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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."
We're there already. But its not even a few lines of a song that people are singing.
Its... "Wazzzzzzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuuup?"
Baz
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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"
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...
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.
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.