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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."
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.
Turn off Javascript
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!
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
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
Here are some for Unix based Operating Systems. Here is one for Macintosh that still runs in OS 9.
Burn Hollywood Burn
We're there already. But its not even a few lines of a song that people are singing.
Its... "Wazzzzzzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuuup?"
Baz
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 think you're missing the point - which is that anythig that is a barrier to content, makes it more likely that said content won't be seen.
;) ) - and again, I've avoided the ads.
Content is what keeps people coming back. It's what's made the 'Net so popular, and what has kept it going. It's what the 'Net was made to convey.
Now - if you start sucking up bandwidth and time with super-obtrusive ads that can't be ignored - not only will bandwidth usage skyrocket (inflating 'net access costs along the way) but people WILL NOT feel obligated to buy your product. They'll be pissed that it took them another 1-5 minutes (depending on connection type) to access what they wanted to see.
People keep saying that it's "just like TV" to do this - I hate to bust bubbles, but it isn't -- I can turn on the TV at 8:00 - watch until 8:10 - turn off the TV for 3.5 minutes (7 30 second ads) - turn it back on, and watch till 8:20 - lather, rinse, repeat - and avoid 90% of the ads (I realize that this isn't an EXACT schedule - I'm just using it as an example).
I could also flip the channels as soon as an ad comes on, and watch something else for a couple of minutes (that's how we originally found Iron Chef
What they're proposing for 'net ads are COMPLETELY different - they subvert focus from your browser window (in the case of popups) [TV analogy: I turn to Food Network, the TV goes to Ad Channel 4 instead, until I change the channel a SECOND time], keep you from closing your browser (in the case of on-exit scripts) [TV analogy: I turn my TV off, but it instead changes to Ad Channel 2 - I again try to turn it off, and it instead changes to Ad Channel 5, ad nauseum], or worse, force you to view the ad before seeing the content (in the case of "interstitials") [TV analogy: I turn my TV to the SciFi channel, and it instead turns to Ad Channel 8 for 2 minutes, then changes to my desired channel].
The more barriers there are to the content, the more people who will simply get fed up with it and go elsewhere. I'm one of those people. Companies who use these forms of ads won't get my eyeballs. They'll get my anger and resentment.
Of course, I can't simply bash the concept without offering an alternative. Micropayment CAN work - they just have to figure out a way to do it right. People wouldn't mind paying a TINY payment to download their mp3s or read commercial news articles.
I won't lie - Free (speech) sites would always come first - but I definitely wouldn't mind a small payment for decent content.
I'm not quite sure about that but I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to make a free, ad-based ad blocking service. Afterall this is the new economy, you don't have to make any sense to get funding.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
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.
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.
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!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
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.
Sorry if I've rambled endlessly; the mention of preventing pop-ups reminded of the list I have here...
________________________________________________
suwain_2
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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"
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
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.
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What happens when you outlaw guns
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...
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.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Try FilterProxy...it does exactly what you describe, in perl.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
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.
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.
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