads, but it asks you if it wants to be your start page.
Quite possibly the most annoying 404 banner ad I've ever seen. All it needs is a Java applet and some MIDI music playing.
As a plugin writer, I rely on the onload and onunload events for serialization of my code (in some instances), so "whacking" these events may not be a good idea. It would probably be better to have an option where you could disable events selectively.
No group in the history of mankind, (NOT the Wrestler,) has been as annoying, ineffective and as perversely pernicious as advertisers.
Their most effective techniques come from "The Triumph of Will" and other Nazi propaganda films by Lenni Rifenstahl. Those didn't sell anything, they grabbed you by your emotions and wrung your brain out until you'd swallow anything, including justification for euthenasia and genocide.
We REALLY have to improve search engines until their effectiveness can be demonstrated to be better than the noisy dross people are trying to full up our screens with. If the search engines are so desperate for revenue, and they are, why don't they try micro-payment adn set up an indexing service which would review pages and categorize them. I'd pay a nickel a search for the information I want and NOT what somebody wants to shove into my eyeballs.
The Web is a terrible place to advertise but until you can show something more effective, you're going to have these morons selling inappropriate use of the 'net and the web to other morons who are just reiterating their desperate efforts to perperuate themselves. (And annoying the crap out us all. in the process)
I stopped watching TV two years ago because I just couldn't be bothered to sit through 18 minutes of ads to be subjected to 42 minutes of product placement masquarading as content every hour.
I don't visit sites that carry advertising beyond my tolerance level. I no longer go to AltaVista, AskJeeves and several other sites because they're just junk, noise and dross.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Then I guess they've lost my business. I won't even go to the site, period. What an innovative, creative business strategy: alienate potential customers by making it hard for them to see your content unless they suck up to your "requirements".
I've been ignoring sites that depend on Javascript. I hardly (if ever) turn on JavaScript: I find that it adds no value whatsoever to the content on the page I'm viewing, just useless bells and whistles. So far, I've yet to see a site that absolutely cannot deliver their content without JavaScript -- most of the time it's useless, annoying, resource-consuming bells and whistles that I'm not interested in. Where's the beef?? I don't care for these useless frills; I want the real content. If you're so braindead as to force your visitors to turn on Javascript when you don't need to use it, then sorry, I will never, ever return to your site again. Your competitors will get my business.
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
>>advertising is fundamental to the way that the internet has grown during the previous few years
Yeah, that's why the Net sucks so hard now. I probably haven't just surfed for the adventure of it in over a year. I have a couple dozen sites bookmarked because they contain something useful or entertaining in a bearable format. I look at about 6 of them on a daily basis. The rest is just too painful to endure.
Banner ads are mostly OK, but I couldn't count the sites that I've backed off of because the animation in the banner sucked all of the BW so that I never got the rest of the page. When advertisers learn to provide useful information about their product in a non-irritating way they will start to see a lot more return.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I think companies wanting to redirect traffic to their site should not be spending all their time and dollars on advertising (although some wouldn't hurt) They should be expending more of thier effort making thier sites either a good source of information on their product and others, or a very site alltogether.
Give the viewer something for free, and they may just want to spend some of those dollars on somthing else
This trend doesn't surprise me -- porn sites have been doing obnoxious things with ads for years. I've been told that porn drives all new media technology, and this seems as good a proof of that as anything.
Content driven web sites need to learn the same lesson that remote controls taught TV. If you want to keep a viewer from changing channels make the ads entertaining. Or at least interesting. Because most people still access the net with modems providing add with Flash or Shockwave isn't a real solution yet, but as DSL/Cable gains in market share that will change. Ads on the internet may become as entertaining or as informative as the content they support.
The story mentions a 12% clickthru rate on the TacoBell interstitial that ran for a while last year on some site or another. The story also mentions that Unicast requires a "close" button on every interstitial. Now imagine if you could "close" commercials and move right on to the remainder of your programming. Would you watch any commercials?
I daresay that their 12% clickthru rate will drop to 0.12% with the combination of proxies and user intervention. Web users are not TV-watching couch potatoes, as they become experienced, they become more interactive, not less. And the more advertising interferes with their browsing, the more they will "interact" by finding a way to filter the annoyance.
Heck, the remote control proved that was even true with couch potatoes. Advertizers had to force TV stations to synchronise their commercial breaks in order to guarantee revenue for the slots. And now there's Tivo...
As information technology improves, there's going to come a point where the user has enough control to avoid the advertising he or she doesn't want to see. The only advertising a user will see is that which he or she has subscribed to. Therefore, advertisers would be smart if they started now figuring out how to make advertising that we want to see, instead of forcing interruptions upon us. You'll know we're there when an advertiser sues for the right to force their message upon some audience or another...
I can see the fnords!
Great, now we'll have non-Porn websites popping up windows. So the next time I go to Amazon.Com I might see a pop-up window with the NY Times best seller list. I think I would rather have the Hot Young Teens pop-up windows.
A question for those screaming on about ad blocking. How exactly do you think websites pay their bills? Do you think the money for hosting and bandwidth drops magically from the sky? Internet ad spending has allowed content providers provide content for free, and all we ask in return is that you look at/click on the occasional banner. I'm lucky that my site is run in my spare time, others have salaries and rent to pay. As more and more of the web community decide that they aren't going to respond to traditional advertising (banners) of course content providers and site owners are going to have to look for alternative delivery methods. Pop-up banners suck, but when you're getting .15% clickthrough on static banners they look awfully tempting. The more people who run ad blocking software, the lower that % ctr drops, the less income there is to pay bills, the less content is supplied for free - it's not a zero sum game.
Ugh... yeah... if anyone actually saw Demolition Man, the future was portrayed somewhat similarly. They'd listen to "classic" commercial jingles on the radio.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The nice thing about having a slow modem connection, is that you can close pop-ups before they actually display anything.
You can almost always deduce from the content on the main page whether or not the pop-up is useful. If the site is one you visit regularly, you get to know the "personality" of the site. For example, Intellicast pop-ups are never useful. When one appears, I dismiss it before it has any chance to display content.
That's not to say that all pop-up windows are bad. The online finance people seem to have the most useful pop-ups, but they are voluntary ones. Nasdaq's customizable ticker is a good example.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A better idea: if the auto-forward URL is the same as the URL you were just at (i.e. the browser knows when you hit the Back button), the auto-forward is ignored.
All of your other ideas are excellent. Hopefully, they'll be added to Mozilla.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
...and if I can add a bit to this rant:
Stop assuming that only Netscape and IE can handle 128-bit encryption (ahem, ticketmaster, ahem, hmm...). If you want to force high bit-level encryption, go ahead, it's possible, I won't complain. But do not force me to pick a particular browser because you're unenlightened enough to be aware that there are other options.
...andrew
Junkbuster anyone?
Hats off to ./ for biting the banner ad hand that feeds them.
100% Ad Free Zone
Dude, you are missing the point. There are no audio ads that I have run across (except for Real Audio)
;-)
If there were some on Slashdot, would you still come here?
(However, I might not come here anymore if there were audio ads for the SlashDot Cruiser
EverCode
A TV ad isn't likely to crash your television.
Perhaps this type of advertising would work on tv network web sites... 'course I don't visit those.
They're kinda boring with akamai blockfiled.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
it can filter images by dimension, URL, and also u can turn off javascript functions like popups (but enable them for sites where u want it)
i ain't seen a popup ad for months!
> The problem with turning off Javascript is that some sites use
> Javascript legitimately.
Really? I have yet to meet one. The closest I've seen is a conference
registration that used it to come up wiht a subtotal. However, this could
have been done on the server as well.
With that half an exception, I have yet to see a use of javascript that
didn't boil down to advertising, laziness, incompetence, or showing off.
Plain and simply, if your site can't deliver its content (graphical
and sound content excepted, of course) under lynx, your site is wrong,
not the user's browser's capabilities.
Oh, and I have seen a single use of java that wasn't abusive, too--
it's an animation as part of a statistics text that repeatedly
draws a sample, showing hte results.
hawk
Why don't the advertisers use a "coupon" model for
their ads (or at least use one more often)?
Just like the coupons that come in your local
paper, when a user clicks on an internet ad
for a product, that user could submit a small
amount of information (you're presumably
already going to buy the product, and coupons
+ what you buy + how you buy at the
supermarket already gives out more info than
you know - even if it is an anonymously
generated profile of you) and receive some
amount off of a purchase price or a service
charge or whatever. Advertisers could better
market to the people who replied to the
"coupons", users would get savings on things
they actually want, and sites who host the
ads/coupons would get revenues.
Where's the beef?
Are there any options in current web browsers that can disable things like "pop-ups" ? That shouldn't even be allowed. It's just not nice on your system. Maybe a Yes/No question? Now that we have some good open source browsers, we could always just hack it in if the developers never get around to it.
[X] - Always ask before opening a popup
"Question: This page is trying to open a new browser window, is this ok? [Yes,No,Always,Never]"
Perhaps the "Always" and "Never" options would be on a per-domain basis.
Just a thought.
-Justin
Yay! New technology! The constant flow of progress. For example, these new innovations help solve the problems of "Not enough annoying 'in your face' web content", "Signal/Noise ratio of web is too high", and "Surfing via modem is too blindingly fast".
[/sarcasm]
I suppose it's a lost cause, but I REALLY wish that advertisers would just give it up, and leave us in peace. Unfortunatly, what I see as a "advertisment-free sanctuary", they see as "an unexplored market demographic". And sadly, since they're the ones with the money, their vision wins out. Hmph. I think that when I get rich, and have made my millions, I'll pick couple hundred worthy websites, and offer to finance them so that they can dispense with the banner adds forevermore.
Yep. I'm with you. In fact, even on the campus network here at school and with a fast machine, I'm fast enough to kill popups before they even render the background color. I'd also agree about the resizing thing. Damn annoying. Worse even than sites that insist on rendering their page as a 640-pixel-wide column down the middle of the browser. Unfortunately, other than routing around such bull, I don't have a good solution...
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Have you ever found one of those sites that had content worth seeing, or even worth turning javascript on for?
hawk, who just managed to end a sentence with two prepositions
Possibly true. But the Internet grew up just fine w/o much commercial support. There are sites out there that exist w/o it, and would continue to exist w/o any prospect of commercial support. Despite the success it has brought and can bring many businesses, money is not the only motivation for putting stuff on the web.
The point is lost on some people, but maybe that's OK. It seems likely that the non-commercial portion of the web will remain that way no matter what the current ad-fad is. Then the ad monstrosities can be avoided and people can start looking at real information and Twinkie experiments -- what the web is REALLY about!
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
With the exception of the first one, all your other wishes can already be fullfilled:
Netscrape: Point to menu "Edit", then choose "Preferences". Go to "Advanced" and uncheck "Enable JavaScript".
I have yet to find a website which really needs JavaCrap scripts for the purpose of navigation.
So if you remember the ads, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Write the advertiser. Tell them you aren't getting their product because of these ads.
If I didn't post already, I'd mod you up :)
:) sick of these spoiled brats on here.
Preach on brutha
--
>
> I want at least
> A way to disable animations,
> A way to disable resizing, and
> A way to disable pop-up windows
> A way to disable any script when I exit the page
Based on how long it took Mozilla to add enough chrome to sink the Bismarck, and still managed not to include these, probably at least another three years, if ever. :-(
All I want from a browser is something that renders as fast as Netscape 3.01 did, and which allows has the four features the previous poster cited. Nuke "My Netscape", gimme "Toggle Javashit on/off". And gimme back the rendering engine from 3.01, 'cuz it's 10 times faster than the one from 4.x.
I plan on paying close attention to each of these ads. So I can avoid their sites and products. If I feel cranky I will even e-mail them and let them know my intentions. I'll even include those vital statistics: 25-35, male, and $50-100 a year, that make them shiver with anticipation of my spare dollars. Bastards.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Ah, well here in the UK we have the BBC where there are no adverts :-). Yes, one has to buy a TV license, but that's only for TV. If, like me, one doesn't own a TV then one can listen to high quality advert free interlectual radio (I'm talking about Radio4 here) all day and its completely free.
Obviously, I do realise that eventually someone will either find some way of charging me or add adverts, but after about 20 years of free listening they haven't found a way yet :-).
BTW, most, if not all, of Radio4 is now streamed.
The web is a matter of convenience. I visit your site and its slow or it bombards me with ads, I don't go there again. You lose.
Don't be bastards or you force me to be one as well. And I'm really good at it. I promise.
People may not click on banner ads, but they still perceive them, and they still get the advertiser's mesage. Viewers don't "click through" on television ads, subway posters, or billboards, and those haven't been deemed as worthless. Just a thought.
Look at half the stuff on CNN - instead of a link to an image, they require you to have javascript enabled so they can open a pop up window - that way you don't leave their site.
Sure, not just CNN, but lots of sites do this. I normally browse with javascript turned off. Sites that don't let me access content without javascript stop getting hits from me - I can find news, and pretty much any content I want, from a site that doesn't dictate to me what I have to do.
That includes javascript, cookies, etc. Slashdot is a great example of the right way to do it - cookies make it easier, but you don't NEED them enabled to access content.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I don't want my browsing interrupted every three minutes for a one-minute advertisement, nor do I want only 21 minutes of content for every 30 minutes of air-time.
Content sites which you browse have bills to pay. They need to collect revenue. That comes from one of two sources - Advertisements and subscriptions (long term picture here; Venture capital will only get you so far). You have told us about your feelings on advertisement, and I can assume that you feel that the internet should be free.
The market will decide the fate of these technologies. You can only annoy the customer so much before they go to a less "noisy" site. Browsers will continue to evolve ways to minimize the effect of these annoying tactics. Browser developers are also internet users and will scratch an itch if they feel it is worth it. And from the consumer side, people should support the friendly sites and their sponsors and also let them know why you are using their site/service/product. This will encourage the friendlier tactics.
The internet is not a "new" medium, but rather a simple combination of existing media. People love to be called pioneers, but the internet is just publishing/video/communications all wrapped up into one package.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Dogs is already as passe as the Budwiser frogs. (When I gave up on TV. Its great. Now I READ.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Sorry if I've rambled endlessly; the mention of preventing pop-ups reminded of the list I have here...
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suwain_2
That's what TiVos are for (among many other things).
Most advertising isn't that hard to circumvent with a little know-how and a little effort. The thing is, most people don't know how or don't want to expend the effort, so they end up subsidizing the minority who do. I agree with you that more companies should let people circumvent ads by actually charging for what they provide, but until that day comes I'm happy getting things for free thanks to advertising that other people see. It seems to me that the 3 "upcoming" methods of advertising mentioned in this article would be fairly easy to circumvent (or at least minimize the annoyance of) with a little Mozilla hacking.
What really ticks me off is when companies show me ads after I've already paid for their service. I absolutely hate going to the movies and having to sit through an ad for a car before the movie that I have already paid for. Either make it completely free or raise your ticket prices so that you don't have to show ads - this form of double billing is so distasteful.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
With Yahoo's personal address feature, not only do you pay for the service, but you are required to advertise for them:
If I were to host my snowfox.net domain with Yahoo, every outbound message I send would still have those fucking advertisement footers attached that you get with the free service. They want you to pay to advertise for them . You cannot turn these off.
Frankly, if you can't tell, this pisses me off.
Mozilla can actually block images from certain sites from loading, if the user configures it to. (Left click on the ad, and tell the browser to ignore images from that site). I wonder if using the pr0n industry tricks is the response to such a great feature in a browser.
IE lets you select what privileges each site gets. That is also a good approach. If a site relies on popups for ads, you can turn off javascripting for that site.
Anyhow, if I indulge in the skin side, I turn of Javascript. Mebbe I'll just do that alltogether.
Stop the brainwash
How long will it take until Mozilla and other open-source browsers have automatic filtering built in?
In the official source?
Mozilla development is paid for by Netscape+AOL+Time/Warner
Think about it.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
How hard is that? (well, for someone who already knows their way around the Mozilla code)
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
My idea would be to have the from page deleted from the history so that going back goes back to the last page you looked at, and going forward again skips the auto-forward page.
If the auto-forward page is reached from a bookmark perhaps the program should offer to fix your bookmark?
Unrelated, but I have always wanted buttons on the page that say "home" or "back" to work in the history, perhaps by having the browser search up the history for a match to any url it jumps to, and act as though the user selected that item off the history.
You'll find that the opinion on /. is that micropayments will work better than ads. I'm sure if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that Uncle Bob with his iMac wouldn't know how to fill out the form to even make a micropayment. Advertising for revenue does not require user interaction.. user interaction is something that many people who use the web have not quite mastered yet.
Plus the whole mentality of alot of people is that they shouldn't pay for anything (warez, mp3s, divx's) so I'm highly doubtful you'd find micropayments useful on a site with an audience that for the most part doesn't give a shit about the site administrators. Slashdotters scream micropayments in the same post as boycott the MPAA and RIAA (while downloading MP3s and DivX movies). I'm doubtful that most of these people will pay for anything. Yes yes, there are different ideologies behind the RIAA/MPAA thing and not paying for websites, but I'm betting that most people "boycotting" these entities are doing so because they can just get it for free.
I'm not boycotting the refridgerator industry if I don't buy a fridge and then go jack one from the local Sears after the store closes.
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Why not add a feature when Javascript is turned off (or in a browser that does not understand Javascript at all) that looks for URL's in the Javascript and assummes that a click on that thing is a jump to that URL? This should not be hard and would make the WWW usable without Javascript.
I wrote the following on this. Basically said that the porn industry again leads the way.. You pay $30 or so a year (or even a month) for a block of web sites that subscribe to a given system. You could have themed setups, such as news organizations, geeky things (like slash, fresh meat, etc), general entetainment, etc. These organizations would compete for famed web sites, so web sites with a lot of fan fare would get to charge a lot of money for the access control providers, or cable blocks, whatever you want to call them. This undermines advertisements, but so does HBO nobody seems to fight them. A web site could still even have adds, but they just couldn't be obtrusive or real-estate stealing (as part of the agreement). Since this is something that would make web masters more happy than anyone else, I see it really only working as a consortium of web sites with tiered subscriptions. I'd gladly pay for garunteed uninterrupted slashdot viewing.. It already cuts deeply into my work time as it is.. If I had to spend an additional half hour on advertisements, there would be hell to pay (or worst case, the loss of my viewer ship). I suggested in my other article that advertisers should set up virtual malls with catchy themes such as the home shopping network (which actually seems more appropriate here). Things like price-watch work really well. Ironically, this could also be part of such a subscription service.. If people pay to use a shopping service, they'll be more likely to use it. There would be a consolidation of web sites, since those with high ratings would have more money, much like the TV industry. -Michael
-Michael
1) Java/Javascript allow this to happen, so turn it off
2) use junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com) to block ads from being downloaded
3) Turn off image loading.
Right-click blocking: Occasionally a banner ad will really start to tick you off, especially if it keeps coming from the same domain or URL. I'd like to be able to right click on it and choose "Block this URL", or "Block this (sub)domain" Or maybe just "Don't load any image that is placed right here."
Mozilla already allows you to block sites from loading images, in almost exactly this fashion. Right-click on the banner that you dislike, and choose 'Block image from loading' from the menu. This blocks all images from that site - fine for ads.doubleclick.net, etc. but it doesn't allow you to have a part-path yet - that may come. You can review which sites are currently blocked in the Image manager.
Firewall-like controls:I'd like to be able to tell Netscape/Mozilla to "block traffic from doubleclick.net", or whatever. I can do this if I mess with the firewall, but I'd rather leave it alone.
You can't block all traffic with Mozilla, but you can block the cookies from a site too. Enter the cookie manager and select the cookie you wish to remove. Check the 'Do not allow cookies from this site again' box and click 'Remove'. Of course this doesn't solve flash plugins or Javascript, but I'm fairly certain that as the need for these features grows, we'll see it added to the Mozilla codebase. At least with an open source project, adding this sort of functionality is possible.
I'm not about to state that Mozilla is the epitome of stability, but the number of crashes I have with build 2000121404 is none. But it's only been four days so far.
I also advocate running with Javascript off if you are visiting sites you suspect of useless popups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Consumers and surfers do not want to be bothered with ads, PERIOD! Perhaps what they should do is start looking at other means of advertising.
I hate pop-ups. I don't even look at what they are. If you can't have the navigation as part of the window, why bother?
And while I'm on a rant, don't check what resolution I'm running at, then resize my browser. Maybe I don't want to run my browser maximized.
Stop applying print and television metaphors to the web! It is a new medium. Break some ground! Do something interesting! Think out of your tiny little boxes! I don't want my browsing interrupted every three minutes for a one-minute advertisement, nor do I want only 21 minutes of content for every 30 minutes of air-time.
Mosaic, Netscape 3 and earlier, etc., have a window by window option for image loading, rather than having it buried in slow-loading preference windows that affect all windows. Also, you can use alt-I to cause them to load.
hawk
I used to use mozilla as my primary browser but now i don't. I find that i'm more productive using a console browser that lets me use the mouse. i use w3m in a krxvt. however, i usually only look at places like fm, /., and usually text pages. but if i ever want to open an
image, i can just click on it and press I. I still use mozilla some,
but it's only for special cases ;)
Since Siemens was behind WebWasher, I assume they had their lawyers check out those issues.
--
Username: slashdot2000
Password: slashdot2000
Enjoy!
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
There are definitely requests for enhancement filed on the first and fourth point; I'm not sure about the second and third. The "disable opening new windows in onunload handlers" rfe is definitely being worked on.
I went to ElLamo.Com and registered, but I still couldn't read the article.
I can think of plenty of web sites that I would kick in a small amount of money to support. Good search engines, Slashdot, X-Entertainment, hell, I would even pay for some decent web-based email access that would let me use my own domain name without spamming me and selling their profile of me to everyone they could.
Instead, everyone wants to turn the internet into the adver-net. Whatever. People who spend lots of time online often do so because they are sick of other forms of advertising-supported media. For the most part, all we get from advertising-supported media is biased journalism, and prime time programming kept as bland and formulaic as possible to prevent conservative protest from scaring advertisers.
I want the internet to be like PBS, without all the silly concerts and endless reruns of "Are You Being Served?." The cool web sites would have a link where I can kick in some money every year to keep them going, like many do already with t-shirts, mugs, ThinkGeek, etc.
The big companies fronting web sites like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN need to stop viewing the web as a source of easy advertising revenue, and instead see it as a vehicle of expression, and we need to help them do it. Keep pushing against the tide of oligarchic monopolists and their attempts at global economic domination by just ignoring them. If enough people ignore them, they might just run out of money and go away.
I like this product, and it's free for personal use, so I'll rant a minute:
One of the best tools for removing web advertising is Webwasher. Unfortunately, it's a Windows-only program, however it can serve as a proxy server, so you can still serve your Linux box.
Webwasher does some nice things which none of the 'nix tools yet do. It can filter out Javascript cued on opening/closing windows, remove pop-ups entirely, and reclaim space which would have been used by banner ads. It can even remove entire frames if it suspects that advertising was their only use. It also periodically updates its own block list if you allow it to.
As a plus, if you have a bizarre Microsoft Proxy Server in your office that isn't configured in a Linux-friendly manner, this is an excellent way of helping yourself out.
I've bought a couple things through slashdot banners.
I can't remember the last time I bought anything through the tube...or even the last time I watched TV.
Oh, it was about 6 weeks ago, and we watched a dvd, not broadcast.
This will do nothing but piss me off and give me a negative impression of the advertisers and site.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
NYTimes Channel Link1 8STEL.html
http://channel.nytimes.com/2000/12/18/technology/
To enable POP3 access, you have to allow Yahoo to drop advertisements in your mailbox. The paragraph of text you read before clicking to turn on the POP3 access explains this to you.
like adult sites currently do, with popup windows if you try to leave one, etc? This could get ugly. And even then, ad proxies won't help all that much - you'll still have to go to, say, doubleclick's site to continue to the rest of the content. I was getting annoyed at Wired et al for putting articles on multiple pages... this doesn't bode well for those who try it first.
That said, the biggest complaint that I have is that this invites dead links by the thousands to a web near you, as the ads get replaced and links to the rest of the content die. While we can't remove banner ads completely, destroying the ability to retrieve content is fundamentally against the spirit and character of the web.
If I want your web site to make noise, I'll lick my finger and rub it on the monitor.
No, I won't turn off my audio, because (you're right) audio feedback is important.
But I will - and have - nuked the .DLL Nutscrape uses for embedded MIDI files on my Windoze box.
Wake me when there's actually better advertising out there. (And no, the Times' Tide pop-ups don't count - they aren't very effective at all, and they're certainly annoying.)
sulli
RTFJ.
I work in the internet advertising industry and the people here are not so stupid.
.edus.
Pop-Up Ads
I don't see your stats on the popup ads, but i can tell you from experience that the return rate on popups is far better than that of banners and email drops combined.
Interstitials
Interstitials may not be the best way to improve a user experience but if there is incentive enough for the user to stick around they will go through with the interstial process. Some ad agencies are smarter than others and know when to say when.
Conclusions
The ad industry is going to continue to roll with the punches just like every other industry does. Some players are not going to be as smart as others but it's certain that when one technology is beaten to death another will come around to replace it. If you don't like to see the ads then stick to the
Remember what the Internet was like before the suits got to it? That's where we're headed again. The greedheads thought the Web was a Big Fat Golden Mountain, but it turned out there isn't much gold there after all. They will eventually go away. So what? There will still be plenty to see and do on the web, but it won't be VC-funded, subscription-funded, or advertising-funded. It will be grass-roots and hobbyist-powered, like the old days.
- Have a picture
You speak for me also.
Moz developers? Anyone getting this?
Finkployd
Their order page uses javascript legitimately. So I have to turn js on just to go there. For the rest of the web I just leave it shut off, I figure if they wanted me to see it they'd put it in html.
-jpowers
-jpowers
I think what a lot of the guys that are proposing these ideas don't realize is that there are easy ways around this stuff (we all know what they are, so I won't bother listing them). They have become so accustomed to the idea "Hey, if it works on TV, it'll work on the web" that they are missing the crucial difference between the two (i.e. we have a LOT more control over the way we browse than what we see on TV). This mindset has to change for web advertising to be successful, because let's face it, most of the time commercials suck. I guess I'll just have to keep waiting to see if anybody in ANY marketing department can come up with a good way to make money from the web.
You rush a Miracle Man, you get rotten miracles - Miracle Max, TPB
Banner ads are much harder to get rid of, at least on any common browser, unless you're running special software like the blocker proxy or have a special hosts file (which isn't an option AFAIK on a Macintosh).
I am the Raxis.
Liberty in your lifetime
Hey, advertisers, wake up!
I may not click on a banner ad but I do notice them.
Click-thru should not be the only measure of success for this form of advertising. It would be as though TV advertisers only considered television ads to be a success if someone watched the commercial, then dropped whatever they were doing, got in their car, went to the store, and bought the product that was advertised. Almost no one who watches TV behaves in this manner. Except possibly the demographic targeted by saturday morning cartoons.
In fact, who really goes out and buys stuff just based on advertising alone? Don't most people shop around, compare prices, do a little research?
Perhaps if banner ads were linked to websites that contained valuable information, instead of some bandwidth-sucking Flash presentation, and some vapid, obviously anti-informative ad copy designed to garner brainless enthusiasm for the product, rather than a rational analysis of the product's benefits and drawbacks, people would start clicking on them.
You're lucky that consumers by and large tolerate banner ads as they are. Popup windows and redirects will only serve to alienate people and cause them to stop visiting sites that advertise in that manner. Once word gets out that the well is poisoned, people stop going there to drink. It's that simple.
One thing's for certain, I will definitely boycott any product that is advertised by highjacking my browser window and paid-for bandwidth!! It is nothing less than the web equivalent of spamming.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That might be their prediction, but I don't see that happening from a content-provider's perspective. I know that on my sites (at least one of my sites gets 2M impressions/month, no small potatoes), I would never subject my users to that. Neither would Slashdot, Wired, Freshmeat, Salon, Macintouch, or any other sites in this vein, I daresay.
The popularity of this format among some sites will not, I don't think, add up to web-wide interupptions. This is to say nothing of what I believe to be an inevitable consumer outcry; I know I'd refuse to sites that did any such thing. MSNBC.com pulled that on me once 2 years ago, and I (no kidding) haven't been back since.
-Waldo
Guess we won't be shocking anymore monkies for $20 now...
:)
If you haven't seen that banner ad, consider yourself lucky
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Check out my blackbox styles
Hehehe... I think you're on the right track about the elimination of certain kinds of advertising, but there are other far more subtler ways to get the message across.
And that's just some examples right off the top of my head, and I'm not even an advertising monkey.
Maybe we can now start controlling the overt stuff, but the much more subtle crap is going to get harder and harder to filter out.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
I also really want a way of assigning a bundle of feature toggles to a single button (e.g. load images or not, allow ads/javascript or not). Opera has some (hard-coded) buttons that are very nice - one to load images when you press it, and another that used to render illegible pages readable by applying default formatting (until they broke this in 4.0...).
Would somebody who knows Mozilla be interested in writing a patch that eliminates the window.onload and window.onclose events and whacking the window.open function? Yeah, it'll break a couple of pages... w00p. Ideally, it'd be a pref. For extra bonus points, only allow window.open when it's in a javascript link that I clicked on, since the rare site does actually use that.
These simple measures would make the web a lot more pleasent to use.
As an unrelated comment... does the web really have the "usability" reserves to pull stunts like this? A normal user might not actually close windows, but allow them to float to the back. How are 'normal' users going to feel when they wonder why their computer is so sluggish while browsing, so they close the browser, only to discover 40 windows frantically flashing advertising and "special offers" at them? How many people will be chased away by these policies?
At least banners were more-or-less unobtrusive... of course, that's their main crime, isn't it? Not obtrusive enough. Sickening.
I rather doubt this is going to work well at all. People are getting used to freely available information, and they are not going to react well to this annoying stuff.
Hotwired tried interstitial ads way back (1997?) and they bombed bad. Lasted about a month at best, then they had to abandon that idea. We all know how much we *love* popup ads, so that's not going to please anyone.
In short, who is going to buy stuff from people who do this? Not me. I mean, I get amused by TV ads sometimes, but usually I *change the channel*. In an ADD-obsessively-hyperactive world, that impulse will be that much stronger.
So, in short: nice idea, won't work.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Let me tell you a story about Company A and Company B.
Both companies rely on ad revenue to pay their bills and keep their content available. In the beginning, both companies get the same amount of traffic for an equivalent product. Company A only uses banner ads with a click through rate that isn't even worth counting. Company B tries out a new form of presenting ads which get into a measurable percentage rate. For math, let's say they get ten times the click through rate as company A.
Half the viewers out there are Slashdot leftists who can't accept that the Internet is not a communist endeavor. These people boycot Company B and only use Company A.
As time goes, B has lost half it's traffic. This means that A is now getting 50% more traffic than it used to. B may only have half the traffic, but it has ten times the click through rate on it's remaining traffic which gives it a total of five times the click throughs than it had before using the new form of advertising. This means that B is now generating about 3-1/3 times the click through traffic as A (5 / 1.5).
As more time goes on, advertisers realize they get more bang for their buck with Company B than they received with Company A. A can no longer charge the same rates as B and sees their revenue drop. Eventually, A can't pay it's bills and goes out of business.
Welcome to market evolution.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Consumers control the media. We go to sites we like, and we stay away from sites we don't. If cnn.com started displaying full-screen banner ads, it would be our choice to get our news elsewhere.
And so we will. There are other sites, and those without these "un-ignorable" ads will grow more popular. Why would any site do this to their visitors? It doesn't make sense.
If this does happen, I hope that consumers will use their brains, and boycott the sites that do use this ad technology, as we boycott Amazon.com for their One-Click-Shopping pantent ignorance.
-Ando
- Ando
Without effective online advertising techniques, no advertiser would pay to place ads online. Without ads, there would be little or no free content on the Web. Sure, we complain about being bothered by online ads, but what's the alternative? Paying for every piece of online content we access?
You wont get it like A&E doesn't get my business, because they think interupting my viewing every 10 minutes is ok. You wont get it like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox rarely get my business, because you don't let me watch TV for reasonable periods of time without interruptions.
Don't you know what those interruptions are for? They're there so you can skip to another station and see if anything better is on - or in some cases even watch two shows at once!
-
Addlepated - punk & metal
Normally, in browser whack-a-mole, I cheat by pressing Ctrl+W (Command+W on Macs) repeatedly before a window has time to execute its EcmaScript popup code. If you really want a platform-independent whack-a-mole game, you should try Hampsterdeath, which works on Linux, DOS, and Windows.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's at junkbuster.com.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
This is the key to making ads go away. It really doesn't matter in what format ads on the web take, if people ignore them and don't buy products/services from online advertisers, then the ads will be deemed ineffective. Marketers may spend endless amounts of time and money to ram ads down your throat, but clients won't. Banner ads are a money pit, we tell all our clients that...but really most of them know it already before they ask. IMHO I don't think online advertising has much time left in this world. Pay for play will take its place.
/."
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
They're trying to change your behavior to force you into the old model they're used to.
I would agree with this and I think the model they're use to is return on their dollar and that isn't holding true for web advertising : $1000 in advertising is not equalling $1001 in additional profits. As bizarre as it might seem, television commercials have been proven to work: Put a name in someone's head and they might give it a second chance at the super market. Namespace is a very confounding thing but it's so true : Put your name in people's minds and they're more likely to buy your product or services (it's like the old "any advertising is good advertising" motto). Remember that while the net started off as the realm of the intellectual elite, it is now the domain of every facet of society, so the advertising is going to evolve into the standard namespace advertising.
Having said that do you really think advertising in the way you mention would work? Remember that advertising is a science as much as it's an art : These people know what they're doing. They study and research and follow and test. They analyze the impace of every type of image, colour, sound, etc. If there was an ad saying "IBM Deskstar 9ms 7200RPM ATA100 - Fast!" I wouldn't even notice it...and that's the problem that advertisers are finding : People simply don't notice ads on the net. On TV the ad takes over the TV (they've been trying other things...during a F1 race last year they tried doing a thing where they had side screen ads with the race still running : I TOTALLY didn't notice the ad while trying to concentrate on the race, and I'm sure they found this to be universally the case as they never did it again) so you can't help but notice it. Hell advertisements are some of the best things on TV (see http://www.adcritic.com) but it's because we give them a chance in the first place. Banner ads don't get a chance on the web. Hell on Slashdot I scroll down so quickly I never have a clue what the ads are. I think once there was one about a penguin stepping on Redmond but that's the only one I've ever noticed.
So you want to replace all pop-ups with pop-ups?
No, infiniti99 wants to replace all of a domain's pop-ups with one pop-up to rule them all "on a per-domain basis."
Look before you leap, and read before you reply.Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
a song for something called "Denton's" came on
:) )
That would be Denham's Dentifrice, if I remember correctly...
(ashamed to remember something that obscure, and related to advertising no less
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
A large part of the "freedom" of the internet, in my opinion, stems from the fact that anyone right now can stake a claim and put up a homepage (on geocities, or whatever) or sit in their room and hack away and make a website (like I did.)
My site is a bit of an exception to the rule, since it actually has money based on donations (and ad banners, which bring back a bit of money.)
The thing is, the money to supply the hardware and bandwidth has to come from SOMEWHERE. Before commercial interest in the net came to be, it was quite a pain in the ass to set up a decent website, and you had to drop money out of your own pocket most of the time. The only exception was acadamia, which was funded by tuition anyway.
I remember having my dinky homepage with 1MB of space that I payed $20 a month for. Now I can put up a larger site for free if I look around, or, if I can get the hits, I can break even on advertising some of the time if I'm using the right amount of bandwidth/ad displays if I wanted to run a more complex, database driven site.
I'm annoyed by banner ads and commercialization just as much as everyone else. There's probably a better model for revenue, but people shouldn't bitch because nobodys thought of one as of yet.
Sure, if all commercial interests in the web vanished tommorow we'd lose priceline.com and nytimes.com, but we'd also probably lose sites like stileproject and x-entertainment, who are run by dudes with nothing better to do, but need ad money to keep them going.
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Sure, you'll be without adds, but then half the websites out there won't work anymore because some people rely too much on Javascript. When a simple A HREF will do, they have onClick() to do a simple hyperlink. Or they'll see if you have javascript running and refuse to run the page if you don't because you won't see their interactive ad in the corner.
I never buy stuff with logos. I do wear logo stuff if it was given to me for free... and I don't have anything else clean to wear. My only exception is maybe shoes, and even then, I go for the subtle stuff.
In one sense you're sort of delcaring your "tribe" by wearing logo'ed products. As far as I'm concerned, if you're paying Nike to advertise Nike products, you are part of the stupid tribe.
Hmm, I have to download some sort of plugin for a new style of banners.
"Download Banner Plugin
Yes No
"
You decide...
Web advertising as presented today is just plain STUPID. Imagine if televsion tried the same techniques as web advertisers:
- Change the TV channel... wait the cable provider wants you to watch this 30 sec. ad before we send you on your way.
- Get to your new channel... wait, the broadcasting National Network would like you to watch this 30 sec. spot then we'll send you on your way.
then finally... the regional television station would like to watch this 30 sec. spot before FINALLY sending you to the station you selected over 2 minutes ago. STUPID.
Remember you haven't seen ANY content yet!!!
As many have said, the web isn't a boob tube, it is a "self-directed" interactive experience. Once advertisers start mucking with a users ability to self-direct the journey, most will find another mode of travel or a new path to get there.
Just how many advertisers really think pissing off your customers gets them in the mood to recieve some sloppy advertising message. DOH!
how about zap the monkey for 20 bananabucks? man, i've wasted hours on that dang money tree...
I remember when the media clamined that the internet be an all new type of media filled with information on demand. However I think after doing that for long enough they realized that they were putting nails in their own coffins because they were driving people away from themself and to the new medium.
Now we see the turn around. The media is now claiming that the internet is harmful to our children, should we have them. Advertising is no longer working in such a passive manner so they need to make it more obtrusive to the user. Now information is travelling in much the opposite. It is what they demand. No longer the user.
After all the comments that I have seen here I think many people are starting to shy/avoid places that have advertising that is "in your face" style like GeoCities and similar sites. I know personally I have given up my own site on GeoCities and moved to my own domain which I am still building.
Oh how I remember the "good old days" when high speed backbones consisted of 64k lines and the internet was fast and useful. For the world's greatest tool why must it be full of junk?
Then maybe you should pay for the content you get on the internet unlike the novel that you had to pay for at a book store, unless you are in the habit of being lightfingered.
Expect to be advertised at if you don't pay for your product.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
homepage: http://www.geocities.com/_semperfi_/ieze/
or:
http://www.davecentral.com/14011.html
Remember that the web is an open media where business ventures are continually being experimented with and new ways of providing services and making money are thought up every week.
Advertising and marketing form an essential part of virtually every business and non-profit organisation. To suggest that all advertising is evil and should be filtered/banned is wholly unrealistic and represents a very childish view of how the businesses and the capitalist world operates. So try to consider this from the perspective of advertisers and the businesses they are promoting. A banner-ad at the top of a web page does not constitute a Hard Sell.
So if you are not interested in what's being advertised, use your willpower and don't follow the link! And if it really annoys you then don't return to the site, ever. Simple.
Rob.
I can see the next wave of windoze ad-blocking proxies now... free popup/interstitial/superstitial ad blocking software, suppported by banner ads... ugh.
Sean
While I don't like banner ads, popup ads, or even advertising on television or the radio, the people who provide the content that you rely on (for example I have no problem with the banner ad on Slashdot here. If I had some moral objection I simply WOULDN'T COME TO SLASHDOT. It would be moral theft to use Slashdot's hardware and programming without allowing them a chance at financial returns) have to make money (hell most of them are begging only to make enough to not go under next month...let alone the idea of profit). Even if it's Jim Bob running a moderately successful fanzine co-location or a high speed connection doesn't come for free, neither does the hardware that he's running it on, neither does the electricity that it's using, etc. You may not like advertising but if you're looking for someone else for info, entertain, or enlighten you then stick to the .edu domains (where you're still paying for it through taxes) or realize that people have to survive.
It seems like an awful lot of people out there are of the mindset that they should be getting everything for nothing : The world owes them. Warez software while claiming that open source is the wave of the future, all the while giving pathetic excuses about how software companies make too much money anyways. Warez MP3z all the while talking about the evil music industry and how mainstream music sucks (What's that? Make your own music and provide it to the world for free? NO WAY MAN!). DeCSS DVD's while claiming that the evil movie empire makes crappy movies anyways (What's that? Make your own movies or actually watch independant "Free" movies? NO WAY MAN!).
Capitalism is a funny and remarkable thing and it's very unfortunate that it is put into such a bad light (usually by ignorant youth who have neither the experience nor the wisdom to have the slightest idea what they're talking about, but they're looking for some anti-mainstream platform to try to differentiate themselves). Instead of chickens and wheat being traded back and forth we pass around dollars. You do something that I want : I pay you for it. I do something you want : You pay me for it. There is nothing evil about that system, and in fact it is remarkably fair and workable quite frequently. Advertisers sort of confused the situation by saying "We'll pay for the service you want hoping to get you to buy our service over our competitors". That's how NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. work. Advertisers are trying to apply the same fundamentals to the web but unfortunately technology is denying them the value that they are paying for (again they are paying for a service that YOU are using), so they're trying to change the model. Makes sense to me for the free world to continue to exist.
Having said all that I really think a lot of the web will be reverting to a pay structure soon, and personally I'm looking forward to it. If I could pay a good, very high quality, good research technology paper $40 a year or whatever to have access to knowledgable articles that are up to date and frequently changed (there used to be lots of these but they're all finding that the advertiser supported model simply doesn't work on the web where there are so many cheats), I would do that in a minute. Of course a bunch of socialist, no-clue-what-they-talking about little fucks would undoubtably start ripping content and posting it somewhere else all the while talking about how the model doesn't work (which is akin to throwing firebombs into old age homes and saying that a non-police state just doesn't work). My company would pay $X a year to have corporate access to something like Deja news, or even something like Google. Again we realize that these things cost a lot of money to run, and they're providing us a great service, so if they need that model to survive then I would absolutely support them.
Or at least that's my take no things. The irony is that like government services, it all costs you in the end. Advertisers have to recoup the cost in their products for the services that they paid for for you so it's all the same anyways. Alas.
I want I want I want micropayments. I would gladly pay $0.02 to read the NYT article, if that is how much they are getting from an advertiser for showing those nasty giant banner ads on the sides. As it is it is easy to ignore banners, but that is no way to make money on the web. So the content providers obviously need money, I just hate the way they do it...Ah, well. Since most of us don't want to spend hundreds a month on web page viewing, ads will continue, I just with they weren't so evil. Salon.com gets it right -- they have a bunch of those stupid links in the story itself, eg "View these sites with SafeWeb" or "Backflip this page." I get the feeling that many more people will be turning off JavaScript now...
I think that as advertisers get smarter (read "more annoying") the web is going to get smarter as well. While it proably won't show up on commercial browsers like IE or netscape (and because of their close ties, probably not mozilla either), but on the smaller browers like skipstone, kmeleon, and galeon, I forsee some changes to counter act these advertising practices.
What about an integrated ad blocking service? Yes, it's already here in junk buster, but why not have something just like it built right into the computer. Imagine right clicking on a banner ad and selecting
o never show ads from [server.host.tld]
o never show ads from [*.host.tld]
(or something similar).
How about an icon in the toolbar or status bar that lights up when a pop up is attempting to be displayed. Mousover and it gives you what the address is that is going to be displayed and you have the choice of clicking and displaying the pop up, or not and simply ignoring it. This would be an effective (IMHO) way of dealing with either popups, but still going to sites that have a popup into another page (generally "artsy" pages in my experience, but I digress).
Something similar could be done for forwarding to/from ads (automatically detect and circumvent).
Anyway, I really feel that should ads start going this way, the web will react. Some things are just now coming (or just about here) like disabling the BLINK tag, etc, but I think the smaller, "user" browsers will be resourceful enough to move ahead (or around) this sort of advertising.
AND! (and) if the content of the page is done via something like, php, you can load the add right into the page using an http get from one server to another and just pump it out.
---
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I've got a fscking JobDirect popup that must be located somewhere on my harddrive, but I don't know where the fsck it is. It just pops up at random times and is PISSING ME OFF.
I use one of the free dialups, so I guess I have to contend with banner ads constantly, but this just has an opposite effect on me, and I come to resent the companies that buy this advertising space. MySimon.com, half.com, and a bunch of others whose banner ads fill me with rage every time I see them. I guess it's kind of a good thing htat their paying for my dialup, but they're never going to get me as a customer.
Oh yeah.. and if that fscking "Shock the Monkey" comes out in popup form, I'm going to track down the owner of that site and cut his throat with a fish-scaler.
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Don't let ads.* get you down. There is a solution :)
Get JunkBuster
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nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Unless you're running an ad blocker proxy, it's going to get really hard to ignore ads on the web soon."
/etc/nsswitch.conf checks files before DNS and my /etc/hosts has 40+ entries in it that are doubleclick.com, adserver, adforce et al, and they all point to 127.0.0.1. I've heard rumors that you can do the same thing in a (lm?)hosts file in Win systems, but have no experience trying this.
This is exactly why my
I've grown sick of the world and its people's mindless games
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
For the love of god, somebody KILL Mozilla/Netscape 6's insistence on importing my IE hotlist every single goddamn time I load it.
I don't want it, and I can't get rid of it
For that alone, Mozilla/NS 6 should die, die, die
just MHO
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I've been wondering recently why ads in print media continue to be used, while "banner" ads in online media are universally decried as ineffective and ignored by consumers.
Look at your average full-screen pop-up. Now look at your average full-page print ad. Notice the similarity?
Banners are "decried as ineffective" because click-through rate (the most commonly used statistic) is not a reliable indicator of the effectiveness of an ad. I've recently seen banners that make no attempt to build a brand; they don't even give the name of the product or company. The real power in advertising comes in building the brand in viewers' subconscious minds.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not all advertising is bad. Some advertising delivery methods are inherently evil.
--
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
My experience is quite the contrary: whenever I have some question to research on the internet and I need high quality information, I invariably end up at a free site or FAQ put up by some enthusiastic volunteer or engaged academic. The commercial sites by their very nature target the broad masses and can't and don't want to bother them with high quality and necessarily complicated information.
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I know that it would be slightly more work for the web developers, but how about something like this:
Make your content-rich web site have two modes of delivery.
1) If you subscribe to the site, and pay with micro-payments, or subscription you don't get any ads.
2) If you are browsing the site for free, you get banner ads, or whatever type of advertizing is appropriate.
This should make both types of surfers happy. Also, many web sites would discover that people are willing to pay--especially if it means no more ads.
Of course this does not really apply to geeks because we can find a way around anything. Consider it a professional courtesy.
domc
Bah, what is the lynx for? Popup window? What's that? Surely nevere had any problems with banners ... the net just flies in text.
Slashdot is a bad comparison, because it's not intended for Joe Sixpack. And any other analogy would probably be just as flawed because there just isn't that much to compare common websites such as yahoo.com, msn.com, mp3.com, and schoolgirls.com with in real life. Museum? No. Exhibition? No. Magazine? No. TV? No. See...
I want at least
A way to disable animations,
A way to disable resizing, and
A way to disable pop-up windows
A way to disable any script when I exit the page
All of this configurable in general, and specifically for each site!
In Murphy We Turst
Of course there was that guy in the Diamond Age, which is Must-Read Sci-Fi, who is infected with a nanotech parasite which inserts Hindi commercials for roach motels into a corner of his vision 24/7.
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Doesn't matter if you were or not.
Place the blame there, maybe they'll listen. (I doubt it, but one can hope)
If the ad didn't change your mind to purchase the product, it failed anyway.
For ad blocking, I heartily recommend Guidescope. Here's a company that respects people's privacy, provides a great service, and has a program that actually works--cross platform, cross browser.
Incidentally, one of the great ironies of being in the ad blocking market is that you're assured that when you advertise it targets only those people who don't already have your product.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Very very simple point:
/interesting/, and the advertising must offer value. A better model for advertising would be interactive-advertising whereby the advertiser offers a small service (sports scores to a cell phone, contest entries, etc) right from the banner (or whatever you want to call the advertising content space.)
.. those people with 'content-for-free' demands are living in a dreamworld. We all work for companies, and our companies rely on advetising, in whatever form, to be able to print your paycheque, so you can browse the web in your spare time and check out sites that are kept in business by advertising ... etc, etc.
Sites are kept alive by advertising. (slashdot included.)
Advertisers will stop paying for banner ads.
Advertising isn't going away.
The suggestions made in this article may or may not work, but they miss the point:
Advertisers have to find a way of making advertising
Anyhow, its not going away
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicacorn
"Old man yells at systemd"
why should an ad be there, I already pay to use the internet.
You pay to use an Internet connection; the advertising pays for the content on that connection. All content created on or after January 1923 (pretty much everything on the Web except Project Gutenberg) is under perpetual copyright; somebody needs to pay royalties for the content.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The real problem is that people want to advertize, and they're going to keep trying to think up ways of doing so to keep one step ahead of the blockers. The real danger is that the ultimate in advertizing is not far away: product placement. Of course with media conglomeration this is already at least somewhat underway, but it's only going to get worse. How long is it going to be until web sites start incorporating ads for their commercial partners into the main content of their pages? I guess that search engines are already well down that road, from Google's "sponsored link" to goto.com's outright selling of placement to many other search engines' more insidious under-the-counter acceptance of pay for better search results. How long until other web sites start similar practices?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
>paranoia< /. anytime soon....let's just say the results won't be pretty. /.ers that he would consider an inane stunt like this....
/.ers don't want to see VA Linux'/eGrail's/whatever's latest ad campaign show up on our desktops.
If a pop-up JavaScript window appears on my screen when I load up
Why else would Herr Malda post a story like this, but as a warning to
>/paranoia<
Okay, maybe that's a little un-founded, but I'm thinking that most
"Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be wrong." -- Dennis Miller
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
I look through the forum here, and I can see a bunch of people who have obviously never run a professional website.
This thing you call the Internet, while yes, originally came about because of hackers and geeks, thrives today not only because of them, but because of invested capital in companies based upon projected profits from advertising. This is the case with not just e-commerce sites but many sites that you probably use daily and take for granted that they exist.
I'm so tired of people bitching about advertising on the internet. Yes, you can ignore it. You can turn off javascript, and outside banners, or whatever. That's fine and good, but it's also pretty damn inconsiderate when you realize that while it is an annoyance, it is what is driving the people (alot of the time) to keep the site running.
I run a site that has a very promising future. I posted an article on k5 about it, and it was completely bashed because the site has banner ads. I was shocked at how naive everyone was about the magnitute of revenue ads generate and their purpose. Bandwidth isn't free. Hardware isn't free. My ad revenue doesn't even get mailed to me, it gets mailed to my provider since they're DONATING bandwidth since they have so much faith in my site and are LOSING money because of it.
Once again, the geeks come out in droves and show me how spoiled they are. This Internet revolution is possible not only because of the software and design, but because of the money that's been dumped into it as well.
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The argument could be made that this kind of advertising is an unauthorized use of your computing resources.
Until every site out there starts including a EULA stating that by entering their domain, you give your explicit permission for them to transmit and display ads in your browser. Blocking, or otherwise interfering with the transmission or display of such ads is illegal under the Digital Millenium Advertisers Revenue Protection Act, and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and fines of up to $25,000 per offense. Additionally, trafficking in programs designed to steal revenue from advertisers via blocking or otherwise interfering with the transmission or display of advertisements is illegal under section 12.4(b) of the DMARPA, and is punishable by up to 8 years in prison and fines of up to $75,000 per offense.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Elgon
sorry but if I don't want to watch ads on TV I can either change channels or turn the thing off. Thus, me filtering ads cannot and will not be against the law. They can send all the ads they like but I don't have to read them. Thank god they cannot force that on us :)
http://www.intercantech.com has a product called AdsOff! that works great and is cheap. Filters out the /. ads too ;)
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
The type of advertisement that makes sense should correspond to the type of information you're presenting. When you're showing a video or audio presentation, it makes sense to pre or postempt it with a short ad. But when you're reading text, does that make sense? Image reading the paper and a little ad gnome comes up, grabs the paper from you, tells you about his product and then gives it back to you. The internet is a new medium, but it has ties to several old mediums. Use the one that makes sense.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It usually doesn't make the websurfer too happy, and usually web-surfers go somewhere else unless there is no competition to speak of.
Even altavista has those annoying pop-ups now. That's one reason I've stopped using them.
I think advertisers should keep this in mind (and many do). Just because it is possible to annoy the user more doesn't necessarily mean it is going to bring more profits. If a site uses pop-ups, that usually causes me to go somewhere else. And I think a lot of surfers feel the same way.
There is a limit to how much annoyance a web-surfer is willing to tolerate, and when you cross that border, it is very difficult to get back. Because, when profits drop, what do you do? Advertise less? That means you will get even lower profits, because old users will not come running back now that they've found some other site. So you have little choice but to annoy the users even more, which in the end means you will go the way of so many other dotcoms has done before; straight down.
Just my thoughts...
"Unless you're running an ad blocker proxy, it's going to get really hard to ignore ads on the web soon."
Like bloody hell.
If there is anything that time has proven with the Internet, its that if it can be done it can be undone.
the day sites start using ads like this, someone will find a way to circumvent them. I'm not worried.
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Keep in mind here the number of web-based businesses that have gone belly-up because they couldn't be profitable. I'm not sure that banner advertising is significantly helpful -- I've found the few commercial sites I've bought things from by hearing them mentioned someplace, through an existing commercial relationship, or through a search engine. That's about it.
That money has been thrown at it in large amounts means little in this regard -- how many millions of dollars have been invested in .coms that have gone belly up or failed to produce a dollar of profit and have no prospects even yet?
I'm increasingly struck by the paradox that the net would never have been created by a commercial interest, the protocols necessary to do all of these wonderful things including the web would never have been created by a commercial interest, and yet there is so much money getting passed around through this that it's incredible.
If Internet advertising moves to commercials and annoying pop-ups, I'm sure that people are going to become more annoyed with it. After all, the promise of the Internet is fast access to a huge collection of information. If you get in people's way when they need to look something up quickly - as banner ads can sometimes do - they're gonna be pissed off. Jeffrey Veen has a great article discussing deceptive banners at Webmonkey and how they may garner more clickthroughs but end up agitating potential customers. I'm waiting for the day that people stop trying to commercialize the web, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Not everyone wants to use it pirate DVD's.
Using a DVD player in Linux would be nice.
What's that? Use Windows? NO WAY MAN!
(ok so I am right now but I'm not at home:P)
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No sig for you!!
This is, actually, one thing that (recentish) internet explorers can do. (Tools Menu, Internet Options, Advanced, Scroll down to Multimedia and untick "play animations".) Ta da! Animations off. Not too sure what versions of IE can do this, I think 4 can, 5 certainly can.
Well, for your information, amazon.com uses pop-up ads. And I believe amazon.com is supposed to have their income from customers (although they haven't had any net income yet).
Amazon is a special case : They're doing everything they can to try to keep investors believing that they're going to be profitable one day and that it's worth $7.1 billion dollars (wow not too long ago Amazon was worth $40 billion...amazing). It's sort of like the capitulations Deja went through trying to discover itself and in the process forgot who it was.
Expect anything from Amazon. It reminds me a lot of Sears actually : Sears is one of those places where when I was a kid I associated their name with quality clothing and home products. Now after seeing just about every type of shady IMHO) service with the Sears name emblazoned on it their name is more of a liability. I always wonder what these people are thinking when they spread themselves so thin.
Hey, guys, we all know there are plenty of tools for filtering out ads and popup windows, etc. Most of us probably use them, too.
Let's just continue to use them and let the advertisers happily spam all the non-nerd users while we slide through the system with less visual clutter, not being tracked or bombarded with images of products we'll never buy anyway.
Sounds like a win-win situation. Advertisers maintain the status quo and those of us in the know get to avoid all the stupid advertising.
Sounds obnoxious? It is. But the alternative is to pay for useful sites or see more ads. I'd prefer the former if it comes down to that.
Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone what we are up to.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Is it just me, or are the methods outlined above already used frequently on pornography sites? I hate the onload and open features of javascript, they give too much control over my browser to the content providor. (And I'm not just saying I want to get at pornography without being advertised at ;)) I usually turn off javascript when a site gets too annoying and controllish. However, I imagine they could do interstitials with refreshes. This advertising seems to me to be far more invasive than radio/television, it sounds very big-brotherish.
1) They were small (byte wise).
How many times have you been to a site with banner adds and it seemed to take forever to load just the ad? Many times for me.
2) They weren't animated.
Relating to #1 above, animated ads account for a lot of size issues - the most hideous being a Flash or Java-based advert. Animated GIFs can sometimes be just as bad, when they don't do thier compression right (or do a 24 bit GIF, or something equally tacky). Plus, the animation is distracting.
3) They weren't pushed in your face at every click of a link.
Slashdot is probably the sanest use of banner ads, but even they get somewhat annoying. Some sites make you look at ads constantly, relying on Javascript (or Java?) to keep the ad "in-the-window", no matter where you scroll (Geocities does this with there "G" symbol down in the corner, do they think they are a TV station?)...
4) Put at the end of the page, instead of the beginning.
If I want to read your advertising, I will read it last - not first. Then, and only then, will I decide if I want to click on it. Many a time have I been to a site that I wanted to see the content, waited forever to load the banner ad, then said "Screw it!", and closed the window, before even seeing a thing (sometimes, including the banner ad)...
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Marketers just don't seem to get that the internet is a communication medium, and as such, anything that interupts the flow of information will be ignored and scorned (in the end). Stop interupting us, and give us something worthwhile (heck, even a free tee-shirt would be cool in some cases)!
Sadly, I think product placement ads are soon coming - since these porno-site tactics are going to fail instantly (do they really think people are going to like whack-a-mole?)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Sooner or later they had to find out that it takes a few days of surfing until your selective perception completely masks out ads, even flashing ones and stupid monkeys that pop up, etc.
But if they really want do these kinds of ads, people will stop reading those sites with the nagging ads, and look for services where they can pay for being left alone.
So I predict that ad-only free sites will vanish mostly, when there are alternatives. And even if not, people will probably find other means of communication.
But this also makes sense: These "new economy" businesses will have to make money somehow at one point, and that can't be done on ads alone.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
...the good old days before big providers like AOL started providing internet access.
Back then the internet was about communication, not forcing ads down people's throats.
I wonder what percentage of the total bandwidth taken up on the net is from ineffective spam and advertising (stuff that people receive that doesn't make them want to buy anything). Anyone have any figures?
Has anyone wondered what will happen if ad-busting software becomes mainstream? Stuff like www.junkbusters.com?
Is it possible that we could see legislation that made "devices" that would disable web ads illegal? Like an EULA for a web page that specified that turning off ads constituted "circumvention", thereby making an ad proxy an "anti-circumvention device"?
I haven't heard anything to this effect, but I'd sure love to know if anyone in the e-commerce business knows if steps are being taken to fight ad blocking software.
Internet Explorer 5 for Windows will refuse to show many web pages if the banner ad's web site is redirected to localhost. Try it - set ad.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 on a window's box's hosts file, then try to load yahoo. you get a blank page.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
On this subject, the thread in the cartoon strip Help Desk about integrating spam into the desktop is very funny. Start here to read it.
Someone should really make a game in javascript or something called "whack a pop-up window", where it pops up windows in random spots on your screen and it's your job to close them before they disappear. I would, but I can't figure out how to get around some newer browsers that ask you if you want to let the window close itself. So annoying. Any ideas?
Look, ads that annoy me too much, like Java downloads that slow my page reads or pop-up ads that keep popping up, or animated GIFs that take too long to load do succeed.
They succeed in making me NOT buy the product. I go out of my way to think bad thoughts about the company that does such ads.
That said, I love the animated penguin squishing Redmond HQ. But that's because it's topical, interesting, and very funny.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I don't know of that many ad proxies. But one that works well, I find, are:
.adclick.com/ will block out all data from *.adclick.com]
ATGauard 3.22 (windows)... (just a stand alone proxy). [This program blocks ads, via a list of usual ad names... such as
Mozzilla has one (all supported OSs) [I don't know how this works, never really checked it out]
Taxi (MacOS, which blocks adds by image dimensions, and I think by url reference as well [lick ATGuard], but can't remember).
If you people know more, post them... long live freedom from advertising.
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
Which just goes to show how clueless and unprofessional the 'web industry' is, expecting that 'dumping money' will make you rich. If you want to charge people to come to your site, then charge them; but don't complain when you rely on advertising that almost no-one wants (you admit yourself that you get a very low response) and we block it out.
It's not our problem that you've chosen a stupid revenue model; nor is it our responsibility to keep you in business. When exactly will the 'professional' web sites finally come to realise that many of us would much sooner have a micropayments system which let us pay 0.1 cents per page we view rather than have to put up with pointless and annoying ads for things we don't want?
I mean, seriously, how many industries on this planet will continue following a clearly broken revenue model when everyone in the industry is lowing money? You think that if the motor industry was giving away cars with ads printed on the side and relying on advertising revenues from those ads, they wouldn't soon realise that charging for the cars was much better than giving them away to people who'd just respray them as soon as they got home?
I agree that flipping text into banners or popups are a big lose. Instead, advertising networks should be moving into audio and video ads in streaming media. That's going to be the only (halfway) reasonable way to present in-context advertising.
As for radio, I don't listen to commercial radio anymore. There are plenty of non-commercial radio where I live (San Francisco Bay Area), and my radio experience has improved 10-fold since I ditched the commercial pablum. And yes, I do make donations to non-commercial media.
-- $SIGNATURE
Strip your cookies file to the minimum:t ml
/etc/hosts:
# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.h
# This is a generated file! Do not edit.
and then write protect it.
chmod gou-w ~/.netscape/cookies
add the following to
127.0.0.2 ad.doubleclick.net www.valueclick.com netadsrv.iworld.com
You push him away, but a small boy dressed in annoying colors grabs on to your shirt and holds on to you throughout the shop. Every time you pick a new item from the shelf and put in your basket, he starts jumping up and down in front of you and screams with an annoying pinchy voice: "POKEMON CARDS. GET NEW POKEMON CARDS!"
When you finally reach the cashier, the little boy is gone. You hand the cashier your groceries, and he sums up the total and ask you to pay. You show him your credit card, but he shakes his head, looks upon you with a stupid smile, and insists that you have to read the numbers up load for him. As you don't want everyone in the shop to hear this, you object, but he insists on it being perfectly safe.
As you leave the shop, the annoying salesman you saw on arrival violently grabs your arm, turns you around and screams (this time right into your left ear): "BE SURE TO VISIT OUR PARTNER SHOP TIE-HEAVEN. PLEASE VOTE FOR THIS SHOP AT THE MALL INFORMATION DESK. HAVE A GOOD DAY SIR!". After screaming this, he doesn't let go of your arm. He just stands there with a glassy look in his eyes completely silent. You carefully remove his grip by bending away his fingers.
There are two exits. One of them lead to the main hall, but it is just a small hole you have to crawl through beside the main exit. The other door which is big and wide leads directly to other "partner" shops. As most other customers there, you have no interest in this, so along with all the others, you choose to crawl on your knees through the little hole in the wall.
As you are about to drive out of the parking lot, each time you set your car in reverse, a guy jumps up on your car, and tapes a large poster to your front window. You don't even care looking at the poster, just get out and tears it off. This happens six times before you are finally able to drive out of there.
Thank God! And people wonder why dotcoms are failing...
Not Junkbuster - The Proxomitron is a million times more powerful than that.
Is there a proxy for Unix that works in a similar fashion as the Proxomitron, i.e. let's you match and replace web page contents and HTTP header contents using regular expressions?
I heard of webfilter, but it is just too old, unmaintained and contains too many vestigial CERN code in it.
I think the one of my biggest complaints against advertising in general is it's tendancy to carpet bomb people without mercy. I mean you really just can't get away from the stuff if you want to.
When I stop and evaluate the sheer volume of advertising that gets directed at me it gets quite depressing. The energy content of the paper advertising directed at my house via junkmail and my one newspaper subscription is probably at least a measurable fraction of my home heating energy needs.
I could go to all the trouble to get removed from mailing lists and the like, but that would eat up as much of my time as throwing the crap out. So I basicly end up saving my energy to direct it at a few serious offenders. I've got a short list of rules I try and apply.
1.If it gets advertised on the sunday comics page ad flap, I boycott. (A certain "B-label" tire company is screwed.)
2. If I get a phone call that I did not solicit, I boycott. (Yes, I need new windows, thank you for informing me which vendor to avoid... click)
3. If I get targeted due to what I consider to be highly confidential information, I boycott. (Home equity loans... Faaassstt!!)
4. If you sell highly confidential information about me, and I am able, I will boycott you. (I've left 2 banks over this, and I'm trying to find a way to punish my home loan vendor. Funny thing is, the banks were probably breaking the law.)
5. If I stop doing business with you, and you harass and persue me, I not only boycott, I activly try and damage your reputation with my peers.
6. If you engague in "blitz" tatics, I'll usually seek some form of retribution. These offenders are usually movie advertisers. My retribution is usually to go to the matinee' and reduce their profit, if it's a movie I want to see. If it's crap I'm not interested in, I'll avoid doing business with the "market channel" they're using to get at me. This keeps me out of McDonald's and Burger King quite a bit, which may end up improving my health.... :-)
So I guess the coming changes in net advertising will force me to add some more rules to the list. I'll probably start with page exit popup windows. Those seem particularly obnoxious, in that they would hold me captive against my will for a brief period of time. When I want to leave, I don't want anything slowing me down. Viewing a page before getting at content at least has some sort of pavlovian reward to it. Multiple pop-up windows will get old quick.
Temkin
But anyway, it is easy to get rid of, in any version of netscape: Load your netscape binary into emacs (regardless of your editor religion, emacs is the best generally available tool for this), I-search (c-s) start typing onclose... when it shows up, change it, but leave it the same length. So make it `onAsdfg'. That's it. No more onClose, ever.
Okay, strictly speaking you have a point. But realistically, I do this, and I get one message from yahoo-spam every 2-4 weeks. This is about 2% of the amount of unrequested, unjustified spam that gets sent to my inbox by random people for no reason at all. I think it's an incredibly small price to pay for POP service. I think it helps that I UN-checked every single "interest" in their list of categories... now I don't match many advertisers' profiles :)
I hate pop-ups and ads when I'm surfing at home. That's why I use webwasher . It stops the banners but not most of the pop-ups (sigh).
But to pay for my computer and other things, like food and rent, I work for a website that makes money through advertising. These advertisers pay my bills. I want them to be happy. I have no wish to be so altruistic as to starve myself. I read that NYT article with an eye to increase advertiser satisfaction, while not annoying visitors to our site.
Now that funny-money stock options and IPOs are proving to be ineffective, websites have to find ways to generate revenues. The good ones use advertiser revenues to provide good content that brings in visitors that bring in page views that encourage more advertising. It is a virtuous circle. Sies that get greedy and make it hard to get to the content throught the advertising, like crazy pop-ups, lose visitors and thus revenue and go out of business, another virtuous circle.
I detest self-righteous asses, hiding in their basements and expecting the rest of us to give up our prosperity so that we can all be doctrinaire losers with no money.
Advertising is a pain in the ass. I try to avoid it when possible. But I can live with it. I'm all for any techniques that make advertising more effective in generating revenue while keeping them unobtrusive.
And yeah, Doubleclick scares the hell out of me.
you dont have to play the "is this a goatse.cx" link game...
its always tons of fun at work...
tagline
... hi bingo
How long will it take AOL-TimeWarner to buy a Digital Millennium Advertising Revenue Protection Act to make filtering proxies illegal. After all, by using filtering proxies we're getting all this content without paying for it, denying hard working Shockwave artists of their hard-earned money...
Hmmm. Pop ups on Entry, pop-ups on Exit. Pop-ups during, Getting redirected to different sites entirely... Yep. The Porn industry has been at this for a few years now. Hint: turn java script off.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
It's true that the click-through rate on most ads is pretty miserable. Likewise, it's pretty rare to suddenly change your destination because you saw a billboard along the road.
Except for the small percentage of informed users who have implemented ad blocking systems (such as the list of about 50 blackholes I used to keep in my hosts file), I think banner ads DO work. They're just using the wrong metric to measure success. Hell, I don't know if you CAN measure success. An ad is designed to make an impression on the passer-by, so that they might remember a certain product or service later on. It's rare that something is so interesting that I immediately want to cancel my browsing destination just to check it out. But I frequently remember the names of companies I saw mentioned in a banner ad (for instance, when I was looking for a colocation provider, I thought of Rackspace, which advertises frequently on Andover).
-John
I don't know how many times I've seen redirection that pauses a few seconds and sends me to a Page-Of-No-Return. No amount of clicking on the back button will take me to where I cam from. It brings me back, complete with pop-ups along the way. And these "mistakes" seem to be most common on pages that come with spam, so I can only assume that they are intentional. Yes, I know how to get out, but does my mother?
This has upped the ante considerably in the war on unwanted "content".
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I remember when there was no web -- only usenet, mail, ftp, finger, and telnet. And even though many of the DNS names ended with .com, it was
a decidedly uncommercial experience. It's OK if
we go back to that point -- everything I get
via the web that isn't (a) a public service by
a .gov, .org, or .edu or (b) profitable to the
provider (www.southwest.com, for example) I'm
quite happy to let die. And I don't think I'm
alone in this sentiment ...
alot of the good MPOGS are owned by people who run the ads the get revenue. if this happens all the games would start sucking(IE: every move you do, got to stare at the ads for a few seconds) that would slow the games down bad, and people would start quiting.
and pop on their 56k dialup getting really frustrated at this.
They already loathe waiting for pages to load, if 30 seconds were added to
that I'd imagine they'd find a new site to read their news on.
The moderation system here at Slashdot is remarkably good but it's still funny seeing certain things when you push some people's buttons the right way. I've watched my post go up and down several times over the past couple of minutes. Someone likes it and mods it up then some pimple popping geek espousing his great new paradigm of an everything for nothing free world, between asking mommy for his allowance, mods it down. Society is a fascinating thing.
Homer said it best : "When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!"
Of course that's tongue in cheek.
Don't know if I agree. Look at DVD's. You don't have _any_ alternatives for Digital video. DVD was started by a consortium of people that wanted to get it right.. They wanted complete control over the content so they could maximize regional profits, which included things like forced airing of the copy protection laws, and now forced airing of commercials in select DVDs.. Are you going to protest a given movie becuase you can't skip past the commericals? If you're like me, and have spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment center.. Don't you feel cheated if your only "option" is to use cheap VHS pseudo-stereo?
.01% of the people care about at that given moment.
What happens when advertisers "choose" to only pay well for sites that agree to use such intrusive forms of advertising. What happens to Slashdot and friends? Pay themselves for advertisements?
Look at PBS.. Even they can't get away from advertisements.. Their commercial free broadcasting has hours a day (or so it seems whenever I happen to watch it) of "please give us money" segments. Personally I like the entertaining commercials better than that pity fest. The only escape seems to be direct monthly payments. Once again, the porn industry leads the pack. You pay $30 a year and you get to view a block of web sites. So you go out there and say, hey Slash, freshmeat and this and that is part of this premium group. So on and so forth.. That way you pay for the types of content that you think you'll like to watch. Then what's left are the non obtrustive forms of advertisement that I OCCASIONALLY think are cute and curious enough to click through.
The real problem is that people need to advertise. The web is an excelent medium for finding what you want, so a given service provider / producer has a better chance of being matched with perspective clients than anywhere else.. But the old mentality is that people don't even know that they want you yet (consumerism at it's dirtiest). I think portal sites like amazon and price watch are valuable in this respect. People enjoy going to the mall to window shop. So advertisers should be interested in producing consumer attractive online malls. They just need to find the right gimics. One stop shopping that can feed revenue to the millions of dot coms through such portal shopping. It would be just like the home-shopping network, where people purposefully want to see the commercials and gimics. The main difference is that you're not stuck watching a stupid ring that
-Michael
actually that's one of those truely unique ideas that you would think people would have thought of long ago. Believe it or not, most people still surf the web over *shudder* modems and if the NYT is any indication, it takes a while for the "second page" to load up. So why not shove an ad in there whilst it is loading? Because of the low atten... wow, shiny thing! .. span of Internet users there's no real reason to believe they won't click on the advertisement, especially if it has lots of motion and pretty pictures and swirly things and sound effects. Seriously, I don't think I've clicked on a banner this year. Maybe last year. Oh wait, I think there was one thing on Slashdot about 3d goggles but I didn't buy em.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's amazing how this "We must force all customers to receive advertising" bullshit is driving the industry. If Yahoo mail would give me POP3 access for a small fee, I'd pay the fee, but instead they force me to download spam. So I don't use it. So I also don't buy the much more valuable "own domain" feature they're offering at the moment. I don't want spam. I have money, I'm willing to pay for things. Why does nobody want my money?
Friends, I'm rarely click on banners. You're wasting your bandwidth serving these things up to me. I don't want to install Windows just so I can use a "free" long distance phone service. I don't plan to buy an airticket with ridiculous terms and conditions from Priceline just so I can save $10. I read those adverts, I can't miss them, I just don't want what they're offering, and if I had the choice, even if I did want what they're offering, I still don't want my reading interrupted by adverts.
If you prevent me from reading something until I've read an advert, you haven't forced me to read an advert I'd have otherwise missed, you've just pissed me off. And if any site, even those I love to death, from Yahoo to Slashdot, from Snopes to Salon, forces me to download crap in exchange for reading the content, I wont read the content. I'll ignore you, and your ads, and your advertisers. Katz et al may think that it's dreadfully "old economy" for people to pay for content, but some of us are quite happy to do just that, and unless you provide us by the means to do so in comfort and without wasting time on stuff we really don't want, you're not going to get my business.
You wont get it like A&E doesn't get my business, because they think interupting my viewing every 10 minutes is ok. You wont get it like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox rarely get my business, because you don't let me watch TV for reasonable periods of time without interruptions. You wont sell to me products and services I'd have otherwise been willing to pay for, because like Yahoo, you're not willing to let me and too interesting in PISSING ME OFF.
You want to piss off the customer, you go right ahead. We'll take the first door out, and screw you and your advertising too.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I have always thought that audio ads were going to take over. There would be embedded sound files in web pages that would play while you read.
You say, 'sure, people can just turn off their audio', but finally audio feedback is important from a computer so you can't turn it off without missing something.
The same goes for JavaScript, as people were mentioning above. JavaScript is necessary anymore.
At any rate, the browsers should add in features to turn off ads, but that won't happen. The Internet survives in a large part off of ad revenue. If everyone turned off the ads, there would be big problems.
Advertizers can go too far though...
EverCode
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
but then, we wouldn't have these short articles spread over 20 pages just so more margin and banner ads can be crammed into it. of course, advetisers still need to advertise, so i think product placements will increase dramatically.
this is just another step in the evolution of this media. when products become widely available to combat this, there will be a new model. i'm pretty sure micropayments is coming fast on the horizon, although i doubt it will be the last.
I run my own proxy, and I set this up in my ACL list then denied them.
Sure it looks freaky with stacks of "ERROR" messages appearing in place of adverts, but is saves my limited DSL bandwidth.
This also has the advantage of catching adverts from the same domain as legitimate domains (eg mp3.com/RealMedia) acl advert_dblclick dstdomain .doubleclick.net
acl advert_mp3com urlpath_regex RealMedia/ads
acl advert_slashdot urlpath_regex /banner/
acl advert_zdnet dstdom_regex ad.*\.zdnet\.com
acl advert_ucomics dstdom_regex ad.*\.ucomics\.com
acl advert_assorted dstdomain .aaddzz.com .adbureau.com .admaximize.com .admonit
or.net .avenuea.com .enliven.com .flycast.com .focalink.com .hitbot.com .imgis.c
om .link4ads.com .linksynergy.com ads.mircx.com ads.msn.com .ngadcenter.net .pre
ferences.com ngads.smartage.com .track-star.com .valueclick.net ad.vert.net .web
ads.co.nz .webtracker.com
Now you can deny this at your leisure. eg:
http_access deny advert_dblclick http_access deny advert_mp3com http_access deny advert_zdnet http_access deny advert_ucomics http_access deny advert_assorted(The trick is putting the deny lines in the correct order.)
There are people that have work to do and cannot dick around and recompile every third app that they want to run. If I can do a purchase req. for Webwasher and run its auto-install, that saves my client hundreds of dollars over having me scavenge the web for an open-source Linux app that needs to be recompiled, manually installed, and then configured using some arcane series of command line invocations and spells. Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but, by and large, it's a lot less painful to install and run Windows apps (just ask id Software).
Besides, I have yet to see you (or anyone else) recommend UNIX/Linux alternatives that are comparable in features, ease of use, and performance to the aforementioned Windows products.
P.S. I run Caldera OpenLinux 2.4, BeOS 5.0, and FreeBSD 4.2 (in addition to Windows 98 and Windows Me) so don't even think of claiming that I am unaware of non-Windows OSs.
(If you don't know what that means, suffice to say that I won't be going to that site.)
I am not a lawyer.
How many things advertised in banner ads can people really buy? Perhaps they aren't clicking because they just don't want to buy that stuff right now. Making the ads more prominent is just going to annoy people more.
Internet advertising has worked well in banner ads, but I don't think that the advertisers are measuring their success properly.
The point of advertising in the past (TV, radio) has always been more to demonstrate the product in question or to show what great deals the advertiser has to offer. This investment(hopefully) is returned in increased sales of the product or increased sales (in general) at the store. Ultimately the strongest drive for this is building your name in peoples' minds so that when they shop they visit your store or consider your product. The internet, however is being played differently. The problem now is that the advertisers are equating their ad success to click-thru counts. Frankly, if I am not in the market for a given product a that moment, I will not visit your site no matter how intrusive the advertising is. In fact the more intrusive it becomes, the more likely I am to avoid your ads with proxy filters or reduced surfing at the sites you advertise with. Unfortunately, the business models on the internet rely so heavily on advertising for revenue right now that it will only become an increasing annoyance.
I think that if advertisers were to do a better job getting their product or service across in the existing space that they would indeed reap higher benefits. Differentiate yourself, show the product and link directly to pertinent information to increase traffic and sales. Bigger, flashier and equally vacuuous content only serve to anger your target audience and force them to remember the useful info they got from somewhere else...
If there are no people to view the ads, who are they advertising to?
If Slashdot put up a full-screen ad, that couldn't be closed for 20 seconds every time you accessed the site, would you still be as loyal a visitor?
What is the point of advertising in a vacuum?
- Ando
Auckerman mentioned this below... webfree
but you might also check out http://www.flourish.org/adremove/.
You can also use a proxy.pac file to selectively block ads if you have a javascript capable browser like Netscape/Mozilla/IE etc.
"I have a cunning plan..."
...by posting stoires relevant to Slashdot readers: probably everytime they run one and Slashdot signal it, thousand of new users sign to NYTimes.com. So, more eyeballs and more advertising money for them. Maybe Slashdot should begin to ask for a slice of the pie... :)
I just tried it. I even turned javascript on. It seems to be a site that *doesn't* work with javasript.
:)
It loaded properly without it. OK, well sort of . From viewing in both lynx and netscape, it seems that those things on the side are supposed to be ads--but if junkbuster was getting them, they'd be broken images rather than question marks . . .
It seems to have some of those stupid menus that only work with javascript. It has links that only work with javascript.
S I tried turning on javascript. Instead of the site, I get a banner add surrounded by some of the script that is supposed to load it.
Nope, this isn't a site legitimately using javascript
hawk
The advertising on TVs and radios works because the media is continually streaming, and has been already programmed. The only thing the audience does is pick a station out of a pool of only several hundred (at the most) choices. On the internet, at the average user's download time, the experience is fragmented and the choice is potentially limitless. It's a possibility that once everyone has broadband, we'll see more audio-only ads and interactive pop-ups, but the way web content is divided up in numerous pages that may be chosen in a nonlinear fashion seems to demand a completely different paradigm for advertising.
Probably, it will be increasingly difficult to get on the web without going through numerous ad-heavy pages since ISPs will consolidate into fewer, larger corporations that force ads on the user. I believe that the ISPs we must deal with for access will be more significant than the actual websites, and advertisers will use them more and more. Just look at the big rise in free internet that rely upon banners and pages you have to visit to keep on-line. It doesn't matter whether you visit Slashdot or the most backwaters website, you'll still have to face ads.
Has/have/will be mutilated by corporatization , greed, or the media. When each in turn has pissed me off to a certain level I decline to participate or utilize the medium. A website that abuses my visitation with unwanted content looses my eyeballs. A concert that is not given in an intimate theater environment looses my ticket sale. A TV or radio station that bombards me with ads gets muted or tuned out. I think that diminishing return traffic will dictate the end of this kind of gagbage. TV has no way to account for how many folks hit the mute button or switch channels, if it did I am sure there would be some changes made. The web however has the ability to show designers what happens when they include offensive content, their hit counts will drop and return traffic stats will take a seroius hit. It will eventually go the way of push technology, everyone remember PointCast? And it is not completely about bandwidth, it is about being bombarded with useless content. People will automatically gravitate towards the more pleasing sites, that means sites that load faster, don't display unwanted content, don't suck up available memory opening extra browser windows, etc.
Rick B.
The same forces apply in both scenarios. In most cases, the software not only has the hours of free time put into it, but a free web site to support it. So clearly it can be done.
For me, and my web site Poliglut it boils down to the 'love of the game' or 'gift culture' mentality. I enjoy politics, so I simply use the reading that I would already be doing as a boostrap to putting together a site. If people like it (and so far they seem to) great! I'll keep doing it. If not, that's ok to. Kind of like any one of dozens of open source projects. Most of them are junk. The few that are *really* good tend to be the ones put together by a passionate few.
--
Whine whine whine "I hate ads", "Ads suck" blah blah blah. OK then why doesn't everyone who hates ads send a few bucks to every web site they use? Why not also send some money to the TV stations you watch and the radio stations you listen to. Oh yeah, pay more for the bus you ride and the magazines you read. Oh you dont want to do that? Does that suck? Then shut up and deal with the advertising. Find something more usefull to bitch about.
Go ahead, set the score to -1 googolplex.
One of the features I like best about it is that it can block out cookies but lets you define sites from it will allow cookies to be set/sent. It will also remove referrers if you want it to
Another thing I use it for is to block out any goatse.cx links, they all go to 127.0.0.0 now.
This reminds me of Fahreinheit 451. One of the attributes of the "future-is-hell" society is that advertising was everywhere and had gone beyond unavoidable to being the only real form of entertainment. Specifically I remember a scene in which Guy is riding on some kind of mass transit (I think it was a train, it's been a while) and a song for something called "Denton's" came on. Everyone on the train started singing it, and enjoying it, but it was just the same lines over and over and over again...
The only careers you could make real money in were entertainment and advertising... But there was no different between them. This concept, frankly, terrifies me.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Are you a computer programmer? What if everyone became a computer programmer? Your garbage wouldn't be picked up. You wouldn't have food to buy at the supermarket.
Oh no, guess that means no one should be a computer programmer.
_Fuck_ ads, and _fuck_ the commercialization of the net. Sure, it's fucking awesome that "more people using computers"="more companies developing cool new shit"="cool new shit for real techs (or whatever the hell we should be referred to as, but you know what i mean)", but is it really worth it? Yes, I know that everybody's a newbie at some point, but there's also a shitload of newbies that never go any further than windows and yahoo chat. Do we really need these people encouraging the clogging of our bandwidth? I say _fuck_ them all, time to take back the internet that was created _by_ techs _for_ techs. They can have their MTV and their little lives, let us have the technology that _we_ understand and _we_ use to the fullest.
- [RFE] Backend support for all page prefs on a URL by URL basis
- [Feature] JavaScript auto-disable per-domain RFE
- Prevent repeating pop-up windows
Have fun!Cheers //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Lots of people are criticizing pop-up windows, their intrusiveness and waste of system resources. A website I've designed uses pop-ups to provide brief definitions and pieces of ancillary information without interrupting the flow of the parent page. I'd like to describe my use of pop-ups and find out whether they avoid the complaints here.
First of all, my pop-ups are backwards compatable. I use the code
page" onClick = "closeWin();openWin('page?popup=1','myWin'); return false;">
for links, where openWin opens a popup called myWin. But if Javascript is unsupported or turned off, or if you choose "open in new window," it's interpreted as an ordinary link.
closeWin() closes myWin, ensuring that no more than one instance of it will be open at any time. Additionally, the parent page contains the tag , so that it won't hang around after they move on.
So, is this an improvement? Would you accept this kind of popup?
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I use my c:\windows\hosts and /etc/hosts to resolve common banner-ad servers (ad.doubleclick.net) to 127.0.0.1 thereby rendering most pages i frequent with broken images where banner ads would usually appear. It's ugly, but the pages sure load faster...
Here's my hosts file:
http://chelsea.k12.mi.us/~rodent/files/hosts
-rodent
On a more depressing note, the present and future might be worse if no one were to sing at all. When's the last time you and your frinds acutally sang something? Do you know more than a few lines to a few stupid top 40 payolla tunes? Why bother to sing when you've got canned crap right?
To enjoy browsing more, turn off images and java.
To enjoy life more, turn off the browser, the computer, the TV, the radio, get outside and do something.
Damn, that's a quality movie. If you've only seen it once, and didn't like it, watch it again. I know at least 10 people (including myself) who didn't like it the first time, but now they think it's great.
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
Newspaper, radio, and television all fell to the persuasion of phat checks from advertising companies; it was inevitable that the 'net would also.
But consider this: it may be that soon we will have broadband access for free; paid for by the advertisements.
Whoever thinks this is the next form of advertising on the web is an absolute moron. Myself and nearly everyone else I know would instantly boycot any site that went to this form of advertising, and probably be so perturbed by it that we'd never even bother to check back and see if they had reformed their ways.
Porno sites must be lightyears ahead of the game when it comes to online marketing. Afterall, everyone who visits one just LOVES the 5 gazillion popup (pun intended) windows that surface. Even banner ads on regular pages are causing a window to popup now.
The reason most banner ads don't get clicked is simply because the creative sucks. I mean if you actually look at and read a few banners you can't even guess what the hell they are advertising in the first place. Taking that same lack of creative talent and putting it in a pop-up window isn't going to make it any more effective. Another problem is simply demographic: putting ads in front of an audience that doesn't care about whatever is being advertised.
So I think a novel new idea for web advertisers would be to create a few ads that send a clear message worth clicking on.
I use (under windows) a simple program, NoAds that close automatically the popup windows of ads, very cool! And easy to configure.
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"
The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.
The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.
Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.
Pogo already uses the methods described. When a game loads, it loads an ad first with a fake "loading game" status bar. After the prescribed 8-10 seconds, your game starts. I hate those ads because I remember them. The other method is the "commercial break." The game interrupts after a period of time or a set number of games. These are less effective. I will get up to raid the fridge, quit the game, use another browser, or simply stare at the countdown counter. These don't bother me as much. My biggest fear is as industry eventually shakes out the weaker competition, the ad owners will require these intrusive techniques. And guess what? They'll check if your browser is blocking and simply not load the page or play the game. They won't allow anonymous servers. There will be ways around, but contracts will prevent the less obtrusive methods in the near future.
----------------------
do
{
write_software(to_block_ads);
advertisers_come_up_with(new_ad_method);
} while (ads_still_exist);
Real-time indexing of the Internet coming soon!
Kord
OK kids, let's review the latest strategies from the advertisers...
Pop-up ads
Maybe these advertisers should take a lesson from Geocities: pop-up ads don't work. Nobody likes to go to a page, only to have a window with some flashing ad banner pop up. My reaction: close them and move on. Nowadays, I have Ad Filter (DISCLAIMER: Windows only) on my machine, which keeps the ads away from me.
Still, history has proven one thing: pop-ups simply don't work.
Interstitials and the such
Unless you're rich / at work or school / lucky, chances are, you're still stuck on a 56 K modem like the rest of us. Who wants to wait for some gigantic 2 MB Javascript ad to load, especially when you're putting along on a modem? It doesn't matter if it "quietly" loads in the background or not, it still sucks up the same amount of bandwidth. Not everybody has a cable modem or higher in their homes.
Conclusions
Why do advertisers think that big-ass Javascript ads are the way to go? Sure, we all grew up with ads on TV and the radio, but until around 1994 - 1995, the Internet was still commercial free. Not all of us grew up on a banner-filled Internet...and some of us who did grow up in one still don't like it.
PS: The channel link works. Neener.
--
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
1 Linux box
2 NICs
IP NAT (ipchains)
Squid
Redir script
works like a charm...
As an added bonus, several banner-laded windows shareware apps pull adds with html and are also subjected to ad block, leaving nice peaceful empty white squares ;-)
HOWTO/Starter scripts available at:http://taz.net.au/block/
Squid can be gotten from
http://www.squid-cache.org
The ads on normal non-porn/warez websites are really not that bad, you are just bitching too much. Try ie. some of the sites @ http://www.t50.com/ and then after 10 popups per page you know when ads are truly terrible.
"Endure for in enduring grows strong." -
Dak'kon/Plane Scape: Torment
AOL users are so aplenty and used to getting commecials crammed down their throats that a boycott would never work. Heck, you may actually be able to charge many of them to watch these new ads.
Seriously
More
I remember those. I haven't seen one since I started using Junkbuster :)
The first point you make, and the point you make most strongly, seems to be that Windows software is always significantly easier to install than comparible Linux software.
Let's assume for a moment that the following items are true:
Debian is the obvious choice. "apt-get install L" is significantly easier than "search web/search store; find product; buy; download/wait for CD; double click; next; next; next; next; next; next; Install; maybe Reboot".
Let's assume that in the above example it's not Debian/.deb but RedHat/.rpm
With rpmfind/freshmeat/etc it's still easier than the windows install. The linux install becomes "Search web; find package; download; rpm -i package.rpm"
Even with a source tarball it's pretty simple "search; find; download; ./configure; make; make install"
Your second point has to do with the avalibility of software for Linux vs. Windows. I'm not going to argue this point, but if you're basing your O/S choice entirely on the basis of the featurefullness of avalible web add filtering software, you deserve to be smacked.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I look forward to the people with the QuickBuck mentality going away soon.
I always said there's two types of people in this world. Those who make pop-up banner ads and those who close the window when it pops up. Alot of people are getting so used to ads that they don't even notice them anymore. I go out of my way to ignore them at all costs. An ad popping up in the middle of my browse is like an ignorant telemarketer that can't respond to the word NO. Sooner or later marketing "geniouses" will realize that annoying people just doesn't bring in the profit like they thought it would. That day my friend, I will go on a shopping spree of love. Until then, I'm shopping with 100% pure attitude.
"pop up windows" God, I hope not. Two weeks ago, for three days running. In IE, I had these really annoying Finlandia Vodka Ads throwing themselves up in my face while trying to get stuff done. If I had fully snapped, may have then held them responsible for my stress level going through the roof?
Or one could look at it like a penny arcade game. Remember the old orange guns with the cable attached you'd point at the screen....
Make THEM stop.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Just proxy the heck out of everything.
On another note, how about a spam auto-replyer that replys not with an email complaining about the spam, but instead hires and assassin to mame the spammer.
-Chris
Rubbish. Believe it or not the web extends beyond the borders of your country.
Wherever there's Disney, there's perpetual copyright. The Walt Disney Company buys puppet politicians in every major country and, every 20 years, lobbies for another 20-year extension to all subsisting copyrights.
But that's beside the point. The point I was trying to make was that web sites have to buy their content somewhere. Not only that, but they also have to pay Unisys for a license to display animated banner ads, as the patent-free alternative only works in recent Mozilla builds.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe the internet is just not meant for advertising, has anybody ever thought of that? You can't apply offline media advertising to online advertising and try to force them to be the same... just as you wouldn't try making a bicycle go at the speed of sound, as you would a jet.
The internet is full of leeches (myself included) who avoid ads at all costs. The net is non-linear. This fact alone is a HUGE disadvantage to online advertising. There's just no way to force someone to look at your ads for a predetermined period of time, unless you're providing streaming media.
Second, unlike traditional media, there's no barrier to entry. That's why you have millions of channels, and gadzillions of unsold advertising inventory. Too much supply, not enough demand. Therefore everything becomes a buyer's (advertisers) market, thus they're the ones who dictate terms of performance.
And how about competition. Since there's no barrier to entry, some guy far off in country XXX, who feels lucky to make $10 U.S. a month, can come online and compete for your dollar. You have to make $3000 a month at least to survive. He only needs $30. How are you going to compete against that?
Hard to believe? Just look at the online porn industry. That market has been over-saturated since about 2 years ago. I should know because I used to have a porn site myself. Things got so bad I was making $10 on 100,000 impressions. Then, if your click-throughs weren't productive enough (leading to enough sales, aka, conversion ratio), you were canned and payment was witheld.
Sadly, I see the non-porn industry headed for the same black hole.