Slashdot Mirror
Internet Ad Network Commentary
Jonas Acres writes: "Lowtax of the [in]famous Something Awful has posted a commentary on the future of Internet advertising. It's a pretty interesting read. He's bounced from dying ad network to dying ad network, so he has a decent platform to preach from." I've also had to deal with a number of ad networks over the years - both for Slashdot prior to the Andover acquisition and a couple of other projects. It definitely sucks. Companies that break contracts, don't pay you, and never getting any return phone calls or anything is the norm that I dealt with.
I run a large Age of Empires 2 fan site, and we have had our share of dealing with ad companies.
The main problem in trying to make money is not necessarily that banner ads don't bring in enough money, but that bandwidth costs so much.
We recently leased a second server from our hosting company only because we needed to extra bandwidth that came with the package. It will be nice in the future if bandwith costs are brought down further. That way, you would definitely see an increase in the number of "hobby" and "fan". Right now, if you grow too fast, you will pretty much run yourself out of buisness.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
In truth /. kind of has it right as most of the ads are very targeted (I said most and yes the anitrust ads were just awful) but many times the ads on /. are for stuff I might really look at and therefore my clickthrough rate here is many times what it is on other sites (one or two a month) and I don't mind seeing most of them. But some other sites (debianhelp.org) have some of the oddest ads for a tech site and I do block them through my firewall at home. So I think like most other mediums those that understand who they are talking to will continue to do fine and those who don't will either get a clue or go away.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
A successful internet venture will use this to their advantage - make your site a resource for people who also happen to be potential customers. That way, they track you down, not the other way around.
An example of a web site that does this well is Summit Racing. People can go there for information, and by the way find out all sorts of neat stuff they want to buy. If you try and search for information on racing equipment, you'll likely be led to that site. Lo and behold, you can order the stuff you discover you need right there...
Any information you try and force on people will just be filtered. Either by software, or by the person's brain. They'll skip to the information they actually want.
To put it another way, the best way to advertise is to provide useful content.
These people are often spending sizeable amounts of their own money to keep their site going for the sole purpose of entertaining the public.
Then these people are morons. I personally don't have anything worth saying that would have me parting with $2K every month, but if I did it would be valuable enough for me not to taint with some bad banner ads. That's quadruplely true if those ads only cover 25% of my expenses.
Blocking their ads is the rough equivalent of saying, "I want you to have to pay more so I can see your site every day."
No. Blocking their ads is the exact equivalent of saying, "I don't want to see your ads." There are better ways to advertise than banner ads, and ways other than advertising for a site to generate revenue. You are not allowed to blame the visitors because the tired old ad banner networks won't make you money anymore.
...or do you also blame me for not reading the newspaper ads?
I agree with you 100%, but I don't think the analogy works. Maybe a better one would be someone with a Tivo who tapes his shows and watches them later, fast-forwarding through the commercials. I don't feel guilty about doing that and I don't think anybody should. I also don't feel guilty about using Junkbuster. At a site I like (like Something Awful, I'll sometimes click on the blank banners just to give that webmaster the clickthroughs as a kind of "thank you."
I'll tell you this, though: I don't go around to all my friends talking about how everybody should use Junkbuster. If proxies that eliminate banner ads become prevalent on the 'net, I think advertisers are just going to come up with sneakier ways to force ads on us.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Yeah, but a dollar per click? You got some pages about turning lead into gold or something?
Where's the beef?
I'm surprised that the bulk of the discussion here is along the lines of "How can we make advertising work on the internet?". This question presupposes that advertising on the internet is a good thing. Not to sound patronizing, but this is the real question that should be up for debate.
For someone who is bombarded by advertising every day, it may be difficult to see it for what it really is. Subtle mind control, 2nd generation corporate propaganda, a full-scale assault on free will. This may sound paranoid and extremist, but really think about it. Advertising is not informational- it does not appeal to your powers of logic.
In addition to the inherit problems with advertising, online advertising results in spam and privacy violations (in the name of "audience targetting").
I don't think it's at all obvious that we should publish designer disinformation in order to publish real information.
What does advertising give us? Is it worth the cost? Is there really no other way to finance information? I would dearly hope that the answer to this last question is no. Every once in a while I hear someone mention the idea of micropayments. I know that I would pay small amounts of money in lieu of watching advertising. Advertising *does* cost you- it's not really free. You might as well pay for it up front where you can see all of the costs, and make decisions based on reason.
Actually, even with a little thought, most of jakob's statements are reasonable, although his metrics are flawed, in particular the concept that an ads effectiveness is measurable upon click-throughs is false. No offense folks, but I do NOT immediately get up and run to a dealer just because I saw an ad on TV. (And I suspect that the TV's effectiveness in this regard is FAR less than 5%.)
Frankly, I've bought from ThinkGeek and I see their ads quite a bit. The ads keep ThinkGeek in the forthought of my mind, but I don't go buying stuff just because I saw an ad.
Well this is admittedly a comparative measure. When I started out online, there was no such thing as spam. That rapidly changed, until at one point I was getting 20-30 spams/day! Now I get maybe five per week, across all of my accounts. I am confident that by this time next year, that number will drop to 1/week.
Usenet spam is down too, amazingly. Truth is that any actual company has learned (often the hard way) that spam hurts them. The only spammers left are a few die-hard fly-by-night operators who are looking for that one remaining sucker, and are finding him (the sucker) harder to discover.
OK, it ain't _quite_ dead. It's on its way out, though.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it is better. The internet was just fine in its pre-ad days. I don't remember people complaining that there wasn't enough content. As a matter of fact, I seems that more and more people complain about the LACK of content lately. I am not suggesting that it is directly related to advertisement, but commercialization has certainly led to a cold and impersonal internet. The content to fluff ratio has gone WAY down.
I can think of plenty of useful sites that don't rely of advertising for income. And for those useful sites that rely on advertising... If it is really that useful, I will pay for it (Online travel agencies, map making ala Mapquest, and even slashdot.) Its like TV, I am getting increasingly annoyed by commercial interuptions in my viewing experience. I will eventually either give up TV altogether or pay for cable and only watch uninterupted programs (HBO shows, movies, etc).
Yes, I REALLY want the internet to revert back to it's pre-ad days.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
During the few times that I ever clicked on a banner ad, just to see what the site was pointing to, I came away feeling that I had wasted my time.
The problem is that sites pointed to by the banner ads are filled with such garbage and useless stuff such as MORE banner ads to click on, "You can't see this until you pay $xx.xx", "Keep clicking until you win a prize!", etc.
What bugs me is that it takes so much WORK just to find out what they're selling. If only they'd just say upfront what they're offering, offer interesting content, etc. Then maybe I'd click on banner ads more often.
Another reason why I avoid banner ads is because they often lead to spam traps and windows that endlessly respawn another window if you try to close them, filled with garish ugly flashing animations, java scripts that are guaranteed to annoy the hell out of you.
Why? Why trap me? After all, I *did* click on your banner ad, didn't I? I might've been interested to see what you were selling, but you've just pissed me off enough that I don't want to see anymore!
It just doesn't make sense to piss off your visitors, then cry, "Wahhh! Banner ads aren't working!" if noone clicks on your ads anymore.
Be nice. Be friendly. Offer interesting and meaningful stuff if someone were to click on your banner ad. More importantly of all, don't piss them off. And for god's sake, don't force people to wait or fart around until they get to the REAL stuff (such as fluffy intro flash animations, etc.)
My attention span is *VERY* short. If I don't find anything meaningful within 10 seconds, I close the window. Design your web site around that. Be creative.
Of course, it would be only a small matter of time before the value of a click-through would be driven way down, since advertisers would realize that the feature was the online equivalent of an automatice TV commercial squelcher. But would the world be worse at that point? :-)
I have a healthy attention span. When I get on the internet to do something, I do it. I read the article or retrieve the information. I don't want to a) fill my screen with excess browser windows, b) lose my place in my current task, or c) forget what it was that I originally was looking for by clicking on a banner and reading that. Call me unamerican, but I don't want to be distracted. So, I don't click those banners, never have, never will. No matter how interesting they might look. But at the same time I am mildly annoyed that they are there to begin with...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Right now, the current paradigm is that advertisers make shitty ads, and the web hosts suffer because no one clicks on the shitty ads. The web host goes under, so people assume that internet ads don't work. WRONG. You need to make your ads compelling enough to drive response rate. If you're not getting click-through, it doesn't mean that the web host isn't doing their job ... they shouldn't have to BEG for clicks just to pay the bills. It means your AD isn't doing it's job.
Sales for ads should go like this: The advertiser pays x amount for posting the ad on your site per month (determined by average traffic, just like the networks), and an additional nickel per click commission. This is fair to the web host (who needs to increase their reader base to get more "guaranteed" money) and to the advertiser, who only pays more when they are getting customers.
My point is, the onus should NOT be on the web host, but on the advertiser, just like it is everywhere else.
And please ... stop thos friggin' ads that look like system notifications, and pop-up windows. That's what's souring net users on Ads.
And how long before a browser / proxy that prevented that from happening would occur?
Where, exactly, is the promise to anyone that creates a web site that they should be able to "make a return on their investment", especially a monetary return?
No one's saying that. But if they don't, thier site ceases to exist, regardless of how much people liked it or visited it.
Are you saying that's a good thing?
I'm working with a group that has put up a site purely for the hope of getting our work out there.
That implies that you're running a website simply as a hook to get you a higher paying job. And for what traffic you're going to get, a geocities site would give the required bandwidth (not that I'm saying use them - they suck now worse than ever - but if all you're worried about is getting your work out there, you don't need to pay for a colocation service because your website takes up too much bandwidth). When/if your site gets too many visitors for your current setup to handle, what do you do? High bandwidth colocation can cost anywhere from $2000-$4000 a month, and that's at the low end. Do you propose to pay that out of your own pocket(s)?
The web started as a medium with relatively free information dispersal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and when I was young a bag of chips cost $0.35, and arcade games still cost $0.25, and video games were *real* video games, and you could still play Pac-man ripoffs in the arcade instead of todays street fighter ripoffs.
Get over it.
Web hosting *costs money* today. And there are *alot* more people on the net now than there were 10 years ago. A moderately successful site can suck up alot of bandwidth. The money to pay for that has to come from *somewhere*. If ads don't work, what does? Or should the site like somethingawful simply cease to exist when it gets too big?
There seems to be this overwhelming mentality anymore that just by having a web presence you should be entitled to make money. It doesn't matter if your site sucks. It doesn't matter if you have absolutely no clue how to attract people.
This isn't about
Of course, having said all that I would say it is just a matter of time before the government cracks down on all this illegal software that blocks web ads.
Hardly. Sites will just go pay per view. Internet advertising can work - it just doesn't right now because not enough effort or research is done into it.
Of course, targetted advertising on the net is taboo here, which puts internet advertising further behind television.
I just don't quite get why it's so important that when you pay for your web connection, some people are even paying for bandwidth, you should still have to pay for content.
So, run this by me again - because I pay for my car to drive to the store, and I pay for the shoes I use to walk into the store, then I shouldn't have to pay for anything in the store?
--
I think the problem with advertising on the internet, is that everyone is advertising their own site in the banners - there is rarely any real "substance" behind them.
If money is to be made, then we need to see more 'real' advertisments on the internet, and less of the standard junk services that people are trying to push into your face. When was the last time you saw a Mars Bar or Coca Cola being advertised in a banner?
Advertising just needs to look at the model used in television, you don't just see adverts for other TV channels - this is purely the internet method. No, you see advertisments for washing powers, cloths, consumables, household objects. Real stuff that you can touch and feel.
Until the internet reaches this level of advertising, it'll still be an immature media.
Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
I shudder to think of flights in a few years: a nonstop 3 hour ad! Yikes!
It's now possible to prevent tracking while still seeing banner ads--for example, Netscape 6's ability to allow or disallow cookies on a site-by-site basis.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I'm a lot more likely to click through an ad on /. than most other places, but even when I see something that catches my attention, I often don't click on it. It just gets filed away somewhere in my mind until I'm actually looking for the advertised product or service, at which time I'm more likely to remember that company and pay them a visit. I see the ads more like billboards on the side of the road. Sure I don't look at them all the time, but sometimes they make an impression and get some business for that company somewhere down the road.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Let's take the case of a site I run (http://www.urateit.com). The site's purpose is allowing readers to review infomercial products. It's not a very high-traffic site, but it costs me around $400 a year to maintain and doesn't supply any income. Advertising wouldn't help at all. (I fall below most ad network's "minimum page view" requirements.) I was toying with adding a "toss a nickel in the jar" PayPal link, but I'm guessing I'd get next to nothing that way either.
As it happens, I run this site with a friend of mine. We split the costs. He's always telling me that I should sell some of the products that we review. But, in my mind, once I do that, the reviews become tainted. I figure journalistic integrity demands that reviewer not have a commercial stake in the reviewed product.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about those who say that sites should find a way to make money without advertising or get off the 'Net. They obviously don't have a site of their own, or only have a free Geocities page. Besides banner ads, the only ways of a site staying afloat, are selling products, or "teaming up" with a big conglomerate that doesn't mind the slow $$$ leak the site represents. Selling products isn't guaranteed (and in some cases can be bad for a site's reputation) and the thought of all web sites being owned by huge companies just makes me shudder. (Imagine if Slashdot were to become a gobbled up by AOL-TIME-WARNER in order to stay afloat.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh, I dunno, in some ways the web was a lot better when this was still true.
The NSF?
And no matter how many times I punch/zap the monkey, I never get 20 actual real US dollars. False advertising at its finest.
Huh? And how old is anon.penet.fi? I remember it being around at least a decade ago.
Actually, a large portion of the interesting sites on the web would die without banner ads.
Come to think of it, a large portion of the sites on the web would die.
Without support from ads, every free web hosting service would be GONE. All those sites that offer free space to upload stuff to? (ie nbci sharehouse, idrive, etc) They're gone too! The list goes on and on...
Then there are the sites like SomethingAwful. Lowtax spent a *lot* of time on that site, and counted on the ad income in order to make it all worthwhile. IMO, this was one of the best sites on the web, and it may be gone now, because of the lack of payment.
Penny-arcade recently talked about this, how if they weren't going to get paid, they wouldn't be able to do the site anymore, I imagine most web comics would be the same.
Think andover would keep Slashdot up if there were no income from banner ads? I doubt it.
The point is here, that just about every site that requires the author(s) to put any substantial amount of time into it is USUALLY counting on the banner ad income. Taking that away, (as we're currently seeing with SA) in more cases than not, leads to the death of the site.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Look, yes, most of the companies suck big-time. But it's amazing that the /. culture is happy to come out and say "Banner ads don't work" based on their experience. It's like me saying "Linux doesn't work" because I was stupid enough to make my first newbie install attempt w/ slackware and I couldn't work out how to fix it.
Repeat after me: Click-throughs != effectiveness
1) Internet advertising can build brand. It's proven.
2) Internet advertising can generate a consumer response. That's proven too.
3) Building brand and generating response are two different objectives, requiring different strategies and - most of all - different means of measuring effectiveness.
Hardly Ph.D material. Yet even usually sane commentators such as the Industry Standard still point to declining click-through rates as an indicator that banners don't work. They obviously haven't read the recent AdKnowledge study which notes a slight *negative* correlation between customers who click-through and customers who buy.
If you need to know why clicks don't work, have a look at Rex Briggs' excellent (and brief) admonition: "Abolish Click-through Now!"
http://www.iab.net/conference/ny99/ abolish.html
If you're still thinking that online advertising doesn't work *at all*, you should probably check out the massive Online Advertising Effectiveness study led by Briggs for Milward Brown Interactive:
http://www.mbinteractive.com/site/iab/ exec.html
This is one of the largest advertising effectiveness surveys conducted in *any medium*, and if you're still listening to Nielsen sprouting his unsubstantiated opinions on this topic, you need your head examined.
- Danny
That's really interesting, I had exactly the same problem. The "Download for free" text is a muted gray that doesn't stand out at all (at least on Netscape 4.7), and the image link does look like it's just a pretty picture, especially since it's surrounded by other non-clickable images. You're right, Apple of all companies should know better than this.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Current trends dictate the end of the banner ad networks that cost X$ per CPM. They produce little or no benefit to the advertiser and just annoy most users.
And now that most Web browsers (except Microsoft's) allow the automatic refusal of 3rd party cookies, tracking networks like DoubleClick are also endangered. Because without Cookie tracking they are just like the dwindling banner ad networks.
BTW, this doesn't mean that Macromedia won't get some companies to buy into their alliance. Those companies just won't gain much. Flash and Shockwave cause more people to leave a site than stay. See:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
for more info.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
I think most of these posts can be summerized thusly:
1) An individual has no obligation or duty to view banner ads. I have no obligation or duty to support the sites I view if they offer their services for free.
and
2) I have a buddy who does a lot of work on a site and he doesn't make any money so you are stealing the sweat of his labor by blocking (or even not clicking) on the banner ads on his site.
Pick your favorites.
Do you ever feel like there are people watching you? You're not alone.
iptables is much better at blocking packets from *.flycast.com then ipchains was =)
I am !amused.
Well, we have discussed it a bit (the group). Probably, since our web site is just an outlet for the group (and the group is really a band) we will probably use the small amount of money we generate from selling band memorabilia and (when we get the proper equipment) CDs and such.
Our web site is an addition to our band, and as such, we don't see it as a revenue generating thing. It's just something we do. And our band is extremely non-profit oriented. Any money we make at anything, shows, T-shirts sales, picture sales, goes right back into the band. And when we are earning more than we spend on the band, here's a kicker for ya, we drop prices. Granted, we don't sell a lot of stuff yet, but what we do sell we try to be fair about.
Our whole band is a labor of love. And the idea that we are going to try to "turn a profit" on any part of it seems silly to us. We're family people with day jobs, and if the web site becomes "too" popular, we will find other ways to fund it. We aren't going to resort of web advertising. That was a decision we made a long time ago.
------------
I think his assumption is a sub-assumption of "Advertising makes advertisers money," which is itself a dubious assumption. I used to work for an ad agency, and no one there was ignorant enough to believe that. Advertising, at best, does two "good" things: 1) Inform people who would buy a product anyway if they knew it existed that it does in fact exist, and 2) Make brandX = productX (like Coke = carbonated beverage or Xerox = photocopier or RHAT = Linux) to a small degree in the minds of the gullible. Usually, it just makes money for ad agencies and sellers of ad space/time.
But, on the internet, where the advertiser can monitor (some of) the effectiveness of an ad directly (click-through rate), advertisers can see that advertising doesn't do as much for them (directly) as ad agencies and time/space sellers had led them to believe. So, the move on the internet will be away from "measurable impact" (banners) to "presence" (interstitials, etc.)--not because we're blocking and ignoring ads (we've always done that), but because it's easier to delude an advertiser about the cost/benefit of "internet presence" than about a
Advertising has been "found out" by the internet. It will release some squid ink and re-conceal itself. All will go on as before. The commercial net will be saved (but made very annoying). Woohoo.
(Or something like that (I just got out of bed)).
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Sites that run Flash or streaming-whatever tend to break on things like *BSD or *linux* or BeOS or (insert your non Windows or Mac)
Let 'them' load up such crap....until 'they' support *BSD or *linux*, they won't reach the people who use such OSes.
Oh no! They're alienating upwards of 3% of the desktop market! Those bastards -- when will they learn that they're losing TENS of dollars in revenue because people on FreeBSD can't hear their audio banner ads?
To even suggest that BSD and Linux users constitute a target market for most sites out there (we're talking general interest sites -- not ones that cater to Power Users specifically) is just a fallacy.
For more information, click here.
Despite the few exceptions most .coms aren't worth the servers their run from. The biggest problem regarding their demise is probably the false expectations they've gotten concerning their future. The guys who really get screwed during this whole upset IMO would be the bluesnews/voodooextreme/shugashack crowd. People who took a passion they had, and magically turned it into bread and butter money. That was always part of the magic of the web for me. I'd like to go on record that I'd subscribe to those sites (as well as slashdot) if it came to that. You've got to support the conent you enjoy, how else can you expect it to stick around?
Forget the pretty pictures, I want the words.
Being a bit impatient, I mostly use Lynx. That's a text browser, useful on a dial-up.
More often than not, the websites I notice are, like Slashdot, mainly textual in content.
Making your text informative enough for my bare notice would probably vastly improve GUI clickthroughs as well.
It'd help to include enough text to tell me what on Earth you're advertising.
I mean, this page whence I submit leads with "Click here to test drive!". Cool. Test drive what?
Were I in the market for an upgrade, and browsing with text because I didn't want to wait to wait forever for the graphics to render, here's an ad I'd be sure to miss.
And you wonder why those state of the art graphics generate zilch?
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
I don't think this is valid. Why would advertisers what people who don't want to see their ads to see their ads? They aren't going to buy anything anyway.
What's the difference between a viewer who ignores ads and a viewer who blocks the ad and doesn't see it? Nothing - in both cases there is no click-through, no payment, no purchase.
I think one of the reasons people who watch TV accept the commercials (often even on channels they are paying for) is that, although the ads are intrusive/disruptive, they don't affect the way you consume the rest of the content.
/. I'm thinking much more about that portion of the web, coming at us pretty soon I think (or at you in the US anyway), that is very rich-media and very high-bandwidth, and which I think will be where Jane Average Consumer spends a lot more of her time than on static-info pages.
/.'s future. But even then, I think people should get into better design and less "click click click" mania. After all, magazine ads are extremely easy to ignore, even the full-page ones, but it's still a highly effective form of advertising, and one that attracts both higher-ticket and higher-quality advertisers.
You see the ad, you pay attention to something else or run to the kitchen for a drink, or whatever - or, maybe you really watch it, if it is visually compelling (as many good TV ads are).
And although there are certainly those ads that want you to make a phone call and order a Widge-o-Matic or Sonny Bono's Greatest Hits, it seems to me that the majority, and certainly the best/most-expensive of the TV ads aren't really asking you to do something immediately. Buy a car, get a hamburger, order Pepsi instead of Coke, quit smoking, what have you -- but generally not in the middle of the show you're watching.
Internet ads, however, seem very much stuck in the world of asking for (sometimes even forcing) some immediate consumer action, such as the "clickthrough" or, in the case of those annoying popup ads, at least closing the window. And to make matters worse, they very often _do_ change the rest (non-ad) part of the experience... and when they at least try to be non-intrusive (like banner ads or google's text ads) then they are extremely easy to ignore. At least with TV ads, the advertiser can expect that, no matter how banal the advertisement is, some percentage of viewers will simply be too lazy to divert their attention, so the ad content will at least get some basic exposure.
So where else might we go with net.adverts? I know a lot of people would disagree, but I think the TV ad model would simply work better and be less annoying. Say, you click on the link and you go to the page but there is some kind of introduction ad. And linking around within a site would not give you a new ad every time, but every once in a while, or maybe when you left the site. Since it's the net, you would probably have the opportunity to click something and go buy some widgets, but the focus would be on compelling ads to build brand identity, etc.
Of course this makes little sense for mostly text-informational sites like
So maybe print advertising (magazines, newspapers) is the better analogy for today's web and
I'm actually pretty optimistic about advertising as a source of revenue for web sites, but I think it's going to be a very tough couple of years before the advertisers and the content providers find a way of fine-tuning existing (effective) models to the web (of which project both banner and popup ads are dismally incompetent examples).
And finally: I rarely watch TV (once every couple months), but not because of the ads - rather because of the low-quality content.
This Like That - fun with words!
Forgot to mention that all the search engines would be gone too. Who would put all that money into something that they won't get any income from?
... and the online news services. (so if the lack of banner ads don't kill slashdot, maybe the lack of links will?)
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I was reading a few weeks ago that most people agree banner ads are mostly useless at this point. 90% (or higher!) simply ignore them.
The future for advertising on the internet is to make it more like television and radio where the program (or in this case the web page) is interuppted by an ad. Example: You are reading an article at nytimes.com, after about 5 minutes or so the web page redirects you to another page which is entirely an ad. You're forced to watch it (some flash animation perhaps) for 10 - 15 seconds then it brings you back to the article.
Most people won't stand for this you say? Well, what if we're not given a choice. Companies will simply adopt this form (or something similar) of advertising without giving us a choice. There was a time before banner ads when most people thought that any ad on a web site was silly.
I "surf" the net for almost 10 years, and I clicked less than 10 times on a banner in my life, so it's one click per year... /. or bebits or benews or whatever site to make them some cash, to support them and their good site, but I never read the ad, I close it. On "big" site, I never clicked a banner.
I sometimes click some banners on site like
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
This was reported a few days ago on dotcom scoop Over the last eight months, more companies have gone out of business faster than anyone anticipated. Why? Because banner ads don't work. Now the big media companies are starting to realize this and are coming up with evil solutions to fix the sagging click-through rates. Recently, Real Media has begun streaming audio in with their banner ads, so when you load up a page, the banner will start spewing out reasons for you to click it. Sounds awful, huh? But it works. With a network average of %0.45 click-through rate (that's .45 clicks per 1000 banners displayed) advertisers are running for the hills.
The audio ads are getting over a %5.00 CTR. So, look for even more annoying and intrusive ads coming your way soon.
http://www.stilenet.com - email: stile@stileproject.com
I'm sort of reminded of the Denis Leary commercials he did for IBM some years back where he yells at the idealistic kids who kept saying things like business shouldn't have anything to do with the internet. Although, in hindsight, I'm sure many businesses were wishing they had left the internet alone.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
>
> Oh, I dunno, in some ways the web was a lot better when this was still true.
I was about to just agree blindly with you (I remember that time), and then it hit me. I'm surprised nobody's thought of this before.
Suppose you put up a site as a labor of love. It grows, ad-free, by word of mouth, because your content r00lz - "content is king!" - until it starts to cost serious cash to pay for the bandwidth. It's basically a Slashdot effect with dollars, and bits-per-month, not hits-per-second.
What happens when a site is Slashdotted? It gets mirrored.
What's the analogy to Laybor Olove mirroring his site? Getting his friend Mirr Roar to mirror it for him.
Now you've got two identical sites paying half of what Laybor was gonna hafta pay. If that's beneath their ISPs' "$10/month flat rate", the site remains free.
More people like the site? More people replicate its content. More people mirror it.
Freenet.
I think I've found the "killer app" for Freenet beyond pr0n, DeCSS and mp3z.
It'll take a while for bandwidth to catch up and Freenet to scale to this level, but I think there's something at least semi-useful in the idea of end users independently replicating preferred content.
I don't get this. Why on earth do you have the right to view something that has cost people time and money to produce, for free? These people don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it for a living. All you have to do to pay for it is look at advertising. Don't want to buy something? Don't. You've done your part by watching the ads in the simpsons, or reading about bawls at the top of this page (well it's usually bawls, gimme a break).
You do not have the right to free information. If i work hard at something that costs me money, I at least expect to make that money back, and if you take it from me without giving me anything in return, I will be pissed.
And so would you be if I did it to you, and rightfully so.
And don't tell me that stealing information is different to stealing a car, it's not. Say you steal a song on napster. The song now has less value for it's rightful owner. "But I wouldn't have paid for it anyway" you cry? Crap. You're willing not only to break the law, but you're willing to pay for it, you're willing to pay bandwidth, you clearly are willing to give some thigns up in order to hear that song, so it had value to the person who's trying to sell it in the record store, and you've robbed them of the value of the cd as sure as you strolled in and held a gun to the pimply faced bloke behind the counter.
</rant>
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
... and the reason the web is so popular now is because of all the great sites.......
THAT ARE FUNDED OFF OF ADVERTISING! (GASP!)
Do you *really* want the internet to revert back to it's pre-ad days? Think that one through a bit.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
So perhaps web content services will move in that direction. For $30/month, you get Yahoo, Slashdot, CNN, Salon, and 200 other web pages you don't care about.
We already have that with the, um, adult verification services. I pay $15 per year for access to one, um, image-laden site that I visit frequently and twenty others that I never look at.
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
- 90% of them look like they were slapped together in 2 minutes. A cheap-looking ad does not inspire confidence in the quality of the site behind the link. Every ad I remember clicking on looked like it was made by a professional graphic artist. Yes, computers are capable of displaying more than 16 colours.
- No originality. Oh look, someone else is trying to make their ad look like a Windows dialog box. It was cool the first time, now I just ignore them.
- Animated garbage to catch our attention. Whether they be dancing credit cards, animation in a fake windows dialog box, or just a flashing background -- almost all animation is there just to get my attention. Well, it works -- I say, "my god that's annoying", and scroll down the page without a second thought.
- Misleading messages. Click the fast-moving object and win a prize! Okay, maybe this belongs under item 2.
- Unclear messages. A surprising number of ads don't give enough of an idea what you'll get by clicking. In the beginning, this was a marketing tactic -- "hmm, I wonder what this means... maybe I'll check it out." I admit, I did it myself. Now, it's so common, it's not worth our time to look at every obscure ad.
- Dislike of interruption. Unlike traditional media, the internet is interactive. While surfing, I have a "plan", if you will. I know where I want to go next -- and it's not to that advertiser's web site. The ad has to be more interesting than the other content on the same page. It doesn't help that most ads cause the page I'm currently reading to disappear.
- Lack of other interesting ads. If 98% of the ads aren't worth my attention, my eyes will be trained to automatically ignore the ad.
- Untargeted ads. A corollary to the above, most of the ads I have zero interest in even if I did notice them. Online casinos, credit cards, some shareware program -- I'm not interested in any of these things.
- Perception that ads are annoying. Corollary 2: popup windows, animated visual pollution, and the rest of the above -- all contributing to the notion that ads are a scurge that should be ignored.
And that's just what came to the top of my head at the moment.Well, look at it this way. If you could spend $2000 of your own money every month without banner ads to have other people look at your stuff or $1500 with banner ads, which would you prefer? These people are often spending sizeable amounts of their own money to keep their site going for the sole purpose of entertaining the public.
They're not in it for the money, either, or else they wouldn't be spending their own just to keep their site up! Blocking their ads is the rough equivalent of saying, "I want you to have to pay more so I can see your site every day."
I consider that to be evil, evil, evil.
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I subscribe through MSTAR, which is a service that charges the standard market price for access. When I first installed their software to create my account, they loaded a client-side content filtering program, an older version of Netscape, and an always-present application launching bar. After logging in through the front-end software, I tried opening Explorer. Within a couple of seconds, it closed down. I tried opening a newer version of Netscape next, and it closed after a couple of seconds also.
I decided that I didn't want tojans dictating which applications I could and couldn't use on my personal computer, so I ran RASSPY on the software to get my *real* user name and password, uninstalled all of their software (and afterwards, I had to manually delete a few directories their software so kindly left behind), and created a new internet connection.
A couple of days later, as I was happily browsing away, and I was surprised to find, at the bottom of every web page, two banners advertising MSTAR and a site related to it. Luckily, there was a link at the bottom which would disable the banner for 5 minutes at a time. I found that it simply called a script with an argument of '5'. I changed my browser's home page setting to call that same script with an argument of '32000'.
I also downloaded and installed The Proximator, to finish the job up of eliminating all signs of commercialization from my personal browsing experience.
I would really appreciate it if companies that charge for service, like MSTAR, would just charge my account every month, and then leave me alone.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
1. If you want me to pay for information, make me pay for information. It's not like all those thousands of people reading somethingawful.com are hacking their way in.
2. If you want to get me to read ads by providing interesting content, join the club. That's what newspapers, radio & tv do.
3. No one, in the long term, has, "done their part", by watching ads. To carry your analogy further, why on earth do you have the right to watch an ad that cost time & money to produce without buying something??
Do you buy products you hear advertised on the radio out of sympathy for the radio station?
No, I didn't think so.
It always comes back to money doesn't it?
You probably have no interest in hearing this but our site is built for the group (a band) to display other things they are interested in. Our band is completely non-profit, and our hope is to generate just enough interest to have people occasionally ask us for more.
While I realize no one out there believes it is possible in this day and age to do something just for the love of doing it (I have a day job and other monetary income, this I do for love of music, writing and whatever else I feel like doing), this is exactly what Faulty Dreams is all about.
Now, having said that, I personally don't think you are interested in sincere discussion about people that are wanting to just get things "out there". You obviously don't understand the concept if all that it brings to mind is a desire to make more money.
Our group/band is not something that will have massive appeal. We knew that going into it. And that is the situation I was addressing. There are more people like me out there, whatever other words you try to push into my mouth. This isn't about money to me. Now, for those that do want to generate money, hey, like you I say go for it. But don't expect that people are going to go out of their way to hand you their wallet. You need to earn the money you generate (one of the reasons we aren't trying to earn money with our site). That means hard work, coming up with a way to draw in people and a way to make those people part with some of their hard earned cash.
And your correlation of web access to shoes doesn't quite seem appropriate. If you put something up without a positive way of generating revenue (as suggested, a pay-per-view arrangement), then you get what you get and there isn't much you can do about it. You can complain if you want, but the burden to come up with a way to earn money should be up to the people trying to earn the money, not the people wishing to view the content that person put up. If that makes me a whiny fuck, then so be it. I don't really see why people owe anyone unless they are told, "TO VIEW THIS SUBMIT YOUR CREDIT CARD FOR PAYMENT". That will probably ultimately be the way it goes for a lot of sites.
But the whole idea that you are owed a living just because you put up a web site is ridiculous. Of course, so is the idea that anyone would want to do something just for the joy of doing it. I guess I should know better.
------------
The problem with advertising is not what people see or do not see, it is whether or not they can recall that ad an hour, a day, a week later. You may sit through an ad on television out of pure lazyness, but can you recall every ad you saw during your 1/2 hour Buffy program? You may remeber one ad though. That ad was successful. I have been talking all morning with my co-workers about the new "Goldfish" ad which states Goldfish, "are the snack that smiles back, until you bite there heads off" If advertisers can figure out a way to make banner ads more effective then they will succeed.
Cox Johnson
P.S. I can't spel
I ran a 2-line BBS this way from late 89 to mid-92. I got enough money from voluntary contributions to pay for the extra phone lines and for occasional hardware upgrades. This wasn't a huge system - I had just under 1000 registered users and about 100 regulars. I did offer a few incentives to get people to pay: paying members got their download quotas disabled, 90 minutes max connection instead of 60, and got their name up on the contributiors page. Not really that much of an incentive, but it worked. Most of the money I collected went to Ma Bell, but I had enough left over for hardware upgrades and even to throw an occasional party for my users.
Let's look at the expenses for a hypothetical web site: say $50,000 initial hardware investment, $5000 a month for bandwidth/co-lo, and salaries for a staff of 3 [a techie, a writer, and an artist; ideally each person wears at least 2 of these hats] at $8000 a month each. This comes out to about 400k per year operating expenses.
With an active readership of 100,000 you would need an average of $4 per year per user to cover expenses. There are several ways you could raise this. Under the public TV model, you could offer membership + a goodie (branded coffee mug, tee-shirt, etc) for a $25 donation. Figuring $5 cost for the goodie, this would mean you'd need to get about 20% of your active readers signed up as sponsors. This certianly seems doable.
Using affiliate programs for sponsored, targeted links (like a link to buy the book/game/whatever you are reviewing) would give you another way to cover expenses. Let's say you do one book review a week. 100,000 readers times 52 reviews is a lot of opportunities to sell a book. If you get $1 commission off of each sale, you'd need to get about 8% of the people who read a given review to buy the product.
Granted, you won't get rich under this scheme, but that's not the idea anyway. The idea is to let a small group of people make a decent living running a website.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
from the article: when was the last time you saw an ad banner you WANTED to click on to find out more information?
this is one of the biggest problems on the web. with or without demographics, you should have a general idea of what your clients are like. if they're computer savvy, it's pretty stupid trying to trick them with the "catch the monkey" mentality...
from post#143: What does advertising give us?
Advertising CAN support otherwise free services on the web. Not all services make money, some of them DO pay for it out of their own pocket. But some don't have anything in their own pockets. And that's not counting all the people employed to work with all the advertising stuff, including those IT folks who write scripts for trackers. What advertising gives you might not be something you want, but it DOES give you something.
from post#38:
I have to agree with that, as in fact the last I saw that I *did* want to click on, was right here at Slashdot. Banners that get to the point, and are even on occasion funny...
many people filter ads, with programs, or just turning images off in their browser. this is your right as a consumer, and also in the best interests of the seller, as if you don't want the ads, you're hardly going to click on them.
from post#56 (a guy with several clues): Part of the problem lies with the complete saturation of our lives with advertising.
A very large part of consumer apathy when it comes to advertising of all kinds.
from post#23: Today's ads don't just inform us of a product's existence; they also prey on our minds with flashing text, glitzy graphics, buzzwords by the dozen, and little white lies.
Today's consumer is not waiting to be impressed, they're waiting for information. true information. they can certainly do without the sirens and blinding lights, they know you're there, if they're ignoring you, there's probably a reason.
from post#27: Anywhere else except on the web, if a company wants to get money by annoying people, and those people blatantly ignore the company, it's the company's fault.
generally speaking, it's very stupid to annoy a potential customer, a seller wants them to do them a favour by buying from them... so putting them in a negative mood is against their own best interests... but there's plenty of stupid to go around... just look at all the spam... (and funnily enough, living in Australia I have no use for your $10 off doctors appointments in the USA... learn how to target your market people!)
from post#29: Why do they even HAVE to advertise on the Internet?
advertisers don't HAVE to, but there's always someone out there short of money, who'll rent their portion of cyberspace... supply and demand are important...
from post #32: Macromedia is trying to promote shockwave to make adverts more compelling.
more compelling? or slower to load? big mistake. I'm sick enough of all the flash-only entries on websites already, I see one flash ad and I'll be closing that window quicker than ya can say "annoyed". I speed read, I speed scroll, but I can't speed flash up, and I won't wait for it.
from post#78: The real change of how ads work on the internet will come when a third party non-computer related company begins to take market share away from the market leader through effective web ads
We're still waiting on effective web ads, so we may be waiting awhile for this one. But if it happens, it will make a huge change. The biggest problem with all advertising is the ROI (Return on Investment)... are they really worth the money you pay? and according to the figures, no. A click-through ad is relying on you stopping what you are doing right now, and to pay some attention to something that wants you to give it money.
from post#86: how are all these little sites going to survive?
all little businesses go through this. if you're not a business, maybe you could look around for free hosting, there's a lot of it around on the web, even for small commerical ventures. you don't sound like you want to make money, just get free hosting, maybe you can find a so-inclined ISP who'll host you for free in exchange for making your site part of their "internet resources" area. or find a company that's willing to flat out sponsor you, with no other ads, just like a sports team. be creative and you'll find a solution. One free hosting service asks their users to click on the banners or the hosting service will not survive, and their community responds. Including to the point where they had to buy new servers, and asked people to "pledge" money so they could upgrade the system. They got a hell of a lot of money that way, a lot more than I thought they'd get.
from post#92: I for one will be freakin happy when animated gifs go away - and the same guys who make those funny commercials on TV get involved with the online phenomenon.
Advertisers take note, this guy is giving you a clue, so pay attention! He wants something more entertaining than "catch the monkey".
from post#147: And please
from post#101: If people see a banner more then one time chances are high that they'll remember the name/site and may even tell others (who may need a place to buy a product) about it.
Most of the banners I see never actually show a site address or name, which is totally useless for recognition, yet another waste of resources.
from post#121: it is just a matter of time before the government cracks down on all this illegal software that blocks web ads.
Governments (plural!) should be very careful about what they term legal or not with the net. If blocking is illegal, so is NetNanny and the porn filter in the workplace. Blocking content can't be both ways.
from post#147: Advertisers don't get to charge the TV station per "click-through", so why should the net change that? Click-through should be treated like commission.
Advertisers CAN'T use the click-through method with TV stations, believe me if they could, they sure would! Click-through tracking does give a bit more of an idea on ROI (Return On Investment) for ads. The net is very easy to track, unless print media or television.
(still same post) If you're not getting click-through, it doesn't mean that the web host isn't doing their job
from post#154: Advertising has been "found out" by the internet.
*laughing* this i so true it's almost not funny.
from post#158: Forgot to mention that all the search engines would be gone too.
This tweaked my curiosity, exactly where does the funding come from for Google? (my favourite for it's accurate results, and lack of ads - hence, fast loading)
and this person who wrote post#169 has some great tips for those looking for good ad networks.
this guy (post#170) has a great idea: Just click on a gap dancer to by her jeans. this is totally doable right now. None of this banner nonsense... paid links for static images, not a random banner, something that's relevant to the content!
from post#34: People have complained about advertising since the dawn of electronic media.
(please excuse any marketing jargon in the following... a consumer IS a person, I am using it for convenience)
business evolves over time, and advertising will never again have the hold it had during the 1950s...
business evolution so far:
industrialisation --} advertising --} marketing --} future?
now industrialisation brought us mass production (you can have any colour, as long as it's black... thanks Mr Ford), and advertising brought us post-war information on new products (new products were very important as credit appeared, houses were mortgaged, whitegoods were purchased, credit became the middle-class way of life), marketing has more recently has given us targeting by demographics... consumer feedback (of a kind) and shown us that advertising is merely one piece of the promotion puzzle... and business puzzle come to think of it.
So what's the next step in business evolution? I believe it will be social marketing. Companies (in addition to their business work) will have to give something back to the community to get the attention or goodwill of their consumers. Whether it's good work conditions for employees, respect for the environment, working for the greater good of mankind, or simply sponsoring the local little league team.
Consumers are the only reason companies exist, without them they will sell nothing. As consumers come to realise this, they will begin to ask for more. What they will ask for is anyone's guess, but if you don't listen, you won't hear it.
This won't happen next week, or the week after, but a shift will slowly take hold, and if you don't get a clue about what your consumer wants, you'll be out of business.
this is really quite long enough as it is, rant stops here...
Well, I've got to think that it's only because spam doesn't work any more. Most Usenet newsgroups have been so innundated with spam (and address harvesters) that nobody wants to read or post there any more.
I don't think spam is going away any time soon. I hope it does, but I'm not holding my breath...
The problem with advertising is not what people see or do not see, it is whether or not they can recall that ad an hour, a day, a week later. You may sit through an ad on television out of pure lazyness, but can you recall every ad you saw during your 1/2 hour Buffy program? You may remeber one ad though. That ad was successful. I have been talking all morning with my co-workers about the new "Goldfish" ad which states Goldfish, "are the snack that smiles back, until you bite their heads off" If advertisers can figure out a way to make banner ads more effective then they will succeed.
Cox Johnson
P.S. I can't spel
>and with advertising money drying up more and more every day (yes, we felt that too)
the money drying up is not the public's fault, most of whom didn't like ads. Business knows people go to toilets, get chips, or just zap away during commercial breaks. Now it turns out that ads on the web don't work, and businesses are withdrawing money. Yes, this may hurt the hobby site. However.. you didn't 'sell' click-throughs, you sold a space on your page(s), so don't blame me for not behaving as you would like. you simply cant sell my behavior. the fact that businesses don't want to advertise more is their own fault for choosing a dodgy business method.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Hmm...lots of interesting thoughts.
.GIF's. When I first began playing with Flash animations, I created a simple logo for my own website. When saved as a flash animation, it was only 8k in size. For kicks, I saved it as an animated .GIF and it was 72k in size. Who wants to download a 72KByte logo on a 48Kbit connection? No wonder people hate banner ads!
I've seen quite a few people point out that the situation isn't likely to get better until bandwidth costs go down. The assumption there is that once badnwidth is less expensive then sites will be able to better afford to exist on meagre advertising revenues. But I think that there's another reason that more bandwidth is one of the answers. Multimedia and interactivity. Once bandwidth becomes more plentiful and less expensive, web-based advertising can finally evolve from a stupid little flashing banner to something more effective, whether that be through integrated video/audio, etc. Regular commercial breaks might even someday make it into web sites.
BTW, I too hate animated
Personally, what I think the wave of the immediate future in online advertising is in product sponsorship. And not just random junk either. My "other job" is as a crew member for an auto racing team. Big-time auto racing like NASCAR and Formula 1 only exists because of advertising. And they have a very effective sponsorship model. Many race fans would decide whether to buy a particular brand of product based on whether or not they sponsor auto racing (all else being roughly equal). It builds an extended sense of comraderie with the teams because the consumer knows that by purchasing product x they are supporting their racing team.
I've seen dozens of people point out that they buy stuff from ThinkGeek or other similar merchants who advertise on Slashdot, and that they would be more inclined to click-thru on ads if they knew that they had been hand-picked by the editors. Well isn't that what sponsorship is? It certainly has the potential to be that.
Let's do a hypothetical Slashdot sponsorhsip. ThinkGeek probably can't afford to be the sole sponsor of Slashdot, but they could afford to be an associate sponsor. So then Slashdot recruits a couple other sponsors. VA Linux, Sun, Cisco, etc. Companies whose target markets are the same as Slashdots. Then instead of banner ads, maybe they sponsor a certain section of the site. I dunno...the VA Linux Slashback page. Or they get prominent placement on certain types of Slashdot pages. Maybe they even have a tie-in...like 1% off the purchase price of a Sun Enterprise Server if you mention a special Slashdot discount code.
So what do the sponsors get? Targeted advertising that is much more likely to generate clickthrus and/or other revenue for the company. Their customers are Slashdot readers. In the case of marketing tie-in's, they even get statistics on how the sponsorship affects their sales.
What does Slashdot get? Money to pay the bills.
What do the readers get? Slashdot for one. And information on goods and services that likely interest them and that they are likely to make use of. I personally had never heard of ThinkGeek untill I saw their ad on Slashdot. But I have purchased from them twice in the past month. So targeted advertising does work for both advertisers and consumers.
The Register did an interesting "experiment" a year or so ago where they "sold their souls" to Compaq for a week. Basically, they only ran Compaq ads for that entire week in a pseudo-sponsorship deal. I never did hear how it worked out, but I'd be curious to find out.
Honestly though, when advertising on the net first came into being, I think that sponsorship was the way that it generally worked. And then people got lazy because nobody wanted to spend time and effort tracking down sponsors or sites to sponsor. It was easier to just join an ad network and get some generic crap. But now we're seeing that doing it the lazy way doesn't necessarily work. Like anything else, the readers can tell if you put any work into it...and if you haven't, they'll ignore it.
When I think of some of the sites that are still pretty successful though, I think that they do rely (to an extent) on sponsorhsip-style ads versus banner ads. It seems to me that Anandtech always has ads from the same hardware vendors. Same with Tom and many many others. Even Slashdot probably has direct relationships with companies selling products rather than companies placing ads. And you'll notice that they aren't the web sites complaining about the ad services cutting them loose.
Just some food for thought.
The forums were the best part, though.
You missed the start of the "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" phenonmenon... possibly the funniest thread that ever existed. (before the phrase got beaten into the ground...)
Oh, and the BBAB photoshoppage.
I have never laughed harder than I have while reading those forums.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
One of the major problems with Internet advertising is that you CAN track the results so readily. Advertisers not only know that they are getting one click per one thousand banners, typically the more advanced also track how many people PURCHASE a product or HOW MUCH TIME they spend on the site after clicking through. So people suggesting that you can just click on a banner and then close the window are mistaken.
I personally believe that if such advanced tracking was available for television or print ads, marketing folks would be just as disappointed in the results.
And now, on to the important stuff. Here are some tips for people running sites that rely on advertising. This is based on five years of experience dealing with advertising networks and agencies.
- Do not sign exclusive agreements! Exclusive agreements are a trap. NEVER sign off to one company, even if it means a lower split. You want them working for you, not the reverse.
- Use multiple networks/agencies. If you have the traffic, use two or three different networks. Most will perform around the same level, but you can tweak your inventory from month to month. If Company A does better than Company B this month, Company A gets more ads next month.
- Don't believe your contract. We were an early member of the Flycast network before they were acquired by Engage. Our contract states a 70/30% split (us receieving 70%). Last month they decided to change it to 50/50. If we don't accept, they stop serving ads for us. While there may be some degree of legal remedy here, the cost makes it prohibitive (little company vs big company lawyers). Just don't believe your contract protects you from them changing the terms...And believe that THEY will enforce their end of the contract.
- Analyze your banner inventory. Good click-thrus bring in better campaigns. I have seen sites earn twice as much money with the same audience and ad views simply because their click-thru rate was (slightly) higher than another site. Examine each ad slot (if you can) and group together the spots with high click throughs and low click throughs...This way you can give "premium" placement to campaigns or networks that are earning you more money and they will see better results. Using one ad tag across the whole site will result in lower revenue.
- Don't rely on advertising. Not many sites can do this successfully, but most haven't tried. Create optional membership programs with a small fee attached to them...This is what we have been doing. You would be surprised how loyal some visitors can be...Ask yourself this question, would you pay $20 a year to help keep
/. going? I know I would, but we don't have the option, so /. is losing out on revenue (big no no). The best defense against falling ad rates is to not have to rely on them. Look at sponsorship possibilities...Diversifying your site's income can make a huge difference in the bottom-line.
I could ramble on but that's the best of what I have learned. I won't send an invoice either!Case
"Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by"
Excuse me? The Internet existed before it was allowed to be used for commercial purposes, much less advertising. Advertising is a Jonny-come-lately, trying to make money off of something, which has a strong culture against it.
That is the whole point of the article, you can't fund the Internet off of advertising.
How, then, do you propose to support sites?
One option is to support a site through voluntary contributions (PayPal is one possible mechanism for doing so, but not the only one, and not without its own problems.) I know one author (whom I won't link to because I don't want to slashdot her) who has been informed by her free hosting service that they are not raising enough revenue through banner ads, so they want to go to pop-ups. She is currently taking a poll of her readers as to whether they would rather have pop-ups, or support her through voluntary contributions. Right now the majority seems to be willing to contribute, although it is not an overwhelming majority--there's quite a few people who say they wouldn't mind pop-ups. (Interestingly, most of those comment something along the lines of "I can kill the pop-up windows faster than they can load," which suggests to me that pop-up windows will not be a viable advertising mechanism, either.)
There's any number of good sites which I would be willing to donate a small amount to in order to keep them going. However, the maelstrom of misinformation that is Slashdot is not one of them. (Granted, I speak only for myself.)
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Perhaps I actually DO work for Target, but I'm just posting this stuff straight up. They may have software in their firewall that modifies my outgoing data and automatically inserts anchor tags and their URL around the word Target whenever it appears. (There's an evil thought, isn't it?)
But to answer your question, yes, I do work for Target. Or at least Marshall Field's.
John
John
users have started equating such designs with advertising which they routinely ignore. These days, it is extremely important for any content and navigation elements to look very different than prevailing advertising designs since users tune out anything that they don't think will be relevant to their task.
An example of this is I went to download a program and couldn't find it because the only link to download was a flashy graphic. I spent 5 minutes looking for the text that said "download" but didn't see the big graphical link saying "download for free" right at the top. This was iTunes, by the way, on Apple's site. I couldn't believe they made such a big mistake.
People just filter anything resembling an ad out as a matter of course. If advertisers were smart they would design oddly shaped static and text based ads to get people to pay more attention to them. So yeah, advertisers should target more, but they need to be a little smarter about the way ads are designed too.
By the way, did anyone else have the same problem finding the download link? The two other people I sent to the site had a hard time finding it too.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
Seems to me there's one quite simple solution to the plight of SomethingAwful.
Since we don't hear Rob or Hemos or anybody else at Slashdot complaining about their lack of financing the logical conclusion seems to be that Andover needs to host SA. They'll have their banner adds and Rob and Co. will have some new friends. Problem fixed!
Mordred
Now that I know that CmdrTaco et al have no say over the advertising, I'm far less interested in it. At one point it seemed to have more of a connection to the site. Nowadays it looks a little too much like the typical marketing-think -- "Hey the techies are here and we're supposed to sell to the techies!"
Imagine if the advertising were run via the same model that the site is run. Imagine if the ads were selected by the editors, in the same way that stories are selected. Imagine if the ads were moderated in the same way that posts are moderated. (Well, maybe not exactly the same way. There would undoubtedly be trouble with that.)
After a while, even the casual browser would know that these ads were different/special. These ads cried for you not to actively ignore them, but to actively pay attention to them. They would be there for a reason, not just because they fit someone else's idea of a target market.
Editorially, we know that /. and the ads are handled by separate departments. That's where the whole thing breaks down!
I don't. It's not my job to make them profitable enough to keep on working. It's theirs. The burden is on them, not me.
And yes, I'm running one of those sites myself (take a look), and I've got other ways to make it possible to go on doing it without banner ads, and I expect to continue working on the site for quite a while. I've found a way, I'm sure others can as well.
-John
He makes it sounds like that targeted advertising doesn't exist. He is so wrong there. I used to work for one of the largest banner ad software companies. Our software supported all sorts of methods for targeting. This could be combined with the site's own tracking data to create ads that are appropriate for the surfer in question. Banner ad software can get surprisingly complex when targeting, inventory managment, and tracking come in to play. Lack of targeting has nothing to do with why banner ad companies have fallen apart.
Companies that buy the ads are realizing that it is difficult to create a presense through online ads alone but easier to do through tv, magazine, and even radio ads. These ads are larger, more interesting, and more difficult to avoid. Most banner ads are completly uninteresting. Meanwhile, BudBowl attracted a ton of attention. Poeple were actually betting on the result and made sure not to miss those commercials. Apple's 1984 commercial only had to be aired once to leave a permanent mark on the industry and set the ton for Apple for years to come. Until high speed access becomes a reality for a majority of internet users, banner ads will continue to stink. As the average bandwidth rises, more experimentation will be done with flash, java, streaming video, and other higher quality ads. The goal is to have the quality of a standard tv commercial but with interactivity. Just click on a gap dancer to by her jeans. This lack of quality keeps many non-Internet companies away from the net. They just don't see the need for internet advertising. For example, which is more likely to get you interested in car, a ugly animated gif of it zooming by, or a beautifull scene of it racing down a hill in the woods? Meanwhile, the net companies for whom it would make sense to advertise on the net are going out of business. Even Yahoo gets 30% of its ad revenue from pure dotcoms. Lose 50% of those companies and that is a significant effect on your bottom line.
Eventually, the Internet, radio, and tv will become more intertwined and more interactive. I see the net splitting like tv did, with pay services and ad supported services. Imagine HBO-Online vs. CBS-Online. Ads will continue to live on because people will always be willing to sit through them for free services. Always.
-- soldack
Of course not, they'll find other ways to make money off the site. Take a look at mine, and see if there's any banner ads. Yet, I'm very happy with the results the site has brought me.
-John
Huh? Have you not used mozilla?
:), and load images from sites where they're really useful (such as www.themes.org)
If not, go grab a copy now.
Mozilla has a couple of great features that aren't mentioned enough every time this comes up, and have been in for ages.
One is to never load images from hosts other than the originating host. For example, get an HTML doc from www.foo.com, and it asks to load an image from www.bar.com (or even images.doubleclick.net) - with that pref on, Mozilla doesn't even bother attempting to load it.
The second (which I love) is accept/reject images (and cookies) on a per-site basis. Each time a page wants to load an image (or set a cookie) from a site it's not loaded an image from before, it asks you if you want to load images from that site. 'Yes' to load, 'no' to not load and 'Remember this decision' to never/always load images (or cookies) from that site in the future. So you can block images (but not text) from all your fave news sites and weblogs and places where you generally _read_ the content for faster access and more bandwidth available for all that pr0n you're downloading in the background
Get Mozilla, and you don't have to worry about your hosts file or junkbuster.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Though I have no interest in paying for most web content, much less double paying for ISP and content, there are a few systems similar to this scenario already in action.
Everyone has access to a bi-directional data service that can transmit almost any type of content anywhere in the world: the postal service. Most people pay for this indirectly via taxes and directly via postage charges. And people get a great deal of "content" free (coupons, ads, bill reminders, etc.) But for premium content, there are additional charges -- I have to pay the subscription fee for Newsweek. I already pay, in some fashion for access to Newsweek, so I'd rather not pay again for the content, but that's how it works.
Phone service:
Basic monthly fee just to have phone service (regardless of usage), plus taxes for various services (911, and such). And I still don't have access to the premium services (e.g. long-distance, voicemail) Those require additional monthly fees.
I don't relish the notion of basic phone service plus ISP charges plus web-content costs just to read CNN.com. But I won't be surprised to see it in the next few years, because but it's no different from how most everything else works: I pay for access and then I pay for additional services.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
We run one ad per page, that's it, I am not a fan of the ad banners either, but guess what: We are unable to find ONE sponsor who would be willing to cover the Bandwith costs.
Merchandising is a nice idea and we are thinking about that. Trouble is: The team is spread worldwide: I am in Canada, one is in Spain and one in the Netherlands, so to sit together and mail stuff is not an option.
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
The first -- annoying flashy grpahics that are distracting? Perfect. You saw them. If only for one second to drag the scrollbar down far enough to ignore them, they caught your eye. They're like the horrible local TV ads for a home improvement center. They have a hick banjo theme, their volume levels are twice that of the surrounding program, and the announcer is so excited about the value of one-coat paint that you want to throw a brick through your TV. But they catch you, and that's their point.
Second, if you have a page that displays the banner ad at the top for a few seconds before finishing the page, you have the equivalent of a commercial. What if dubbleclick decided to not transmit the last byte of their banner ads until a five second pause had elapsed? You'd see their banner for five seconds before the connection was released and freed up to go grab further graphics. For all I know, this might be what they're doing today (not that the Proxomitron lets me see this evil behavior, however...)
John
John
You ad folks don't get it.
I don't go to SomethingAwful, or HardOCP, or /., or ArsTechnica, to see the ads.
I go there for the content.
Ad-sponsored or not, I'm not there to see the ads. The ads - and the more bandwidth you suck by making them more "compelling" - are an impediment to me getting what I want.
If I had an OC-3, maybe I wouldn't care. (But I'd still block all the cookies and tracking data for privacy reasons).
But as long as I have something less than an OC-3, the ads stand between me and what I want. And I don't give a rat's ass how compelling the advertisers think they are.
Until advertisers figure out that The. Web. Is. Not. TV., they'll continue to fail.
Why doesn't your friend find an ISP with web hosting?
If her site is so popular as to attracts thousands of visitors she could probably get some of them to host some of the site. Perhaps she could have various people host the graphics for example. That way she wouldn't be providing all the bandwidth.
If her site is even bigger than that, maybe it's something so useful that a university or other institution will decide to host it. (Like a FAQ, or a foo-help group.)
That would completely avoid the need to go to popups (which any user with WebWasher (or programming skills) doesn't even see) or ask for cash donations.
If she's unwilling, well there IS the option of just paying for the web hosting.
I agree.
If the ad banners aren't creating revenue, then whose fault is that? The fact that the audience isn't held captive by some kind technology that forcefully, uncircumventably links content with ads? Or the fact that the ads are simply not captivating, not compelling. Or that the products, services, and deals in the ads aren't compelling.
Personally, I once saw an ad banner on Yahoo that was compelling. A Visa card with 9.9% interest. I clicked through, and signed up. Most other banners weren't so lucky.
Side note: I plan on going to see AntiTrust, probably at the video rentals. (until Movie theaters bundle in free quality babysitting - that's the way it's going to be; some movies NEED to be seen on the big screen, others - well, will be just fine on video). But I learned about AntiTrust through TV commercials, not internet banners. (and that's a rare thing, because I usually just skip over commercials with my DishPlayer).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They could ask people to donate webspace. If my favorite net comics asked, I'd be willing to let them use the bandwidth that I pay for but don't actually use.
If the site is so popular as to cost $1500 a month to host (which seems high, considering you could get an unmetered T1 for less than that) then you should have enough readers to ask for help.
Look to the old model for clues. Someone would write a FAQ and they'd send it out. People would mirror it and send a link to the author. That author would then include the mirror links into the document so that future readers could use the mirror sites. Then if everyone picked a random link (as you should try to do when using mirrors - or the one closest to you) the bandwidth would be shared and nobody would have to pay extra.
Only if the author wanted to keep the only distributable copy of the work would they have to host the whole thing themselves. If the goal is to draw a comic and get it out to the people, to become famous, or just share the fun, then just distribute the comics.
Kevin and Kell (one netcomic I read) does this. You can download a zip file of all of the comics (well, a year at a time) to save bandwidth to the site. The author has effectively said by doing this that they care much more about people reading the comic (and probably buying a book, or asking their newspaper to carry the comic, etc) than they do about page views. I'd certainly be willing to mirror this zipfile if asked and I'm sure many other fans would agree.
Stop right there.
Is the effectiveness of the ad measured by the clickthrough rate or by sales figures?
If you're a site owner - clickthroughs matter because clickthroughs are what you get paid for.
But if you're the guy who owns the banner ad, all the clickthroughs in the world don't matter unless they're translated into sales.
I'd love to know what percentage of today's clickthroughs are real clickthroughs ("hey, this product looks cool") versus charity ("I like the guy's site, I'll give him $0.10 by clicking here").
An ad agency is merely a bunch con men whose job it is to fool one group of suckers (a company) into thinking the agency can fool an even bigger group of suckers (the audience).
> Advertising has been "found out" by the internet.
Amen, brother. The jig is up. If bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't mind downloading the huge ads. But if bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't have to see the ads, because the content provider wouldn't need the revenue the ads provide.
I've noticed though that this \hosts file solution causes serious instability in Netscape 4.76 on NT 4.0.
Netscape wasn't all that stable to begin with, but I frequently get Dr. Watsons while Netscape is trying to munch on a site with a lot of ad content that it can't read because hosts directed it to 127.0.0.1. And often, site downloads take LONGER - it's as if Netscape is waiting to timeout the download or something. Totally sucky.
I'm not saying it's a bad solution, I'm say8ing that Netscape seems to have some problems dealing with this solution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Unfortunately, while this is a good short-term solution and helps your favored site today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that the ad hasn't resulted in a sale for the company whose banner you clicked.
Sooner or later, that company's gonna realize that despite all the hits its website has gotten, nobody's buying anything. Despite all the money it's given to its ad agency, it hasn't gotten a return on its investment.
It stops doing business via banner ads. The ad agency goes titsup.com and stops paying per clickthrough, because each clickthrough is worth less to it.
And your favorite site still goes down because it doesn't have enough revenue.
I've got nothing against clicking on the odd banner as an act of charity to a webmaster. I do it myself from time to time. But I have no illusions that it's gonna solve The Problem.
Of course this whole lament ignores the fact that many people browse the web with text browsers/images turned off.. what with most connections being over POTS (Plain, Old, Telephone System), plus, of course it is a lot better/faster w/o pictures.
Oh, and everyone is going to put up their websites at their own cost, as a labor of love?
How many times have you waited for a site to load because some ad company server is lagged trying to serve the ad in the page?
A well-designed page will be able to be rendered regardless of whether the ad (or any other image, for that matter) has loaded yet. If the rest of the page won't display until the ad has loaded, that's the fault of the site designer.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Consider this quote: Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by, . . .
And, down on the page a bit, the heading How can the Internet survive with the first sentence beginning If the advertising market is going to last. . .
Is this a true assumption? I don't know the answer, but it seems a question worth asking. In other words, if online advertising just went away, would the Internet therefore disappear?
-----------------------------------
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
Some sites sell their hit logs to slimy info-marketers. Personally, I'm partial to selling souls. What are motion pictures other than long-form infomercials for movie-related merchandise?
www.ridiculopathy.com
vote for your favorite t-shirt design
I'm going through enormous problems trying find ways to break even on my site (in my sig). Right now it's down as we're moving servers, but a) no one wants to advertise with us because of our borderline content and b) our host won't let us run adult ads. So we're between a rock and a hard place, and have been rejected by around 14 banner networks. We got accepted to 1, and then cancelled, as most of our users view around 200 pages per session. Even if they DID click once, that's still a horrible ratio.
:( It's a true shame about somethingawful though. His bandwidth bill must truly be ridiculous, and eFront has screwed his site up since day 1 of him moving there. I really have no answers on how people who run sites for fun are going to break even. Right now I'm paying out of pocket, but I can only afford to do that for so long. Then, like everyone else, the plug will eventually get pulled, someone will start up another site, it'll grow fairly decently, and they'll have to pull the plug too. :(
:( Too bad bandwidth is so goddamn expensive. If the price of it was cheaper, and hopefully will be in the future, maybe this wouldn't be such an issue.
I guess there are some sites banner ads just plain don't work for, and I'm one of those.
What a shame.
BilldaCat
DEATH TO MODERN-DAY ADVERTISING!!! Today's ads don't just inform us of a product's existence; they also prey on our minds with flashing text, glitzy graphics, buzzwords by the dozen, and little white lies. Fortunately, we have the right to censor those ads; unfortunately, not all of us have the knowledge to do so. I'm striving to change that.
Hear, hear. What better way to encourage individuals to set up and maintain sites like SomethingAwful?
"Hey, I like your site and visit it every day, but no way in HELL am I gonna contribute to YOUR banner revenue!"
There are a handful of really quality websites out there that are run by dedicated individuals who generally end up paying considerable sums out of their own pockets to provide the world with their site. Pete at Sluggy Freelance is one. Jon at Goats is another. They're great people, and they pour a great deal of personal time, thought and energy into something that generally ends up costing them money. The more people there are blocking the ads on their site, the more they need to pay out of their own pocket to keep their site going.
I honestly hope your little crusade to "educate" people into blocking ads falls on it's ass. I don't like that Treeloot monkey much, either, but I'm not enough of a jerk to deny the keepers of my favorite sites what little return for their investment they get.
Or had you never really considered that you were telling the guy who writes all that stuff you really like to go piss up a rope?
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Lately, especially when I run my own site, I've started clicking on the ads on purpose, since some sites (aka mine) only get paid not by what you see, but by what you click.
So I'll do the old right-click, open in a new window, then close it as soon as something comes up - I don't even bother to read it. That way the sites I like get supported by the advertisers seeing folks clicking on ads(at least until micropayments become a reality).
In my mind, spending 5 seconds of my life by clicking the ad as a way of saying "Thank you" to someone who has provided me with entertainment/information isn't going to kill me.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Sure, Internet is young and dynamic but also seems clueless in some matters. These studies have been done before and I really wonder why Internet would be so much different ? IMHO the whole "Internet advertisement" is pulled out of proportions big time which may also be the reason that some (IMO tweaked) results are dissapointing.
(1) A large proportion are animated. It is highly distracting to see little flickerings going on all over the page.
(2) Many ads seriously slow down loading of the page I want to view, even on a high-speed connection. All it takes is one slow image server.
For these and other reasons, I'm really thankful for the existence of Junkbuster and the like. Perhaps if the ad companies were to make the ads a little less obnoxious and faster to deliver, people like me would actually look at them!
This article was so full of silly bollocks that I don't know how they managed to get any content in. Consider, for instance, "Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by..."
/. and thousands of others. This is a sticky one--how does /. defray their costs? Understand here that they don't necessarily have to be a profit making venture--hobbyists can (and will!) easily run discussion sites if their continuing net outlay is zero, but they can't afford to dump tons of money into it. This is where banner ads seem like the most successful model, and yet they still don't work. What can be done then?
/. is part of the Andover realm. THE PROFIT-MAKING COMPANIES WILL OPERATE NON-PROFIT SERVICES AS AN INHERENT ADVERTISING REVENUE STREAM. They'll do this without banner ads, and they'll do it successfully.
What internet is HE living on???
Spam doesn't work (and is dying out almost completely). Pop up windows when you leave a website (i.e. what porn sites were so famous for) don't work. Pay-per-click doesn't work. And now it's finally sinking in that banner ads don't work.
Big surprise there.
Let's break down the different uses of the web, and look at how advertising fits into it. First of all, there's company (information) sites. These sites ARE advertising, just as surely as a catalog of new cars from Porsche, or a paper ad in Automobile. This is very important: COMPANY WEB SITES ARE VEHICLES FOR ***SUCCESSFUL*** ADVERTISING! They work, because they're perfectly targeted to the people who go there looking for information!
Secondly, there's the 'portals.' They're nothing but conventional ads, for the most part; and they work moderately well. Go to yahoo.com. Nearly all of those links eventually lead to paid-for corporate ads, and people tend to use them.
Then there's information/discussion sites, like
The answer is obvious, and being done right now. Discussion sites (and the like) will be owned and operated as a non-profit branch of profit-making companies. Yahoo owns Geocities.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There are admittedly times (usually 3:00am) when I am susceptible to clicking on banner ads. Of course, if you will notice, this is also the same time of day when TV is filled with infomercials asking you to CALL NOW. A banner ad is an informercial expecting an instantaneous response from the consumer. Very few products leave the infomercial land to become the cornerstones of an industry.
What an ad agency needs to do is to evaluate how to use internet advertising to increase product awareness, increase brand identity, and to demonstrate the product. The real change of how ads work on the internet will come when a third party non-computer related company begins to take market share away from the market leader through effective web ads. Personally, I think the current 7-Up ad campaign (the ineffectual adman) would make for a great web campaign using banner ads and short clips (clips that play when activated, avoiding the 'forced' aspect).
Until such an event occurs, all we are going to get are one website advertising for another website.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
As a Guidescope user, all I have to say is "Boo hoo, and so long" to such companies.
I don't think that just because someone paid to put a banner ad on a site I read that I have the obligation to look at it. When you record a TV show (on Tivo, or your VCR, or whatever) do you not skip the commercials? Do you change radio stations during the station/commercial breaks? Why should online ads be any different?
If someone wants to make money through ads, that's great, super, excellent. More power to them. But I feel no obligation to click through anything, ever.
The big problem is the attitude that the Internet is Free Content. For the most part, it's true. If you suddenly had to pay a monthly fee for /., would you? How much? $1? $3? $10? Problem is, people enjoy things until they no longer become free.
Either way, banners bug the shit out of me, and I'll avoid them, and whatever comes along to replace them, however I can and feel just dandy about it.
Mr. Ska
The group I work with will always have a free site. Granted, it isn't the most impressive thing in the world, but there are people out there like us that are more interested in the slashdot like community type sites with the time and ambition to keep it going.
Unless hosting costs and connection costs go through the roof, there will always be some free sites. A labor of love by a few people pooling resources can definitely afford to keep a site alive. And if it is really good you will eventually get donations (in other words, if you grow too big for your britches, someone will probably buy you a new pair, or something like that).
The concept that everything has to be commercialized now is just sick, and wrong. There will always be some people that believe in the concept of a "free" web site, information or whatever. And I'm one of those people. Not everything is based on how much money you can generate. Hosting isn't that much (it costs a little, but split five ways, as in Faulty Dreams' case it isn't bad), and I don't really see hosting costs increasing. They seem to still be going down.
------------
Yeah, That really makes a lot of since. Without some kind of revenue generating source on a website, how is the website suppose to stay in business? Do you think all those people working to update content, all the servers, and the bandwidth comes free? Hell no, cost has to be covered somewhere. Either ad companies need to formulate a new plan for advertising on the net, or all those free sites need to start charging. And sure if say slashdot charged like even only $5 a month for reading articles and participating in discussion, What if every other site did the same? That $5 a month would add up real quick. I know off hand about 30 sites I go to regularly, and if they started charging that becomes 150 bux a month I have to shell out just to look at 30 sites I enjoy, only 30 sites out of the limitless amount the internet is suppose to offer.. combined with the fact of standard Internet charges it would total about 200 bux a month just to use the Internet.. So yeah, let the internet be ad-free..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
and agree with Taco and others. Some form of advertising must be found that works on the Internet. If not, the Internet will become a much more boring place. Here's why:
/., something aweful, fuckedcompany and tons of others. This really isn't possible to do anywhere else and garner a large audience. It isn't likely, for example, that there could be a /. TV show. The problem is that as these sites become more popular, they become more expensive to run. Slashdot wouldn't do too well on a $29.95 Interland account. If advertising isn't around to pick up the bill (or at least some of it) then the site owners must somehow make money or just watch their business be crushed under it's own weight. Sell something you say? Well, if all of my time is spent dicking around filling orders or processing returns, there isn't much time to code, parse story submissions or write content. In any event, it's not clear that "selling something" is a panacea either. In short, people expect that there will be new articles on their favorite website and if the flow of new stuff stops, so will the flow of visitors. In my market segment, DIY home improvement, most of the retailers that "sold something" have gone bust: irenovate, cornerhardware and others. They "sold something" and had decent content. It didn't stop their slide into oblivion.
On the internet it's possible to build quirky, interesting sites like
"Well, fuck 'em then, they couldn't figure out a business model that works, let 'em go bust!" you say. Well, it's an easy thing to say but the reality of the Internet is that people come here to find free information. Plain and simple. The internet as an "entertainment medium" like TV just hasn't taken off. Sure, there's some funny and interesting stuff but that doesn't appear to me as the primary reason that people are getting online. It's for email (pretty much free) and to find stuff. This "stuff" is content. It's the reason you're on slashdot right now and it, too, is free. If the smaller content companies can't find a way to turn a buck, the Internet will devolve into the same colorless, odorless, tasteless content we are now force-fed on TV and every other medium. Each company that fails (aside from the clearly ridiculous) are another body on the bonfire and at some point, advertisers will get tired of the smell and leave. Hopefully we find something that works sooner than later.
NEither dot-coms nor advertisers are nessecary to the Internet. I was happily using the Internet for years before they started showing up, and if they should go away, I can't say I understand why that should cause me much grief.
I value the Internet primarily for making it easy to exchange information and for the easy and cheap direct person-to-person (who cares about business-to-business??) contact that faciliates cooperation and projects like Linux. Eivind
Bandwidth costs (an obscenely large amount of) money. Especially when assmonkeys decide to download the ENTIRE site with IE or something for "offload browsing".
I run several websites (since I pay for bandwidth used, I'm sure as hell not gonna post them here and get them /.'d), and, at first, none had advertising, because I felt like you did. I actually was stupid enough to think people would "help out" and click that contribute button I had set up. But not one person ever did. When I started getting bills from my ISP that were more than the mortgage on my house and car payment combined, I realized -- gee.. advertisements are there for a reason.
And yeah, that Treeloot monkey thing annoys the ever living hell out of me. But you know what.... it WORKS. If it's annoying you, then you NOTICED it. And that's what they're trying to do.
The more people that block ads, the more irritating ads are going to get so the reduced viewership will notice them. Hell, some of them play music these days (see the IBM ads on cnn.com), and I suspect that will become more common soon.
But go ahead and use JunkBuster, etc. But don't complain when all of the sites have to go to intersitial ads where you have to wait 20 seconds between pages so a big full-page advertisement can load, just so they can stay afloat.
</rant>
... and all I wanted for xmas was a magic 8 ball, but i got this lousy
Perhaps that's part of the problem.
In Douglas Coupland's book Generation X, (this is the book that coined the term "Generation X", and before you knock it on the basis of what mass media has made of the term, read the book itself--but that's another rant for another time) one of the chapters is titled "I Am Not a Target Market."
It seems fairly accurate for GenX (as much as any stereotype of millions of people can be, which is not very much), but I can't help but wonder if that's really the best thing. "You're not a target market? Fine. Screw you. You'd like to see such-and-such a product? Too bad, you're not a target market."
I, while I consider myself fairly advertising-savvy, and certainly highly skeptical of any claims made in advertising, am not completely immune to advertising, nor would I want to be.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Why is it that so many people believe that without advertisements, the web would just disappear? Clearly they are newbies, or they just forget that the Internet and the web were around long before advertising.
Yeah, before that recent development (also on ign.com) I was satisfied with manually killing pop-ups. Now it's obvious that I need a program to remove them for me.
On the contrary, I would be happy to vote for either Democrats or Republicans if I found their views in sufficient alignment with mine. (Indeed, there is a small percentage in each party which does, although none of them were on the ballot in my district this year.) I am more than willing to listen to the campaign advertisements of any candidate and consider whether they are worth voting for.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Yeah, it's probably a little different for us. Our band situation allows us to do some merchandise selling when we play shows (however small) and we gather together often enough that the idea of mail-order isn't completely out. We aren't big enough yet to offer mail-order, but it's possible.
I'm not sure what to suggest in a situation like you describe. Being that spread out kind of eliminates the "easy" options that require a sort of office or central location. Hmm.
------------
With all due respect to Jakob, there's a much more serious parallel problem -- which is that the economics just don't work, and very few site owners have done the math on this topic. Let's say that I run "mycontentisking.com" and I make an ad buy across a selection of sites to generate traffic. I purchase 2 million impressions at an average $10/CPM ($20,000). Let's say my ads perform typically, and I get a response rate of .05% (10,000 clickthroughs). Let's say that I know that an average visit to my site generates five page views, resulting in 50,000 impressions. I try to "monetize" (what an ugly word) those page views by selling advertising. Let's say that I have multiple ad positions on a page and because of various factors my site commands an aggregate of $40/CPM across all page views. I gross $2K for those 50,000 pages I spent $20,000 to acquire. The challenge is that I, as the site owner, need to have a much more sophisticated plan for extracting revenue from visitors than advertising. Otherwise, it's an MLM pyramid and I am on the short end of somebody else's downstream.
"I never metadata I didn't like."
Boy am I glad that the only way you can sell anonymity online is for the ability to surf porn.
--locust
"I never metadata I didn't like."
Yet when I read a review of some game on some other site, I have to download 80K of HTML, wrappers for ad sites, another 40-50K of animated .GIFs, wait 5 seconds for it to render, and for all this work I get maybe three or four paragraphs of content, then I have to click on "next page" to do it all over again... sometimes five and six times for a single article that's (in total) about half the length of any of Jakob's articles.
Methinks there's a lesson to be had there.
Wanna cut bandwidth costs? Gimme 10K of content in 11K of HTML and one HTTP GET transaction.
It just might be cheaper than six HTTP GETs and 400K of HTML.
Yep, this the holy grail of ads on the net or anywhere else. RealMedia was working on an api to allow sites that already track users, (New York Times for example) that would allow the times to interface thier tracking data into ad delivery. The could ad their own controls over ad delivery with mucking with our code. I think this type of true tracking will eventually take hold as sites partner together and as big companies own more and more sites. Think of all the strange connections. CNN ads could be based on something you purchased through AOL. It looks like true anonymous surfing will become less available. While I would rather see ads that are of interest to me, I also want control over my personal info. Pretty scary stuff.
-- soldack
Having it built into the browsers that have the high market shares would be most effective, but it would also be most likely to invite countermeasures.
In a way, I'm glad that most people see the ads that I block, since it results in the advertisiers not needing to (or not thinking they need to) do something about blocking. An arms race is just going to make the web one butt-ugly place.
Therefore, it's in my interest to get everyone else to cooperate with advertisers while I defect. So let's keep blocking out of the mainstream browsers and leave it to the iCab users and people who are willing to set up blocking proxies like Junkbuster or Squid+Sleezeball, ok? ;-)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Do you think you could hammer home your dislike of advertising any more? Just a bit? Are you going to tell me how much you don't watch TV now?
Now, for those that do want to generate money, hey, like you I say go for it. But don't expect that people are going to go out of their way to hand you their wallet.
What aren't you understanding? The problem that all of these advertising networks, and any future ppv stuff are made to address is that it's too expensive to run a popular, content-driven site out of your own pocket.
Can you respond to that point, or are you going to constantly attack the straw man of "...owed a living just because you put up a web site
--
the moderation system is in desperate need of a rehaul. I have had this kind of thing happen to me many times...
/. moderators are incredibly inconsistent? I understand that they are just people but still, some consistency on what/what not to post would be nice.
2001-01-15 17:00:18 The State of Internet Advertising (articles,internet) (rejected)
only to see it appear on the front page the next day. What is the deal with how the
ironic how your .sig basically states that you are not a target market for either the Republican or the Democratic party campaign advertisements. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Also, are those people with broadband still so sure that they can kill the pop-ups before they can load? Lycos has engaged in the draconian practice of launching pop-up windows off-screen; by the time you notice its entry on the taskbar, it has already loaded itself.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Jakob Nielsen has been saying that ads on the net don't work since 1997. And he's right.
Furthermore ad stripping software like Adsubtract stop your browser from even asking for the ads.
It's only matter of time until people realize that those banner ads are sucking down the bandwith on their poor 56k modems. Once they find they can surf faster without the ads, it'll spead faster than All-Advantage...
-----
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
I mostly read sites which are extremely targetted, and which have extremely targetted ads on them. In 8 years of using the web, I have never - not once - clicked on a banner ad. I don't plan to start now.
-D
ditto IE 5 through zones
There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but what bugs me is that it's going to get pretty dark before we see it. There are tons of good sites (mine included) that for better or for worse, *must* rely on ad revenue to stay afloat. I'm a student, and without ad revenue, there's no way I could afford the hosting fees. We (myself and the other guy who runs the site) got lucky and may be able to move my site to a local ISP, where we can get very cheap hosting, which is the only thing that will help us weather the storm. But if we hadn't lucked into that, we'd be screwed... as it looks now, ad revenue for January will cover about 20% of our hosting fees, and we only have enough cash to run at a loss for a month or so.
Anyway, how are all these little sites going to survive? Many of them are well worth having (at least their audiences think so) but the simple fact of life is that without revenue, no web site. Partnering with the advertisers themselves or getting into specialized technology ads (like the Real ones mentioned earlier) is all well and good for the big fish in the ocean, but us part-timers are going to be left out in the cold here. I suppose user sponsorship is a possibility, but knowing our readers, most of them wouldn't go for it. And e-commerce? Really, what do most sites have to sell?
Eventually this will all shake itself out, through ads that force you to notice them, intrusive targeting technology, whatever. But I fear that by then, the Internet will become a place where the only sites that can afford to exist are either corporate commercial sites or the lucky ones that don't have to pay for themselves. Unfortunately, many of the more worthwhile sites on the 'net (from my point of view, anyway) may not survive until then.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
I don't watch TV mainly for this reason. If the goal is to pay for the costs of webhosting, it will probably work- many people will quit visiting the site and thus the traffic will be reduced greatly. I have a dsl connection, or even a T1 at work, but most people out there are still on dialup. They don't want to sit through a commercial on the web just to see a website.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Internet advertising is still in its infancy. I'm sure most of you have seen TV commercials from the 50's. They were really lame. Usually shows were sponsered by a company. The shows host would occasionally mention the product "And remember, The Detergent X Song and Dance Hour is brought to you by Detergent X, it get's you clothes clean".
Right now, I'm looking up at an ad from ThinkGeek. It's your standard rectangle, some interesting looking Swiss Army knives, and the words "Get yours at ThinkGeek".
I think of ThinkGeek as a great site, but I can't help but compare that banner to "Detergent X gets your clothes clean", and I already have a Swiss army knife.
No, online advertising isn't very effective now, but it will grow up.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I amend that: The Internet and the web were around before the concept of advertising ON THE INTERNET came along.
:)
I wasn't trying to argue that the net predates advertising IN GENERAL
Slashdot ads are the only ads I intentionally don't filter with my Squid proxy at home. Some of them are even pretty cool. However, a small percentage of the ads they serve up are from doubleclick, and since I'm blocking by URL, they're toast. I wouldn't even know they serve doubleclick ads if I had blocked the /. ads too.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Another good one was/is You Don't Know Jack, the Webshow. The game's broken up into segments and there's a couple of commercials between each segment. The game's great and the ads fit in well with the gameshow atmosphere.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
It also doesn't help when people use things like Junkbuster to further eliminate any chance these companies have of making money.
Chances are, if you use something like Junkbuster, you wouldn't click on the ads anyway.
-jon
This has been possible for a very long time. I know junkbuster has a similar, and even better way of doing it. Same with stripping ads. Cookies arn't they only problem though. If your browser sends a referer header (junkbuster can block this too), you get the name of the page you came from. If the URL to the ad's image has an ID embedded in it, they know where your coming from. Hell, some adds (Like one from a332.g.akamai.net, that I just blocked), have the URL of the web site embedded.
Where am I going with this? Well, you request the ad image, they have your IP address. They can figure out where you are from that. They can put it in a database, and see what URL's you are coming from (using one of the above techniques), and then if they serve up ads at another site you visit, they could match up the IP addresses, and then they know more about you.
Before you get paranoid, Getting useable information this way is probably not that easy... Besides, targeted ad's arn't as annoying as porn ad's. :)
-- [ta]
is that the kind of targeting the ad industry
already does is based on sampling, and could
be applied tomorrow to Internet users without
impinging on people's privacy. But that's not
what the industry wants. Their goal *is*
Orwellian, and it's important not to lose sight
of that.
Personally, I'd pay 50c or so to read a week's
new Somethingawful content. If we could
come up with a workable micropayment system
and get rid of the idea of supporting quality
entertainment sites through banner ads altogether,
the world would be a shiny happy place.
K.
-
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
I challenge you to show me a single post that suggests the entire web would disappear without advertising. I haven't seen anyone here argue such a thing.
Of course, many sites existed without advertising in the past, do so without advertising (or any other revenue) currently, and would continue to do so in the future. Without advertising, some currently-free sites would charge for use, and some would solicit voluntary contributions.
And some good sites would disappear. Not all of them, surely. But some. (How many? Most of them, or only a small fraction? I can't say.) But to say "the web wouldn't disappear without advertising" is to attack a strawman.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
unfortunately, slashdot has prevented me posting the perl because of "lameness filter -- junk character post". I feel that way about my perl somethines, too, but really, Rob, what's up with that?
--G
Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?
No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea. Traditionally, anonymity has been scorn upon on the Internet. And the key difference between Internet and other media-types has always been the possibility of two-way communication. On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business.
Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs better targeting of ads. It doesn't. Perhaps the web needs it, but not even that is true. The only thing on the Internet that needs ads are .coms. And
personally, I don't care much about .com's.
Now what would happen to the web if the .coms died? Well, we would
retain all the interesting sites, such as content offered by
universities, personal pages, the gutenberg project, in short:
anything of real value! What would happen is that most stuff that
annoys us would be gone. Ads would be gone, lawyers would be gone,
domain-name wars would be gone, badly designed sites with company
graphics and too much javascript would be gone, and the bandwith would
still be there.
But even if one see .coms as something good, and not something bad,
there is the question of ads. People seem to have forgotten about
micropayments as an alternative to adverticing. But seriously, what do
you want? Pay 2 cents to access your favourite website, or have it
filled up with banners and popups? I would like a portion of those
micropayments, thank you!
Lowtax's article on the subject suggests a possible solution: more targeting.
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
I still giggle when I think back to when he said "Eat a bag of hell!"
The real problem with advertising, and especially online advertising, is that people have gotten so inured to it that nobody pays any attention to it any more. In other mediums this isn't quite so much of a problem - there are always new places and ways to attract attention, and innovative ploys by advertising companies still attract a fair amount of attention.
But who really looks at banner ads any more? They're so ubiquitious that they've become part of the background, and the amount of clickthroughs they're generating compared to the number of impressions is rediculously low. So of course all of these companies are going out of business without paying people.
I see this as a worrying trend though. There are plenty of really good sites out there that are supported solely through advertising rather than subscription or per-use charges, and if online advertising dies then many of these websites will disappear as their owners cannot afford the cost of hosting and bandwidth. It also doesn't help when people use things like Junkbuster to further eliminate any chance these companies have of making money.
At this rate it seems like the majority of free sites will either vanish or start having to charge for their services. I can easily imagine a day in the not-so-distant future where even /. has to start charging people in order to pay for the costs of running a website with hundreds of thousands of readers...
Lowtax made lots of content for his site, excellent satire on the gaming scene and some real funny characters (JeffK will not be forgotten). I'm sad he's probably gonna quit this.
While it's certainly true that this person is a thief, that's hardly true of the entire Linux community. Some of the rhetoric spouted by the more vocal members of the community may encourage this sort of conduct, but the vast majority of computer users, regardless of whether or not they run Linux or Windows, has no problem supporting those sites they frequent.
I found it interesting that Mr. Kyanka just tossed in:
without comment, as if such ``claims'' are purest paranoia.Examine the situation in terms of TV's demographic knowledge, however: TV gets that knowledge by inviting households to allow their TV habits to be monitored---allowed explicitly. Does Mr. Kyanka think TV should simply do what web-based advertisers want to do: instrument the system so they know who's watching what programs at all times for all people. That would get some backlash for you!
Maybe, just maybe, web advertisers could take a clue from the other Neilsen in play here, and ask people to sign up for monitored surfing for a limited period. I suspect you'd get many folks willing to do so, and no cries of pain from people who think their surfing habits are nobody's business but their own.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I come from a webmaster's perspective. Hear me out:
I have a site. My site generates more than 15gb of traffic per day. To accommodate for this traffic I have set up a colocation account with a local ISP. Here's a breakdown of my costs:
- I pay $1800 a month on my bandwidth and cabinet space.
- I spend 5 hours a day on my site. This amounts to 150 hours a month.
- I have 5 servers, which I paid out of my own pocket. Including the load-balancing software and other 3rd party software, I've spent over $20,000 on hardware/software.
- When my site goes down at 3 in the morning, I am paged on my cell phone. I have to drag my ass out of bed, drive down to the colo facility with my tools hoping it's just something minor. If it's major, I have to stay there until it's fixed! Whether it's 1 hour, 10 hours, or 20 hours, I gotta make it work. This alone is worth tons of money, really. I mean, what would you expect for a salary if your employer said "you're on call 24/7. If things ever break, you don't go home till it's working again".
Not so cheap heh? On top of all this, I have to also deal with ad brokers till I'm sick in the stomach. I've had over 10 ad brokers cancel/reject my site because of my content. It's mostly forum content and that's considered "undesirable" to them (since it's user-posted content, and thus "low quality"). In fact, at this moment I don't have any advertisers. I'm paying everything out of my own pocket.
Things didn't use to be this way. 6 months ago my traffic yielded me $8000 a month. Subtract out my costs and it was still profitable. Today? $0 income and all those costs? I don't even know why I'm still operating. Maybe it's because I'm hoping for a brighter day... Maybe it's because I don't want to disappoint my 60,000 website members.
So to all you folks who only care about blocking out ads, leeching the net for free, thinking only of yourselves... Please... take a moment and imagine yourself in my shoes. How would you feel then?
This is all coming from me, a guy who, before his website business days, used to hate all ad banners, who blocked all cookie access, who, if interested in an ad (if ever), would copy the url, strip out any referrer codes, and then paste it into a separate browser.
Capitalism, or communism? What do you want? Innovation, or stagnation? You pick!
There will be plenty of money to go around when Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Tampax start advertising on the internet.
These type of last-foot advertisers are the rock on which the TV advertising model is built. How often do you buy a new server cluster or a calendar? How likely are you to interupt your actrivities to click-though and buy a mug? Will an ad that doesn't mention the URL or even the companies name effectively modify your future buying habits?
These unrealistic expectations by advertisers, the lack of last-foot type advertising, and the glut of advertising for free products have led to the banner ad bubble that popped this year.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
They would deter myself and countless millions of other people from clicking refresh every time they have 5 seconds to spare, which only rarely turns into 5 minutes of reading some unexpected story.
I would still read of course, but I like to think I would waste less time checking for updates too frequently.
Also, this would foment the creation of utilities to monitor webpages, and report to you any significant update (presumably through a standardized low byte count protocol that big name websites could adopt). So you could have a window up that popped a message whenever a monitored site got something new, and you could then give your $.02 to check it out.
Honestly I think I sometimes waste more time per day checking for news that isn't new than actually reading.
This would have the nice side effect of reducing bandwidth and server load for many of these sites.
The night is still young, as they say. www.adcritic.com exists solely for the purpose of people who want to see commercials. So advertising can't be all bad! Its just bad in its current form, with the current crop of online advertisers. Just because the fortune 500 companies who make funny ads (or at least can afford major ad houses to make funny ads) havn't started advertising on the net yet doesn't mean they won't. What they need is a way of offering you something via a banner that is other than a 'click-through' (because what does Coke have to offer you on their web site? Nothing!).
.. now think advertising). You can't win the war to eradicate the world of these things; you have to work with them in order to ensure that they meet your needs. You'll never be rid of advertising, so here's your chance to propose new ideas, and new directions advertising can take, instead of wishing it would just all go away.
Maybe in the future we might see 'interactive' banners that can offer you services though a banner, brought to you by a company. For all the whining and anti-advertising mumbling that people do, no one is truely unsusceptable to advertising. Plugging ThinkGeek is just as pro-advertising as plugging Nike or MSN! Just because your consumer loyalty doesn't run with the majority of companies that advertise online doesn't mean that you havn't helped in some fashion to support it in the past. Ask any company you like - you have to advertise to stay in business!
There is lots of time for the online advertising model to evolve; but for those who point out that the internet existed before advertising forget that many sites exist in their current form because of advertising. Someone who can make some money off running a site they love can also justify spending time making it good looking, user friendly, etc; alot of qualities the fan-run, pre-advertising sites didn't have before. Ie, advertising revenues justify the webmaster investing time into adding the nicities that allow more than 30% of humans online. As technies, we often forget that alot of the increased traffic on the net is due to better site designs and such. A more user-centric standard has fallen out of the online-advertising supported tier sites.
It always kills me when people pull the ostritch routine with things they don't like, but will obviously exist for ever (think prostitution, or drugs
I for one will be freakin happy when animated gifs go away - and the same guys who make those funny commercials on TV get involved with the online phenomenon. Remember, online advertising is still young!
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Besides the programus interruptus factor of TV ads, there is a larger, more important reason they are usually more effective: creativity. Think about it, TV ads are often like small shows in themselves, and sometimes they are MORE entertaining then the shows they interrupt [think Super Bowl commercials over the past few years]. The trouble with banner ads, indeed with any internet ad, is the entertainment factor. As long most folks are stuck on dial-ups, ads have to be relatively small, hence low entertainment factor [for ads anyway]. When broadband grows and becomes cheaper, ad revenue will rise, since ads will be able to be more creative with the extra space they can occupy.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Sure, a lot of people click them... but they don't work in advertising a product, because most user say "Gee, an error box! I'll just close thi--what the hell? A site? What a gyp!"
Darn straight advertising on the web doesn't work... that's because most ad firms are really adapting to the web at all. It's like they're storming onto a baseball feild in hockey gear.
And no ad campaign's gonna hit a home run with fake error messages.
--M.
That's great news, they'll look just great in Mozilla on LinuxPPC... wait a minute, Shockwave doesn't work on... exactly! ;-)
OK, something about your post just kind of got under my skin (not flammage, just a mild irritation).
Where, exactly, is the promise to anyone that creates a web site that they should be able to "make a return on their investment", especially a monetary return? I'm working with a group that has put up a site purely for the hope of getting our work out there. We don't want to have pop-ups, so we don't. We don't like banner ads, so we don't have them. Nowhere did we see, when we were setting up our web site, the guarantee that we would recieve any sort of compensation just for doing what we enjoy doing.
There seems to be this overwhelming mentality anymore that just by having a web presence you should be entitled to make money. It doesn't matter if your site sucks. It doesn't matter if you have absolutely no clue how to attract people. It doesn't matter if you have no revenue generation program of any sort. Just by being there, that should entitle you to make massive sums of money. I disagree with that mentality, and I know I'm not the only one.
The web started as a medium with relatively free information dispersal. And, in time, advertising agencies will come to terms with the fact that they have to be much more over-the-top, and in-your-face to make people see their ads on the web. If people aren't disgusted by it, then it may work. Here's an idea, do what they've done on TV and radio and make the ads entertaining. If there were any effort at all to make ads as entertaining as, say, the Bud character plays (with the frogs and lizards and feret) then maybe people wouldn't just ignore them. Just because you stick an ad on the page, that doesn't entitle you to any sort of monetary compensation. Do something to get people's attention in a way that doesn't just piss them off to no end.
Of course, having said all that I would say it is just a matter of time before the government cracks down on all this illegal software that blocks web ads. After all, we are destroying hard working ad companies if we ignore their ads. More and more it seems the most important thing in the world is to keep all the money we can moving towards the corporations and away from the people. Why corporations have so much more right to it than people in general I'm not quite sure. But I am sure that it's just a matter of time before it is law that advertising cannot be removed from web sites (just as TV is moving more and more towards a type of medium where ads cannot be ignored, or at least cannot be fast-forwarded through). It will take them some time, but it will happen.
I just don't quite get why it's so important that when you pay for your web connection, some people are even paying for bandwidth, you should still have to pay for content. With your cable bill you don't get charged extra for ads (unless you order a pay-per-view with lots of commercials, and they do exist, believe it or not). But with the Internet it seems that people feel they are entitled to monetary compensation just for throwing some words and pictures up on a page. It just seems wrong to me. You should have to work for money. The Internet is not the "get rich quick" scheme that many have made it out to be. You have to work just as hard to earn money this way as any other. It takes more than just saying, "I have a right to earn money dammit!" to actually earn money. I hope at some point people realize that. But more than likely the government will intervene on the behalf of the big corps and tell us that we are being criminals because we aren't just bowing down and handing over our paychecks to any moron that's in league with an ad agency.
It just seems stupid. But what the hell do I know. I'm not in it for the money. So I guess that means I'm evil, evil, evil!
------------
Plus, when they whore all the ads like that, the market for them falls into a downward spiral, from 15CPM down to 1CPM. What does this mean? It means that sites who have real content that can't eck out a high enough ads-served to bandwidth site will die out, as well as ones who don't have a high enough ads-served to disk space ratio.
Where will the pieces fall? I find it interesting that Geocities hasn't died yet considering how its viewer base is undefined, most "homepages" are on the bottom end of both ratios. Maybe Geocities's aggregate viewerbase is what saves it, differing from the white-single-male-geek gaming "affiliate networks."
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I don't see why ad-blocking software couldn't be built right into the browser! We HAVE the source for Mozilla. It would just take a dedicated programmer a week or two to hack in a "Block Advertisements" option on the preferences screen. I'm sure a lot of people would use it if it were just another preference option.
Now if only this functionality could come built-in in the mainstream browsers (Netscape, IE)...
Sorry, I just realized that Lowtax, in his SA article, more or less alleged that the web would completely disappear WO advertising. Still, I haven't seen a single /. poster suggest that.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I was commenting on the attitudes of people like the one who wrote the article on somethingawful.com ("How Can the Internet Survive?", etc). A lot of people in the business of "web publishing" share his point of view. On the contrary, most of the posters here on slashdot are quite reasonable, and like yourself, offer other solutions besides ads.
John
127.0.0.1 (Insert the URL of the nefarious adserver; i.e., ad.doubleclick.net, mojofarm.mediaplex.com, et cetera).
This results in a 404 error where the banner ad should've been. The link will still work, but you won't have to see (or download) the 468x60 banner ad (or the treeloot Javascript monkey).
DEATH TO MODERN-DAY ADVERTISING!!! Today's ads don't just inform us of a product's existence; they also prey on our minds with flashing text, glitzy graphics, buzzwords by the dozen, and little white lies. Fortunately, we have the right to censor those ads; unfortunately, not all of us have the knowledge to do so. I'm striving to change that.
Hopefully, in the future I'll program a plugin for IE/Netscape that will put "Add to Hosts as 127.0.0.1" to the right-click menu. Sure, you'll have to restart the browser to have that take effect, but when you do, it'll look a lot less cluttered and execute a lot faster.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Perhaps one of the problems with online advertising is the fact that you can absolutely track the number of clickthroughs per impression. If a company shows a commercial during the Superbowl and sends out a mailing and receives a 10% jump in sales, do they attribute it to the direct mail campaign or to the TV viewership?
Blanket advertising without demographics can be done to build brand recognition, which seems to be what most of the online advertising is for. Product promotion using the shotgun (scattered) versus rifle (single projectile) seems to be a wasted effort. The rifle approach will always command a higher price because the marketers will know they are getting the most bang for their buck.
I know of an (offline) newspaper that tripled their ad revenue after hiring a market research firm to nail down their readership demographic. Don't be too surprised when they start doing this to web sites.
Why do they even HAVE to advertise on the Internet? Just because its there DOESN'T mean it has to be advertised on. How many times have you waited for a site to load because some ad company server is lagged trying to serve the ad in the page? How does THAT benefit Joe Average Web Surfer? They ought to stick to TV and radio, and leave the Internet for those that want ad-free surfing.
allows you to buy a printed version of it with no adverts? You can choose not to read them the same way you can choose not to read banner ads. But you can't get an ad-less newspaper. I don't see the analogy you're drawing. I can't believe that people think they are annoying considering the alternatives (pay per use / subscription models).
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
once you have a few hundred thousand hits a month, there is a formula to making money at web comics: serve one new GIF/JPG a day, and banners always pay much more than bandwidth costs.
after the bandwidth bill is paid, sluggy makes a few thousand dollars a month. i know because i used to be in charge of the banners for sluggy.
this is not charity; it's business.
what bothers me is that there are less than ten people worldwide who can make a living from banners this way; a few thousand dollars a month is just enough to keep one person alive if you live near new york.
i don't know how small payments can realistically get, but i hope that artists begin to charge small amounts of money for their work. i would probably pay $0.25 a week for a "bag of hell" from lowtax. charge me $1.00 a month and paypal keeps only $0.30.
Many, many people here have stated many times over the various ways in which ads simply do not work.
One thing I almost never see used is sponsorship of a site. This is where a site could have a sponsor (or set of sponsors) that would be integrated into the page - something like "This page brought to you by CorpCo brand dish soap!".
This brings awareness of the brand to the consumer without the annoyance of ad banners. The site could have click-throughs that would take you to the sponsor site or show sponsor advertising (for instance, you might be sponsoered by Bud and the reader would be able to see the latest Bud TV ad through links on your site. If you think that will not help you, how does adcritic thrive?).
Even more importantly, a site seeking to gather sponsors could get many of the metrics they desired because the site itself could say "we're targeting 25 year old males that work at Burger King" and give some idea to the advertiser what kind of segment they would be looking at.
Not perfect, but better than it is now and within the range of feasability - there might never be a good way to determine who's actually using your site but you can say who you built it for, and revise that estimate as you go. Then it's just a matter of counting page views to get a rough idea of audience size.
The other means is using affiliate programs to help generate revenue, that seems like the easiest thing to do going forward - perhaps popular sites could even help companies the want to be affiliates with to start affiliate programs, in exchange for some extra compensation or limited percentage of the income.
It seems in the future that you won't just be able to put up a banner at the top of the screen and rake in income. On the other hand, the web will probably be a better place for it, even if sites have to work a little harder to get ad revenue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is something I'm working on for my site, where when a person logs in, the server detects cross-references their IP address with a national database of bank accounts. Then, for each click, the system automatically withdraws $1.00 from their checking account. Then, at the end of each month a statement is sent to the users notifying them of how much they have spent, so they can keep track. This system would be totally invisible to the reader, and would not interfere with the content in any way (no distractions like banner ads, or annoying notification that the transaction is taking place at all). Everybody would be happy.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
If you suddenly had to pay a monthly fee for /., would you? How much? $1? $3? $10?
:). You can't subscribe to just CNN for $3/month. You have to take CNN and 25 other stations for $30/month.
Will the web eventually follow the model of Cable TV, where you subscribe to a package of services?
Or perhaps the Web will move in a direction that Cable TV will eventually follow?
Currently, with cable, you pay a monthly fee to get a few pretty good stations and a bunch of other junk you never watch (at least that's how it has been for me and friends
So perhaps web content services will move in that direction. For $30/month, you get Yahoo, Slashdot, CNN, Salon, and 200 other web pages you don't care about.
Or perhaps, the web will lead the way to magazine-style subscriptions; $1.50/month for Slashdot, $2.00 for CNN, $0.10 for Yahoo, etc. Perhaps then Cable would follow, allowing for a la carte station subscriptions.
Well, just some random thoughts.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
This coupled along with the fact that many saw dollar signs and this drew in every lowlife around. In fact there is AT LEAST one company that was founded on the premise that the owner would get a bunch of investors make a phoney product and then take the money and run. While his prodect is now makeing money and it turn out that he was a convicted felon. The point is that these type of people were also drawn into the industry along with the good old programmers and business men. Thus it became take or be taken kind of industry with many companies that had piss poor management. Anyone who has worked in a dot-com knows this.
Oh well lets hope that on line ads don't die completely, else more dot-coms will die.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I see two options for distributing content without assistance from banner ads.
.edu will survive. The sites with no clear mission exept to get rich off the IPO will fail. The EFF and GNU.org will go on, VA Linux will bite the dust and probably drag slashdot down with it.
Web sites can go to a subscription or micropayment model, where readers have to kick in a few cents every time they read an article or post a comment. Slashdot may have enough die-hard fans that it could survive this way.
The other option is for people who want their content to be seen, and don't care about making money from it. Peer-to-peer was made for this. Upload that day's article, essay, comic, or whatever to a few gnutella or freenet servers, and use your fans' bandwidth to distribute your content.
Either way, a lot of the hype, rampant commercialism, and get-rich-quick mentality will die. Sites that people care enough about, science sites, political sites, and everything in
0 1 - just my two bits
- networks can't provide user demographics
- advertisers don't know how to use the medium
but holds out hope these things may improve in time. However, Jakob Nielsen has been arguing for years that web advertising is inherently unworkable. See, for exampleAlso saw this off Emusphere's page:
c ro media.alliance.idg/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/computing/01/15/ma
Macromedia is trying to promote shockwave to make adverts more compelling.
The nature of banner ads on the internet has always made them invisible to most readers. When the commercials come on, TV viewers hit the mute buttons, VCR viewers hit their fast forward buttons, and ReplayTV viewers hit Quick Skip. The world has learned (for the most part) to tune out the easily identifiable advertising. On the internet, it's even easier. At least with a TV, you pay attention to enough of the ads to know when you've returned to your show. Not so with a banner ad. It takes a miniscule amount of effort to read them, and their size/shape/color makes them instantly identifiable as something to be ignored. Even filter programs can identify them and eliminate them quite accurately (hurray for the Proxomitron!)
So, given that, what are the advertisers going to do now? Some will fold up their tents. The smarter ones will adapt. One of the cleverest approaches I've seen was on a mapping site. Midway through the printed instructions was the location of a WalMart store that we would be passing. I suspect advertising will have to take a more active role in content in order to command money. Think old-tyme TV shows, brought to you by Alpo; or more likely, the Truman Show (with Yummy Mocha Cocoa.) Who knows, even corporate shills who work for big corporations like Target might be asked to plop advertising links in the middle of their usenet posts or Slashdot discussions.
Advertisers will find a way, but it'll take more effort than they've given it so far.
John
John
I'm not sure where the mention of delinquient clients comes into this. You always have people who don't pay their bills, and the figure is higher than most people realize. Probably one of the reasons that ./ sold out to Andover is because they didn't have a gameplan for dealing with the rigors of selling a service like banner space. That is fine, that probably isn't what they wanted to do, but there are pretty effective tried and true ways to get people to pay their bills. I have found that the casual mention of a collection agency does wonders. It works through my personal site and my business site.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I browse with Junkbuster, and I frequently feel a little bit guilty about this because I'm depriving folks of their ad impressions. I also do my "daily" browsing (comics, etc.) using a perl script that builds me a personal daily "comics page" -- more bad karma there, since it hits the site with lynx (no ad impression) and then I hit only the bit I care about with Netscape, again no ad impression.
Someone ought to build a script that, given a list of URLs, goes through and gives each of them a fake clickthrough on any ads they might have.
Heck, I'll code it up today. No reason to let my browsing convenience get in the way of sites ad revenues.
--G