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Banner Ads Could Soon Be Bigger
remy the man writes: "Yahoo has a story about some group [the Internet Advertising Bureau -- t.] basically wanting to have larger banner ads on websites. If they weren't already annoying enough, this group wants to make them bigger." Betcha didn't know there was a group called the "Internet Advertising Bureau. (Which despite its quasi-official sounding name, is an organization of advertisers, not a regulator body.) Look out soon for ads like the Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600 pixels) and -- even more fun -- a standardized pop-up ad (250 x 250). Mmmm.
If they get too annoying, just use ipchains to filter out the ad-server ip addresses. Broken images are less annoying than huge ugly ads.
Personally, I hate them since they slow down the scrolling on the page for me. Otherwise, I just ignore them as I do all other ads. In fact, the skyscraper ads are the only ones I have been paying any attention to/noticing at all lately.
Oh, and I think they use Flash, not Java, but I could be mistaken. I'm just going by what the article linked to in this story says.
You're correct, of course, but it seems to me that your argument will largely fall on deaf ears. Too many of the children of the Napster Generation (for lack of a better word) have been brought up to believe that they have a God-given right to whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want it. That includes the right to view all of their favorite Web sites without having to take any responsibility for the cost of the material and site operation. Instead of pay attention to banner ads and clicking fastiduously on them, they use "solutions" such as Junkbuster and other programs of similar questionable legality.
What these people don't seem to understand, what they don't want to be told, is that as the direct benificiaries of the West's system of Christian capitalism, it is their duty to participate in the advertising process by clicking on banner ads and purchasing high-quality products from online wealth creators. Christ did not die on the cross so that those who came after him could cheat the system and live selfishly. The banner-filtering crowd is no better than those people who profess to be Christians and then pick and choose which parts of the Bible they will follow and which parts they won't.
Come on, Napter Children. It doesn't work that way. You can't have it both ways. If you want to live in a society where you are prosperous and provided for, you have to involve yourself in the commercial aspects of our capitalist lifestyle. So get out there and click on those banner ads. The more, the better. Your government, your families, your corporations, and your God will thank you.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I disagree. Content on the net should be free (and that includes: free of ads). This of course only works if the content providers are enthusiastic volunteers. The first 25 years of the internet have proven that that model works just beautifully. People who want to make a buck on the net will soon figure out that it won't work and will leave.
--
Well, those types of ads are the ones I tune out. Like that scooter whatsit that people were yakking about, or those drug commercials that don't even say what they treat..
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Well, I'm sure you guys out on Neptune didn't have the Web in 1991, but it certainly existed.
Tim Berners-Lee created the web, and wrote the first browser/editor on his NeXT at CERN. (he had developed other hypertext systems though) Imaginatively, the program itself was called WorldWideWeb. This was in the period of 1989 and 1990. So the web certainly did exist ten years ago.
Additionally, WWW supported graphics, but they had to appear in different windows. Inline graphics came later. They, and support for several major platforms were the big deals about NCSA Mosaic.
Lastly, while I don't doubt that about banners, I suspect that non-free online services like Compuserve had similar advertising earlier.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Now those lovely little empty spaces that JunkBuster leaves will be a tiny bit bigger. How will I cope?
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
We'll set a price for as big an ad as you want..
Most people want 468x60, but we certainly don't turn them away when they want something else.. We just judge what we think they'll pay and compair that to the karma we'd lose..
If someone offers a million bucks per thousand for 1024x768 screaming-flashing-popups-of-doom, wouldn't you take it? Damn right..
Banner advertising has already proven ineffective. Will this help? I know my own mind already automatically filters banner ads. Making them bigger means I will just spend more time ignoring them.
Slashdot looks a lot better if you go to your preferences and turn on the "simple HTML", which I think is meant for Lynx and friends.
I do 90% of my non-work Internet browsing on a Sony Vaio PCG-C1XD with a 1024x480 size screen. It's just about ok when the browser is at full-screen mode, but banner ads this size would be a disaster for me.
If my workplace is anything to go by, sub notebooks are becoming even more popular. Especially among senior managemenent. So I can't see a shift like this going down well with the PHBs either.
And what about Internet browsing PDA's like Compaq's IPAQ?
Macka
Something that I've been thinking about for a while now is to redo the netscape interface so the toggle javascript button is a main button (rather than going through preferences -> advanced ->javascript). Since Pop-up ads are probably the most annoying of ads and usually created through javascript, this will give us a quick and easy method to disable them. ...or even better, have an option to prevent only the pop-ups from appearing while allowing all other javascript routines to pass (yes, it can be done, but I don't know how).
This is a *very* good point. I run a website and we're getting income rates so low we can no longer cover the server's colocation cost. The excuse we get is that no one is clicking and therefore ads do not work. Unfortunately, the information advertisers are able to get from banner ads (like impressions, clicks, etc) are giving marketing people *way* more info than they would normally get with a TV ad. To a marketing person, these stats are the hard facts and therefore banner ads clearly do not work. It's odd that they just ignore the biggest reason to advertise in the first place (brand recognition). Or it's also possible that companies that advertise on the net just don't "get" advertising since they aren't used to it. Most banner ads seem to be new tech companies that were born online and lack the experience older offline companies have.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
The IAB didn't get these numbers out of nowhere.
Both ZDNet and MSN (on its sub-pages) already use the "skyscraper" banner ad.
I found myself clicking it trying to use the scrollbar. Oops!
My former employer, eFront, is also doing a "skyscraper" in much the same style as MSN but sort of cramming smaller ads into the space.
.. that they move. It's *annoying*. That's why I block them. All of them. But only the moving banners. I don't mind static ads. I even look at them now and then. But moving banners is the way to go if you want everybody to use Junkbuster.
TA
As I posted elsewhere, the problem is moving, dynamic banners. That's so fantastically annoying that I block it immediately (and as I'm the one who maintains the junkbuster filter for the whole campus this actually matters..).
Static, non-changing, non-flashing, non-blinking ads are never blocked in our filters. Hey, I even look at them occasionally.
TA
(I block the same thing, using Sleezeball.)
I wonder if it isn't just a matter of time, before they (and everyone else) stop serving banner ads from an easy-to-identify banner directory, and start using techniques that make it difficult for our simple little pattern matchers to identify what is an ad, and what isn't.
There will be countermeasures, and countercountermeasures, etc.
IMHO, the trick is to try to keep ad blocking features out of mainstream products (i.e. the big marketshare browsers, perhaps including Mozilla) so that only people who care about blocking ads will bother to do so. If everyone started using iCab, the other side would pretty much be forced to start working on the problem.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I also use Junkbuster to block the actual html file that the popup window tries to load. Doesn't stop it from popping up, but at least you don't see whatever big, smelly, floppy uncircumsized dong they were trying to smack you in the face with.
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
I think if they start doing that the pages that display them will start getting less views. I do a great job of ignoring them now (and not clicking through) that making them bigger will make me start ignoring websites. Please tell me the people at Andover.net think this is a dumb idea.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
i believe that the last point about a 'big enough size' is true. however, the is something to be noted about too big. for example, the newspaper ad that takes up the entire page is easily and quickly filtered. a large department store in my local newspaper, for some reason, takes 4 consecutive full pages in the 'a' section of every tuesday newspaper. i, and many others, i'm sure, skip over it without a second thought.
on the web an ad that, say, take up the first 400 vertical pixels would be annoying as all hell, but people would just learn to spin their wheel mouse or hit page down to skip over it.
complex
Not sure if you're from a country that has public education, but I will assume that.
Everyone pays for eduction...through their taxes. Are you implying that if I had better math skills I wouldn't be paying taxes and thereby not paying for education?
Blar.
But most of the worst offenders don't offer these options? Like those gaming/tech sites that put three sentencaes of text per page. They fill the rest with ads, tiny sponsor buttons and navigation. I avoid those like the plague.
Blar.
Erm, from what you say, you agree with the original poster. So why is this phrased as an opposing viewpoint?
Good point...however, I think that the ideas will go in the other direction. Ad filtering for TV.
Imagine a Tivo-alike with a button on the remote that says "AD". It functions like fast forward, but when a certain number of people press it, it gets in to a database of ad times. This can then be used to mark the ads on everyone elses recordings.
Problems:
A trust network could be used to stop abuse (by paid advertisers/TV networks employees!) And maybe it should be peer to peer so it can't be shut down easily.
So TV ads may be as useless as web ads soon.
So where does the money for content come from? Well it *is* going to happen, and no one is going to change the morals of a generation by moaning that rich guys are losing money. So a new model is needed.
The BBC in the UK is funded by a mandatory subscription/licence fee/tax or whatever you want to call it. Very few people in here in the UK find this objectionable. However, if there was no other content, I'm sure the BBC would start producing rubbish.
Subscription? Maybe.
The Street Performer Protocol is my favorite. The corps will have to get desparate before they try it though...
The more annoying they make ads the less effective they'll be and the whole concept will die and the web can get back to being useful instead of a marketing tool.
Sig is taking a break!
Ok, well this is something I've actually been pndering on my own for some time ... technically if I remember from my Anti-Virus days a computer virus is technically something that replicates itself on your computer without your knowledge or say ... so technically all these sites I visit which pop up umpteen million banner ads or the latest trend open up a hidden browser window that continues to cycle ads on my screen should be considered virii? I wish I could track down the actual computer virus description document .. maybe someone else will post it. But perhaps its something worth looking into.
Is there a way to disable those window popups in netscape or at least make netscape show you a warning before popping a window ? (note, I don't wsnt to disable java /java script at the same time)
Ah, undoubtedly. And from something I found here on /. ...
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By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds.
Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you
can.
Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are
Satan's little helpers.
Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good,
seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a
joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming.
You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are
fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save
your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a
joke... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang
yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it.
Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you
know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too,
"Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing
dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!
"Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous
indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that
indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing."
Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags!
Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market,
Bill's very bright to do that."
God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
"Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at
our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and
then separate them into the trapped dollar..."
How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at
night, don't you?"
"What didya do today honey?"
"Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight."
[snores] "Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You
know," [snores] "Yeah, you know the mums will love it." [snores]
Sleep like fucking children, don't ya, this is your world isn't it?
--
Dunno who did it, but it's funny. Because it's true.
This is alredy happening on sites like google.
though it's obnoxious when people popup boxes "sorry, you can't view source" Listen buddy, that's how I navigate, and if I wanted to view source, I could do that too.
Insightful, my ass.
It's hard to respond directly to your hyperbolic straw man "I'm a slashdot user! It's my god-given right! Me me me!" remarks. I guess I can at least say that I block ads without adopting the particular ridiculous posture you accuse us of.
Then you say, "...I don't... see what's wrong with putting some advertisements... on commercial-provided free content." Hey, I don't see what's wrong with it, either. Again it's hard to respond directly to your almost content-free claim.
But then you deliver a conclusion, which has no discernable relationship to the rest of your post: "...reading sites with advertising and purposefully blocking out that advertising is extremely immoral."
I don't really know what your rationale is here. You describe this practice as "stealing bandwidth". Buddy, these web sites are a PUBLIC FREE SERVICE. There is no obligation whatsoever incurred by visiting. Banner blocking is no more stealing than using a free newspaper as birdcage lining is stealing. The site operator is putting the site out there for everyone, with zero claim on the user's time or resources.
Other users have pointed out that any avoidance of ads in any ad supported medium would be stealing by your definition. Fast forwarding through commercials, going to the movie theater late to avoid commercials at the start of the show, tearing ads out of a magazine like Newsweek: it's all stealing according to your argument. In every case the user is denying the advertiser of his impressions, which I take it you believe are the rightful property of the advertiser (!). I doubt that even you fully believe the logical consequences of your claim.
Browsing the web with lynx is like driving down the freeway on a tricycle.
For more information, click here.
I (like most people) always have about 10-15 browser windows open with different things I'm working on.
I HATE it when I try to click on one browser window (to focus so I can use my crappy Microsoft scrolly thing) and I accidentally clicked on a skyscraper ad which hadn't rendered yet!!!
Although I'll take those ads over friggin pop-ups any day.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually kind of like the bigger ads. Why? Because they aren't so annoying.
Banner ads are annoying. They have flashing graphics, Java, stupid crap like that. The only kind of banner ads I like are the ones which are actually HTML forms and let you calculate something. Those are useful. I'm suprised they aren't used more.
The reason I like the bigger ads is that they are also useful. CNet's been running a lot of ads from Sun (this one) lately. They're really big, and they're filled with text. Text I actually read, because it's informative, and it doesn't flash or do anything stupid. I just sits there and asks me to read it. I think this is the one true use of advertising -- to inform people about a product or service. How would we find out about some things if it weren't for advertising? Think about your local paper. It's sold at a loss and supported by ads -- HUGE ads. They take up half the page or more in some cases. But we don't mind too much, because they don't flash, and they have INFORMATION which we might FIND USEFUL! CNet's lareger advertisement format gives the advertiser more space to work with (so they don't need to use animation), and is situated in the page more like an ad in the newspaper, as part of the page, instead of on top or the bottom.
The other form of advertising I like is Google's AdWords and sponsored links. Again, they are non-intrusive and informative.
In the latest Mozilla-builds (at least it is in Moz 0.8), you can disable pop-ups by adding the line user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinterna l.open","noAccess");
to your user-preferences. (See here for the details along with some other neat tricks to switch off animated GIFS.)
Pretty soon these options should show up in the Mozilla preferences-menu so that one can switch them on without even opening a text-editor.
I forgot to add:"While keeping all the other Javascript-options working"
Skynet: *Sits down at his computer...*
Skynet: *Types http://www.yahoo.com*
250 x 250 pixel Ad pops up...
All your ad space are belong to us!
Skynet: %$#@!
Execute? [Y/N] _
It's actually pretty hard to ignore some of the new types of ads that were mentioned in the article. For instance, I was reading this article on CNet, and when i first loaded the page, that ad was right in the middle of the content, and it is so huge that you can't ignore it.
I just checked, and all cnet stories have the same kind of huge ad right in the middle of the page. they are little flash applets with active content in them. If you look at this one the first thing that you see is a freakin' oracle add bogarting the window space.
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Of course most adverting people have such a fine grasp on math that they can't deal with division.
Look at TV shop "market share" some time. The ad rates are higher for a show that gets 40% of the viewers even though the total number or people watching is 1/10 of a 20% share show however they keep moving shows to more competitve timeslots. This is why networks will take decent shows and run them aginst popular shows and then cancel them and the networks still haven't figured it out. You would have thought that when the simpsons hit the cosby show time slot, someone would have figured out they could double their ad revenue by shifting one of the shows 1/2 hour but they didn't and they both lost out.
Computer people should take a few pages out of the adverting game book. For example, how about getting paid to do proposals that suck? Advertiing people charge you to give sales presentations.
Of course what do ad agencies sell? Its not your companys product, its their own. Their goals are not to get your product out the door but to convince you that you need to spend more on advertising with them. Typically it starts with a "low cost" program and then they come back and push the even more expensive ads.
The solution to this is set base rates for non-standard ads to be 500x the normal rate. After all its going to be seen right?
In my hosts file, I have :)
;)
ad.doubleclick.net
pointing to my webserver's IP at home. I never see doubleclick ads that I'm aware of. But I sure see lots of little broken images on many sites. Next thing is to figure out how to have all those broken images be replaced by a little text message that says "You are the koolest".
I used to just have
ad.doubleclick.net
point to 127.0.0.1, but then pages would wait for a timeout until the rest of the page loaded (Netscape 4.x).
Pointing it to a real IP stopped that nonsense.
Perhaps pointing
ad.doubleclick.net
to Slashdot's IP would be best, cause then everytime you load a page with a doubleclick banner, slashdot's site would record a 'hit', wouldn't it?
Slashdot's viewings would be doubled in a week if everyone did this!
Or point them to my server so I can rack up tons of hits and then
...put ad banners on my site and get paid
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
You have a valid argument, though people complaining about advertisments is not the horrid tempest of evil you seem to suggest.
The biggest aspect of your comment I have issue with is But most of us have broadband by now
Us who? Slashdotters? So those are the only ones to whom the rant applied? Or you mean everyone? If so, man are you outta touch.Refer to
this image from DSL reports
showing their estimate of DSl-capable CO's. I wonder how cable compares?
LOTS of work to do in the US!
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
You have ad.doubleclick in there at least three times. No, not ad, ads, and ads1, etc, but the same ad.doubleclick line. You may want to go through and strip out repeats, just for sake of efficiency.
Also, how you note Netscape 4.x users have slowdowns- it's due to URL timeouts- it can't find that server on localhost. Instead of 127.0.0.1, point it to some other real server and that hang for Netscape users will go away.
Then again, could this cause a big DoS attack?
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
That's funny. I thought what you really meant was that green markup around the ad - THAT's what's distracting me, plus the e-quill banner on top. Now ink.e-quill.com goes right into my block list, though it's probably not what you intended....
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth).
I'm confused. Let's see if I understand what you're saying:
Ignoring the ad is OK, but blocking it is stealing.
It's OK if you consciously decide not to see the ad (ignoring)
-but-
it's not OK if you conciously decide not to see the ad (blocking).
Have I got that right?
Thanks to webwasher, I don't see any ads on that page =).
thats the only solution i can think of. It takes way too much money and effort to create a new recognizable brand name so the only alternative is to purchase one with its logo from a bankrupt company and use it for a different product. If its a differnet product and under new management people wont associate it with the bad quality or internal management that made it go bankrupt to begin with.
People are realizing what they want more and more which means you're going to be able to sell to them less and less with advertizing. It will require either amazon-style profiling, word of mouth, or people will seek things out for themselves. Besides people enjoy the hunt for bargains, thats why swap meets (dare i say bazaar markets), auction sites like ebay and outdoor market places work well. Its also the same reason blockbuster sells more previously viewed tapes when theyre in a pile than when stacked neatly. The fact that they search the pile for a bargain makes them want to buy more. The name of the game is exposure. The longer you can have people check out or play with your product the more likely you are to sell them something.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
fsck...if you want to see ad abuse, see CNET itself!
Either advertisers pay for it, or you pay for it directly. Personally, I would rather have advertisers pay for it.
Perhaps you are misunderstanding the economics behind this. A sustainable system would be: Advertisers pay for a site, sales pay for advertisments and you pay for sales.
A non-sustainable system would be.: Advertisers pay for a site, venture capital pays for advertisements. But THIS is a pyramid scam, and only works so long as there is rapid exponential growth in the market, and there isn't anymore, so it's falling apart.
In the long run, if the advertisments you look at don't one way or another manage to extract their cost from you (plus the cost of running a company like doubleclick, plus N%) they will cease to exist, or decrease in value to match what value they CAN bring in, in terms of increase sales or whatever.
A site successfully and sustainably supported by ads is not free, but the costs are hidden, because you don't pay (say,) Slashdot directly for their services, and not everyone pays.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Basically, the "suits" won way back when AOL built a browser into its service. It was just downhill from there.
Besides, how are all those people employed at those companies supposed to pay the bills?
Corporations need to motivate people to buy their products. ... Capitalism requires product awareness in consumers to work at all.
I buy a new car about once every five years. During prime time TV I am presented with ads for new cars about once every eight minutes. That kind of disparity very quickly becomes annoying.
I'd be interested to see how those sites with all those tables that constrain all their site to vga width deal with these ads. Surely the designers' heads will explode!
Design the site for vga, but put a 1500x1500 ad in there! haha.
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Sure, there's nothing like sound and video to make a banner less obnoxious.
I use iCab (Mac), which contains a very nice little image filter..
Adding: SRC contains: "http://images.slashdot.org/banner/" to the images filter gets rid of all the /. banner ads.. I also filter images of a variety of sizes (if it looks like a banner, filter it!)
Best of all, pages load considerably quicker when you don't have to wait for the banners..
Why not get Junkbuster. It works great for me.
Ya i hate those fucking ads in icq. Actually the lastest version got rid of adds on the message window..but they're stil there on the file xfer and some other ones.
I'd hate to have icq slow down b/c it needs to download an ad...if it gets any worse, i'm going to dump icq.
I hear you on the tv thing. Even shows that i love like the simpsons or the x-files (which was very good last sunday also) i can barely watch b/c the ads take too long to get through. It seems i spend more time being bored and annoyed by commercials then i do enjoying the show.
I dont think the web is that bad yet, and i can block it in realtime (unlike tv). But then i also use the internet for more then just web browsering, so that could have something to do with it.
great, let's block those ads! it's my God-given right to have free Internet content!
Actually to me its 'Hmm some company wants to use the bandwidth I paid for to deliver something i don't want. They're giving the content away for free, i never said they had to do it. They can always become a pay site if they like. But right now they are free, so i'll take what i want, and ignore/block the rest. Just like i never watch commercials on tv (when i do watch tv, that is). Do you think thats wrong? Do i have some kind of obligation to watch the commercials on tv b/c i'm watching a program i like? Would it be wrong for me to use the commercial skip button i have on my vcr?
and not so that we can add better functionality and improve the product, but so that we can port it to Linux (ie, steal it)
Porting to linux may be considered a derivitive work, which i think is allowed under copyright. Besides, what would they be stealing if the original author has no intention of porting it to linux themselves? Besides, i don't know where this has been done. Most open source things i've seen are for linux to begin with. The 'stolen products' you describe aren't usually ports at all. They are written from the ground up, yes possiblly to provide the same functionality as a commercial product, but they are hardly stolen. Would you say that GM is stealing from Ford for building something of their own but offers the same functionality of a car? Hardly. I believe thats called competition.
At any rate, please tell me something that was open sourced (and not already on linux) and promptly ported to linux.
we have a right to free music and movies!
You seem to thing that musicians and movie makers have a right to be paid for what they do. It wasn't always like that however. Before the record companies, musicans played hoping to get tips. If you liked them, you could tip them. But surely you don't think that everyone that liked the musician tipped him, do you? So where they morally wrong? If i did tip him, was i also paying for the failing musician? Things are different now with the record labels. They say on one hand if i want to listen, i have to pay, yet on the other hand they get thier music played over the radio, which i could record for free. At any rate, i was born with ears and eyes, and i have a right to use them.
people here have gone way beyond that into a "me! me! me!" attitude that make middle-age yuppies look like ghandi.
So tell me, you think its normal for people to WANT to pay for anything? If people can get something for free, don't you think they would take advantage of that? Of course i don't want to pay for my OS; and there's one there for free. Whats wrong with me taking that? Getting stuff for free only becomes wrong with you are stealing it.
Besides, did you ever stop to think this 'everything for free' attitude is a direct result of being subjected to the corporate attitude enacted by the middle agged yuppies of 'screw every last dime out of them?' Most buisness today isn't about making a better product; its about locking people in. Its 'we will offer these shitty services no one will want at a low price, and offer the service they do want at a high price.'
By the way, no one cares that you don't own a car or television. The only reason i can think thta you would even meantion that non-issue is b/c you're trying to see like you are 'holier then thou.' Unfortunatly not owning a car or tv doesn't make you any better then anyone else. And just as we do not care that you don't own these things, neither do any corporations.
So you're saying it is morally wrong for me to walk away from the tv during commercials?
When was the last time you saw an ad for something that was truely new and unique? Alot of the best products i know about i discovered via word of mouth. Even the new Cingular (sp?) phone company i don't really care about. To me its just another crappy cell phone provider. Verizon advertises with 'people want to be free.' From personal experience, i know this not to be the case (which is why i'm dumping them). Cingular says they value personal expression...why should ithink that any different?
And no, most of us do not have broadband by now. Most of us are using modems, and will be for quite some time. Take a look at normal people, not the close circle of your friends...
Actually i've found cable modemto be pretty nice...it would be my prefered internet connection, ifi had it back home. I doubt DSL is dying a horrible death, but here anyway, DSL is only a thrid of what the cable modem is, at the same price. But if it were all i could get, i may do that.
Ironic that i live right in a big green glob in the NE US, and i can't get dsl...
no i think people can be that stupid. Just like you. Fuck off, you anonymous prick.
Text-based Ads or Google's fantastic AdWords are the way forward, I feel
I agree with this wholeheartedly because, as a consumer, the only ads that interest me are the ones that advertise a product that I think I could use. Google's targeted advertising scheme is excellent in this regard. It doesn't matter how big or flashy the ad is, if it's an ad for donkey shaving, it won't get my attention (I have no donkeys). On the other hand, the most inobtrusive ad gets my attention right away if it has in the text something that makes me think, "Hey, I could use that." Obnoxious ads are certainly less effective at this because they get tuned out immediately.
My company has a fairly strict website blocking policy. Too bad they allow us to use proxy servers to just go around whatever they block. But anyway, they block most of the links to banner ads, which is actually pretty nice. Finally a good use for blocking software.
Jason
There's a good chance advertisers would've used larger ads eventually anyway. With standards set for the size of these new sorts of ads, it'll be that much easier to filter them out with regular expression parsers like Internet Junkbuster and Squid.Redir.
You really are a spammaster, aren't you?
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
What I'm saying is, for resources that are popular and are considered valuable (Slashdot for example) - someone has to pay the bills to keep it going. I wouldn't think it would be fair to have Commander Taco and company to foot all that cost out of their pocket. That's why there's ads here.
:)
Thanks for the comments on the dog anyhow..
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
I will continue to favour sites which are Lynx friendly (eg, Mother Jones at
http://www.motherjones.com/
On your recomendation I went there, and guess what showed up? A pain in the ass popup!
http://www.adsubtract.com
if electricity is created by electrons, is morality created by morons?
Since when are ads supposed to be guaranteed to work? They're a gamble, and the net has become the biggest casino outside of Monte Carlo. Make them bigger you say...yeah, and piss off your potential customers? Go right ahead If ads get that large, I'll start being more religious about assigning the ad servers I come across to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file.
That way, I won't see them *at all* and you can take your advertising, fold it up until it's all sharp corners, and stick it where it hurts most.
Opera.
--
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
I think the Internet Advertising Bureau needs to release browser plug-ins that remove all content EXCEPT for ads on web pages. I'm tired of finding all that irrelevant information on the pages I browse. I'd much rather have all those lovely ads to browse without having to hunt for them through all that *shudder* information.
-drin
And realize that size really doesn't matter...
If you were to count up all the pixels covered by advertising the old layout from CNet included then you'll probably find that it has just been accumulated into a single area. I like it better that way. Only one thing to ignore.
Whatever they use for their ads, it sucks. For me the problem with ads on the web is not that they are there, but that they slow down the whole experience of web surfing. Example: DoubleClick. It is not that they are evil about data hoarding (though they well and truly are), but that they cannot deliver what they claim: serving ads to the entire web. They obviously don't have the horsepower for that, since it is often their ads which slow down loading of a page by a factor of several. The big popups are worse. They hang the whole system, and then there is this big screen that flashes things at you. My nervous system does not like that.
I will continue to favour sites which are Lynx friendly (eg, Mother Jones at
http://www.motherjones.com/
).drift wave turbulence: http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
--
cu,
Bruce
drift wave turbulence: http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
You can also hit the stop button when the page is done loading. I generally do this when I am reading a page with one of those x10 ads on it.
Reminds me of sitting in a room one night with some friends. The regular show is on and we're all talking and eating. The commercials come on and we are dead quiet, watching the TV, ignoring our food. One of my friends actually had a fork full of food in front of his face, and held it there for 3-4 minutes while he was zoned into watching the commercial. Ever since that day I've learned to zone out and do something during commercials - or just not watch TV.
What we need is ad filtering software that automatically fetches the url specified in the ad.
It doesn't display the ad (or even fetch it)... it just fetches the url.
That way everyone is happy. The user doesn't see the ad. The website gets paid for the advertising. And the advertiser thinks that people are clicking on their ads.
This is just more justification to start blocking ad generating IP addresses---if that also blocks thier content then tough beans...
why are most slashdot users so cheap?
i always wonder this. it seems that the majority of people here want everything for free. it's one thing to dislike corporate America, but most of what i see here is childish "gimmie gimmie gimmie!"
Some of us slashdot readers don't adhere to the US corporate model of everything of value having to be paid for in such a direct way. (Hey, isn't there an OS that doesn't cost money ....) . Sounds like a great opportunity for corporate websites that can offer a different business model than hitting their users with annoying adverts.
It would help if every crappy site didn't advertise for things. Why does www.joecrackuserspage.com need an ad? That just dilutes the pool of resources.
In other words, this will help decrease the number of sites that have ads, but it will increase the amount of ad revenue for each site. Sites that need ad revenue will have no problem keeping visitors, as k5's recent foray into ads has proven.
So leave it be and support banners, because you are supporting the web. Remember, information may want to be free as in speech, but someone better be paying for my beer.
Doesn't happen on my system. Scrolls right over the ad.
Also, why are banner ads being judged for their click through rate? I think that they can be effective in building brand awareness, just as television commercials are used for this purpose.
Here's a thought... What about the concept of an advertisement portal? People are always looking for solutions. If these ad's were categorized, I would certainly go to an ad portal site for comparative shopping. Also, they would have a higher click through because people would be there specifically looking for a vendor/companie's product.
-Legion
They're not stupid. They'll make it so the fridge is essentially useless without a functioning display. For example, 'Windows Refrigerator (SM) has detected that your temperature setting is too cold. Resetting temperature to 58 degrees F. [OK] [Cancel]" Meanwhile the compressor doesn't work until you click one of those two buttons.
This seems to be the majority attitude on the web, and yet sellers have mostly refused to hear it. If they did hear it, they'd create informative web sites that look good to search engines. Instead, they create hollow, shiny brochure-ware and then pay to advertise it. It's amazing how far they are from understanding customers.
For example, if I walk into a store, the product is typically displayed all around me. The merchant assumed that people walking into the store were likely to be customers, not potential investors or employees or reporters. But go to a typical commercial web page and 'products' is only one tiny link off the front page, which is mostly devoted to press releases.
Why do merchants make the assumption that they are the hunters and customers are prey, when real-world merchants understand that customers are the hunters and merchants are prey? I don't get it.
>it's my God-given right to have free Internet >content! Yup, in the beginning of the NET it was supposed to be free of publicity (according to the hackers who were working to develop it). I remember when SPAM first became an issue.. Community reaction was to send 10 e-mails for each SPAM received. It was effective for a short while, the server couldn't resist the load. >seriously, grow up. I don't agree with you, you're stupid!! Duhhhhhhhhhh
I have known about junkbuster filtering software for quite some time, but didnt think it was worth the effort needed to set it up properly and maintain the block lists. I didnt mind banner adds too much, if they flashed annoyingly I would just scroll down to clear them from view.
But recently zdnet and cnet started to use huge shockwave adds right in the middle of their stories. These adds are large, annoying and hard to ignore... in a word irritating. I thought about boycotting those sites alltogether esp since the quality of their editorials has slipped significantly recently. But Im a nerd and I need my news so I loaded up junkbuster, got myself a block list and modified the ini files to selectivly allow cookies. It wasnt too dificult to configure, but still painful for non techies.
Now I live in a world without banners and it is good.
We have the best government that money can buy.
make hemorrhoids bigger, make driving on the freeway a little slower, and make the tapwater taste a little more like ass.
Ahh, technology marches on.
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
The problem with this is that in order to target these ads they need to have personal information. And everyone here knows that any web sites that collect personal information are evil and are invading your privacy. If you want personalized ads then you ahve to give up some degree privacy.\ =\=\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
reading this kinda put an interesting idea into my head. Sound ads on teh internet, this could be very annoying, but it is interesting. immagine going to see a website and a small ad loads in the background and plays after the site loads, kinda like a commercial on the radio.\ =\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
yup webwasher is quite good if you use windows
but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing
Oh come on. The purpose of advertising is not to make things free, it's to make people buy stuff. If an ad is so obnoxious that it makes people want to block it, then it obviously isn't working for its intended purpose. It's the advertisers' responsiblilty to sway me with their ads, and if those ads are so bad that we block them, then they deserve to be blocked.
big 'click me ads' taking up space on a web page are an awful idea but 'explore within this space' is actually an idea that's quite useful. But few are using it the right way yet. It's most often being used as a multi-page ad. Sooner or later the halfway interested viewer will click the wrong thing and a new window unexpectedly appears or the hooked viewer gets tired of the clicking the ad without getting to the real page. It needs to be made a browser window within the browser and have an 'open in new window' or 'ok I'm hooked show me the page' so the viewer has the choice.
I see a big white blank area, just like ads on any other page... I use squid.redir with a custom set of rules, and find it very effective. I haven't seen an ad while browsing through the system in a long time. Last I checked the stats over 3 days indicated that for a 10k average for ads they would have been around 4MB of traffic out of 23MB total...
There's nothing stopping/forcing sites from posting ads of any given size or shape. It's not like there's some sort of banner ad RFC sites have to conform to.
--
Maybe it's just me, but I remember it being a lot easier to find good information on the net before "free" information had to be paid for.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I've never clicked a {insert your favorite beer} ad on TV either...but I sure buy enough of it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yup, as long as they keep them in a standardized size, then we can come up with apps that can easily identify and block them.
If only the porn-opponents had it so easy.
-Grant aka JimTheta
---
My stupid web site
Every time I hear how banner ads are failing drives me completely insane. Let me make it really clear...
BANNER AD'S ARE NOT FAILING! IT'S THE AD PLACEMENT THAT IS NOT WORKING!!!
Lets put it in a more Proven ground for an example of why banner ad's fail. Your 5 year old brother (or son) Is watching Nick Jr.'s Blues Clues. When the commercials come on. You see the Beer WaZZup Guys. A strong Investment Profolio. and Bob dole Selling Viagra instead of commercials with products that the kid could buy and get the five year old to go insane and drive his parents nutz over a toy or food or something. This is how it currently is on the internet. How many sites have you seen today with the stupid $20 punching monkey on it. I can count everything from a hardware review site, a software company and a site selling kids toys.
A perfect example of how it should be done is slashdot itself. Notice that all of the ad's have something that would most likely interest the users of slashdot, not to mention that there's a variety of them and they are updated rather frequently. Most likely the banners on this site have been more successful than most sites on the net simply because they target their audience more directly than most other sites I've seen.
--
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
It used to be that only p0rn sites used the popup windows. Now everybody is getting in on the act. Is ther a browser or 3rd party software which will block webpage requests to make a new window?
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Well, then it's only a matter of time then, that companies wise up to this and package the content in flash or something along with the ad. Then where will you be?
--It burns! --It's loaded with wasabi.
There's actually a term for this (if you live in missouri you probably know what it is ;-)
It's called T.O.M.A.
I remember when i as living in columbia, we used to see these 30second spots in between shows. They just showed some people eating, or walking, or whatever normal people do. A voice-over was ranting on about this and that "Who do your customers think of when they blah blah blah." And then they cut to a black screen.
"TOMA! If you're in business, you gotta have it."
And guess what: they never told you what TOMA was. TOMA spots ran for three months without a peep. But if i called out to one of my friends on campus "TOMA!" - they would immediately yell back at me "If you're in business, you gotta have it!" None of us knew what it was but EVERYONE knew of it. I called a guy at TCI one day during a tech support call i was taking, and i happened to ask him what TOMA was. He said he didn't know, but he told me to call him back if i found out. I don't think i spoke to a single person over the span of a month that hadn't seen that commercial and wasn't intrigued by it. Even the ads were a perfect example of TOMA.
It's buggin' the hell out of you by now isn't it.
Click
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
nope.
it just means that a week, or a month from now, if someone shouts out "TOMA!" you're going to know what it is. simply because of the way the concept was introduced to you. it was one of the most effective marketing campains i've ever seen.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Therein lies the problem, so far as the marketdroids are concerned - the very core of marketing is forcing the person (hereafter referred to as "consumer") to believe that they need to buy the product or service. It never occurs to them to think that the consumer might be right when they assert that they don't, because your recalcitrance is standing between them and your money, and that money has one rightful place as far as they're concerned. In their pockets.
Preaching to the choir, I know - but find and meet and talk with a marketdroid sometime, if you haven't. Take a sales or marketing course or seminar. You'll see what I mean. If it seems an awful lot like a carny attitude ("everyone's a mark"), then you're on the right track.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
"there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth)."
Sniff...sniff sniff....ah, the fragnant smell of bullshit. The internet IS free; if you want to put ads on it, fine, but dont expect me to pay to see them.
Looks like its time to update my firewall rules.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
This is what happens when salespeople are the ones selling ads. They have been trying to sell ads like these for years, but they were always told there wasn't enough room. When people would pay $750/mo for a 468x60 banner on any web site with any traffic, sales people didn't put up much of a fight. Now that these banners can't fetch $50/mo, it's hard for the technical and design teams to fight back. That is especially true for companies receiving a significant portion of their revenue from web ads. One of our sales staffers sold a 500x500 pop-up ad without checking. Luckily it was just a verbal agreement, so we were able to knock some sense into him and get the size down to 250x250, but even that is quite annoying. After all, if you ask just about any sales person, they will say they don't understand why spam is so aweful. They hate receiving it, but they don't understand why others send "menacing" emails to their ISP to cancel their service when they spam.
Ads are going to get bigger and bigger until salespeople and advertisers wind up polluting the medium they depond on for their paycheck to the point that no one uses it anymore. There comes a point when the price of free is too high.
Maybe then we'll all just go back to text-based community supported bulletin board systems and FIDOnet.
Hmmm. Thats odd, IAB.net has no ads on its page. Some example they're setting.
Another article, same subject
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
If they standardise the sizes that should make them easier to filter out.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
They allow some really big ads (up to 140x800) but the maximum file size is 20k.
We have to learn to live with adverts -- you have them on TV (unless you watch the BBC in the UK), the net will have to use more advertising to survive, but it's important to be sensible. Check out what ZDNET think... they seem quite sensible.
[1]ObTroll: Yes, folks, in some countries non-commercial TV still exists. No, PBS doesn't count, telethons are advertising.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeah, annoying pop-up ads were so successful on MaximumPC and MaximumLinux. The best way to keep readers is to annoy the hell out of them? Sure you can place a dollar value per square inch for your content display, but it may be short-sighted if readership or sales are hurt by it. Like grandpa said, "Twenty percent of nothing is still nothing"
Maybe content generators should be looking at a more realistic business model while advertising sales depatments revalue the rates for advertisers. It's not like there are FEWER eyeballs on the WWW every year.
How about spending less money on chrome and fin development (read: Flash, streaming, shitty asp/java deployment)?
Pop-ups are the equivalent of those annoying consumer electronics mega-store salespeople; they are loud, annoying, abusive, and provide little information. Not to mention the greasy stain they leave on your immortal soul.
one better than mcleodeight
Heh, wow. Sorry, I've had Snow Crash on the brain for a few days, I'm sorry about that. It's been a while since I read it, too, but another good note about the Diamond Age is that the people living in the super-ad-saturated world didn't seem to mind or notice the ads that much. Guess their filters are even better than ours.
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Of course, it won't be long before every appliance has built in advertising. You'll have a flat LCD screen attached to your fridge that runs ads 24/7...ugh.
It could possibly, and very likely go beyond that. As I'm sure many (if not all) of you have read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which describes not only the above scenario, but also, due to the fabulous science of nanotechnology, multimedia ads on food packaging, chopsticks, and yes, toilet paper.
So perhaps one day we will see reports of the Nanotechnology Advertising Bureau trying to get decibel-restrictions taken off gum-wrapper ads.
Who says technology is a good thing?
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I agree with you completely. And this isn't the only reason paying per click through is bad. The main reason is it means that if you have bad advertisements that attract less people, you pay less. Why? If my tv ad sucks, I still pay the same amount for the airtime. Why should the web site that runs my ad not make money for the space they sell me because no one wants my product? I have still used space on their page.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Lynx here I come...
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
Yeah, I clicked. I guess you won.
But I still don't get it. What do you mean? Does the fact I still don't understand mean your ad was ineffective? 8^/
Dazed and Confused outside of Columbia...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This is why you use the Proxomitron. It's another local web proxy but it does quite a bit more than the usual banner stripper. It stops javascript popups (you don't even see them), stops embedded MIDI's and wav files (woohoo!), along with a huge number of other optional filters (want to hide your referer? It can. Disguise your user agent? Got that covered too). It's also completely customizable, so you can make it filter your own personal annoyances.
- No deceptive ads, like "You won $100! Click here to collect"
- No fake GUI's. Ads with fake textboxes or button suck, and deceive novices.
- No blinking!
- Flash or shockwave ads must have a "pause" button
- Java ads shouldn't suck 100% CPU (ie: "shock the monkey" banner)
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
is to slashdot their site.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
http://ink.e-quill.com/view/3876482d4c6d9b94
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I also remember with nostalgia my usenet/gopher/ftp/MUD days (not so into BBSs), but my pr0n collection is much better with my 1.5Mbps DSL than it was with my 2800bps modem.
And no, that's not the only thing it's good for... But anyone thinking that we could have gotten here without the commercialization of the net, is in denial (and I don't mean Egypt).
--
If you want to live in a country ruled by religion, move to Iran.
Coolness! That actually worked!
You can't take the sky from me!
A co-worker had to implement a pop-up on one of the sites at my last job. We would always refer to it a the PPP or Porno Pop-up Page. That way the developers could always remind marketing and customer service where this idea came from and why we thought it was a bad idea to implement it in the first place. >;-)
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I have long been filtering out the banner ads automatically. If they make the banner ads bigger, or pop up automatically, it may get me annoyed enough to actually go and find filtering software to filter all ads out.
:( Good ads make you smile, reflect or even change your mind.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I love good ads, few years ago, I even paid to see a feature length collection of world best advertising. (Unfortunately, I haven't noticed it shown in Calgary in the last few years.
Back to banner ads. May be I am naive, I have been thinking of a way to improve the form of the banner ads, afterall the websites need to make money somehow. One way is by putting some interesting tidbits of information or fun facts (brief text of 10-15 words max) on the ad with the sponsoring company's logo. It is almost like the text you read in fortune cookies and the good ones may make you think. I don't mind reading them if they are brief and good. These "ads" have to contain useful/interesting information that are not there to sell me the products, the selling bit is the brand by the placement of the company's logo.
That's the bullshit I have on this.
P.S. If you want to see some good ads, check out http://www.adcritic.com/ They have a collection of good ads.
My comments are just bull shit. I won't read it again. Why should you?
But then this is an advertisers wet dream! Completely targeted ads. Just make the ad for the one person not running the blocking software after a certain point is reached.
I know this message is half in jest, but use links instead. It does everything lynx does, plus leaves your breath minty fresh, too.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
If the ad popups are all the same size, it will make it easier to block them without blocking non-ad popups (like webpages where the links open up a new window, which can be handy)
Gee, anyone else hear think this sounds like the "use a bigger hammer" theory?
Like the ad that shows up when you search for VA Linux [http://www.google.com/search?q=VA+Linux for the goat wary]. Personally, I have to say I click on those ads far more than I do other banner ads. They're just so... simple! So... Googlish!
Akardam Out
in the future, once ppl realise clicking through is bull: überbanner!
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Well thats the whole point of advertising on free sites. The content of the site is considered "payment". That's why you visit the site, right? If the "payment" isn't sufficient, you don't visit the site. Fewer page views, fewer advertising dollars, more imputus to make the payment (content) better. Nice self-correcting system, eh?
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
---------
NMG
Well, it's happened, hasn't it? Internet advertising is being standardized. Finally! Now maybe I can get around to designing a better advertisement detection/removal program.
While it may seem a step in the wrong direction to enlarge advertisements, it's better than the advertising companies are forming some kind of makeshift doggie-style competition (meow)--in fact, such an alliance may even reduce spam!
In the perspective of the webmaster/designer, standardizing advertisements instead of having different companies with different size advertisement will mean less layout modifications when switching or adding advertisers. Plus, inline banners look cooler than sloppily placed ones.
If only there were more content in the actual article itself about this...and the developments of this so-called advertising bureau.
I made some non-animated gifs of the given sizes. they weighed between 70kB and over 100kB. WTF? Size alone does it here. I don't mind shockwave ads since most of the time I can't see 'em since I'm too lazy for copying the plugin files to the Mozilla plugin folder, an impossible feat deemed impossible by the installer. Next thing I'm gonna do is installing an ad filter on my NAT router.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yet another reason to turn off Java! (as if there weren't enough already)
sulli
RTFJ.
That's what I've been saying all along! Of COURSE people aren't going to click on those "punch the monkey and win" banners all the time, nor the strobing "Click here to see if you won" ads, or any of that.
:(
If I watch tv and see an ad for, say, a bank, I don't really care. It might be a funny commercial or whatever, but that commercial hasn't made me any more prone to go out and take a $100,000 loan. For that reason, TV marketeers TARGET their ads to people who are most likely to want to see them.
Webpages are terrible at targeting atvertising, as well as picking what's an effective ad. Nobody going to, say, an overclocking site is going to click on a "15mb free web space!" ad, c'mon!
It's sad that sites close down because the banner agencies that pay them are so incompetent that they know NOTHING about advertising.
in favour of the Honour System. Visitors get the chance to donate an arbitary amount of money.
Penny Arcade are doing this, and are seeing quite a substantial sum donated. Don't know how this compares to banner ads... did anyone ever click on them anyway?
Time will tell whether the honour system actually works well enough for people to make a living off of it.
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
I guess I will have to update my banner filter with a bigger version too :)
Fight back and check out:
www.webwasher.com for a great ad filter
I am becoming increasingly convinced that users habitually ignore any graphic. If these graphics get bigger, users may in fact abandon sites. The thing that web designers do not realize is that a web page is not a traditional product. For instance, Microsoft can fill Windows Explorer or the area around the browser window in IE with advertising, and the user can do nothing about it. They have bought Windows and are stuck with it. On the other hand, if the advertising become too annoying on a website, the user can invest a little time to find a less annoying site.
We need a creative revenue solution, not more of the same unworkable ideas.
Does this article mean any upcoming changes to my /. experience? I know the answer I'd get from CT, but what about from VA Linux?
science is a religion
I'm already waiting a minute or two for pages to load, I don't wanna wait another 2-3 minute's for a page to load because of a banner.
Forget about /.'ing a page, better watch out for bannering a page.
"We came, we saw, we KICKED ITS ASS"
--Ghostbusters
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
until advertisers start restricting CONTENT to 250x250 pixel blocks on the screen.
We wouldn't want the content to distract us from the advertising now, would we?
Next move will be to advertisement pages with content in tiny 400x60 banners. Yay. More commercials, less product.
Asikaa
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
Yeah turning off java will prevent the new Flash adds from annoying you, good move!
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
My subject says it for me
Hey, how come the Internet Advertising Bureau itself doesn't have any banner ads on their web site?
And so it goes.
There's an easy way to disable those flashy horrors :) Add remotead.cnet.com, ads3.zdnet.com, images.zdnet.com to list of restricted sites in IE. That kills their "new and improved" logic instantly as flash, java and cookies are disabled for restricted sites.
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Hyperom.com
...that this story gets posted right after the 'micropayments vs. advertising' story.
It'd be REALLY nice if we could live with banners the size they are now, but unfortunately I can see their point of view on this:
The advertisers realize that screen sizes are increasing, the resolutions at which typical end users are increasing and thus their segment of the physical screen is decreasing. 19 inch monitors are becoming common-place, and 17 inch monitors are entering the low-end space formerly occupied by 15 inchers. What's an advertiser to do, faced with a smaller footprint on the screen? Insist on larger space of course!
Now, am I defending this move? No. I think the whole point of larger screens is so you have more space to do your actual work in, NOT so some dumbass advertiser can annoy me even more with Flash animations or larger and more distracting GIF animations (the former being particularly annoying to me now-- I never noticed them before, but recently when I've hit ESC in IE to stop the pages animations, I've noted that the Flash animations CONTINUE, eating up more CPU cycles than the GIF images did).
My suggestion to people who get as annoyed by this as me? Don't frequent sites that have this kind of "user-experience killing" advertising.. A prime example is C|Net-- I don't visit their site anymore, and haven't for months.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Where will it all end? It won't.
No, it won't. This is like a high school calculus problem. We're seeking to maximize advertising revenue. The variables in the mix will always balance themselves to find this optimum.
Well, this is more true now than it was in the bubble of days long past. Lately the balance has started swinging to more advertising. Sites like News.com have to have some way to make money. Either you pay for a subscription or they sell advertising. If they've got more advertising than you'll deal with, go to a competitor. It's a free market.
It is really the only way forward.
What the heck is "forward?" Think optimization.
Warez, okay Pr0n, never!
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
I love it when web sites have so many pop-ups that I have to turn my computer off to regain control.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
As soon as the banners become sufficiently large everybody will be using junkbuster. I believe many sysadmins will gladly install filters to save their colleagues' time.
I don't think that's true. Newspaper ads are effective, and there is not an "arms race" to make them bigger and bigger. Clearly bigger is better, however.
There's another very important point here: bigger newspaper ads don't use bandwidth. Sure, they take up space on a page that may have been used for something else, but no one has to wait for newspaper ads to load. In a world with infinite and free bandwidth, this would not be as much of a problem. But as a member of the vast majority of 'net users - a modem boy - banner ads are really bothersome, since I have to wait for them to load (on some pages) and take that much bandwidth away from my latest download (GetRight: something's always coming).
my friend, you stand in a sewer and complain of the smell.
Well, I didn't see no nothing, 'cause that ad is displayed in an "iframe", and my personal style sheet for MSIE includes this:
iframe { display: none !important; }
It disappearded without a trace. Good riddance!Iframes are hardly ever up to any good anyway.
Fortunately, TreeLoot has discarded that incredibly annoying banner-sized Java applet (just look at what it does to CPU time on a P3 733!) with a much less volatile animated GIF. However, I wouldn't have noticed the change on my computer, since I bound www.treeloot.com to 127.0.0.1 in hosts!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
In all honesty, larger banners prolly won't bother me, and I don't think I'll filter 'em...I occasionally see a useful product on a banner, and some sites deserve a click-thru.
But pop-ups. God, I can't stand pop-ups.
I refuse to click on any pop-up, even if it is for a product I'm interested in.
I'll type in the advertiser's URL in a new window, simply to avoid giving the pop-up's owner a click-thru.
The day pop-ups become as popular as banners, is the day I start filtering ALL ads out, simply out of spite.
RG
----
Deepthroat my submarine, swallow my seamen.
I have to agree. Noone likes advertisements; however, we all like free media. I really enjoyed watching my favorite TV shows for free when I was a kid. Advertisements pay for this. Without getting into complicated arguments I will make the statement that the web is free right now and in order for certain content to remain that way we need advertising revenue. Things are MUCH better now, it is far easier to avoid unwanted adds on the web than from TV, think about it. We have made progress. -- Dane
the sig you have there is from sid meier's alpha centauri. you have allredy been told about this.(i hope you the same person). oh by the way mines form hichickers guid.
life, the universe and everything? = 42
delete the files : icqateima32.dll, icqateimg32.dll, icqateres.dll. in your icq dir
life, the universe and everything? = 42
there bad enuf as it is.
life, the universe and everything? = 42
thank you.
life, the universe and everything? = 42
my bad.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
This could, though, spawn a cottage industry for shareware micropayment-tracking software that monitors when you're browsing for work or for pleasure....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
When you look at a road sign or see an ad in a magazine or newspaper, those ads are passively there. The advertisers pay to have the ads placed there in hopes that you will see them. They don't know if you actually saw the ad or what your impressions of it were. The ads don't watch you and report back to the advertising company.
But the internet is different. The ads contain code to catch what you're searching for and what your want to buy. Most people don't know that they are being catalogued and being prospected by marketers while they surf. Doubleclick is reputed to have an amazingly accurate profile of virtually every internet-accessing household in the United States.
As I said, ads on the net are different. They watch you. They steal your privacy. And this surfer doesn't like that. This surfer blocks ads to keep at least a small vestige of his privacy intact. In some interpretations, the way ads work could be considered digital rape. This is vastly different than the passive ads that appear in print and TV media.
So if it lets you sleep at night, go ahead and let the ads be. You're paying for it with your very identity.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
<br><b>Death, taxes and popups.</b>
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
Check out news.com. They already have giant Java applet ads in the middle of their stories.
Imagine this... every 15 minutes your browser went blank. No it didn't crash, it is time for a few words from our advertisers! Your browser will now display full screen ads for a couple of minutes then it is back to your regular browsing.
Don't want to watch the ads? Sure, you can open another browser window (switch channel), go get something to eat, or whatever. But the ads will play on, just like on TV or Radio.
How is the money distribute? Well either the ads are from the site you are looking at and they sell time to advertisers. Or they could come from your ISP which in turns pay the sites you visit for making you stay on line. Or you can pay to see (too much) ads, like with cable tv.
Think this is crazy? Everyone is saying that it is time for the internet to move to the living room: set top box on the family TV. So why not use the TV advertising model, which proven to be so successful?
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Despite the fact the at least two well-known trolls (Reality Master 101 and Urban Existentialist--don't believe me about them being trolls? Read any 3 posts by each and then follow the link in my sig) have already voiced their support, I'm going to follow suit--kinda. That is, I don't *support* it but neither will I resist it.
Junkbuster and Mozilla's "don't load images from this site" seem to work just fine for me. Let the people who are too rock-stupid to use these methods pay for the Internet (just like those with poor math skills pay for education).
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I have found HOSTS files useful for blocking banner ads. They are quite easy to setup and configure.
This one is my current baseline file and includes good directions for Windows users.
This one is more general purpose and "cross platform".
Whenever I hit a new ad site I add it to the bottom of the file.
We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files
I'm sure it's just me but I find it quite funny that this article followed the Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads article.
We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files
I used to hate popups. Then I got Junkbuster
:)
(Does this sound like a 50's TV ad yet?)
I put : slashdot.org/banner/ in my sblock.ini file, and POOF, no more slashdot ads.
As for doubleclick, I have a line in my sblock.ini that reads "doubleclick.net" (minus the "'s of course). Any ads/popups/cookies/riffraff from doubleclick simply doesn't get thru. Everything else loads without a hitch.
Life is better now
---
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
I like to use WebWasher when I surf on my windows box.
It does a real nice job of stripping out the banner ads and the popups.
Progress of Democracy in the US
1776: "Live Free or Die"
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
If you are a mac user, the browser icab filters out all ads. Check it out: www.icab.de It does other cool things like allow you to control your cookies, see which ones you have, and turn them off.
Even worse is Macromedia in conjunction with solaris. Say you go to a pefectly legitmate site, and then there's an add there. This add contains HT ML, Java commmands, and then it springs a pop-up.
"Hi...
My name's Tara...
Wanna fool around?
At which point I vigourously click my mouse no. (optical, no less!)
Bigger banner adds are annoying, but only If they get in the way. That's usually not too bad. Just bad design. Run a search for the nys dmv. It's horribly designed.
Karma...Police...
Arrest this man...
He speaks in numbers,
He buzzes like a fridge..
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
There are ads in icq, there was no warning, they just apeared. They are just of icq stuff, but why put them in.
Come on, we all know that we are going to have to see bigger impact advertising on the new. Some one has to pay for all of this. It is just like a magazine, you see lots of adds which pay for 97% of everything, and you pay the cover price to get it shipped to you (or less). The same with the internet, the 'shipping' is our ISP bills and the Advertising pays for the content. Anyways, The only adds I hate are the .GIFs that someone set to animate as fast as it can, for some reason it slows my whole system down to a crawl, on every computer I have.
Plug for my web site:
www.techsplanet.com/pelicanbay
Just as in print advertising, as the population becomes more and more desensitized and trained ignore the normal banners at the top of a page, ads will change to re-attract their attention.
This is not an evil conspiracy, its is normal evolution. Yes, it sucks, yes, we don't want it. Yes, you'll have to deal with it.
Look at the obnoxious ads at CNET (news.com). They have huge eds there for sun. Click any article.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
If i want to look at ads, i will pick up the local salespaper where i have nothing but ads. an array of differing companies competing for my money. Why not do the same? Just create .ads top level domain for advertisement. If you visit a site that is on the .ads domain, you would get an advertisement site. would make it alot easier to find the best deal online or locally, wouldn't you say?
The problem is, banner ads and popups are not working at all.
Adding popups or bigger banners isn't going to fix that. It's just going to annoy the user.
The problem is that we need a new way to pay for the free information on the 'net. That will probably either be an "Internet Tax" where users pay a certain amount of cash a month and then that cash gets divied up among all of the sites that the user accesses. Or a micropayment system that is reasonably painless.
I've been saying this for a few years now. The 'net market is going to change a LOT and a good percentage of the commercial content is going to go down.
The 'net is still like the early days of TV. In the early days of TV, they modified radio and movie programming a little bit and called that TV. Then, later, real TV programming developed.
Gentoo Sucks
Ads that work for me: The SUSe O'Reilly sponsorship of userfriendly - it's there, they have banner ads, but it mostly doesn't get in the way, and it is well targetted. It certainly made me contemplate SUSe whne I was bouncing around different distributions a while ago.
jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Blocking advertising is not stealing. If I wasn't to respond to the advertising anyway, I actually save the advertisers' time and money by not loading it from them. Do you think that going to the bathroom or channel surfing during TV commercials is stealing? What about watching the advertising yet not buying the products? That might also be considered stealing.
Yes, Avantgo on the Palm has ads.
One line of text, a link to a full page that has also downloaded. I've clicked on maybe 5% of these as the product has been relevant.
Which is a lot better ratio than the web.
PETA Advertisement Standards, Draft 0.0.1-pre1:
To meet PETA certification, ads should not be more than 30KB in size.
To meet PETA certification, ads should work. You should not take a pop-up ad server down for maintainence, as people go *nuts* when they get blank windows popping up, accompanied by various error messages.
Pop-up ads should not be overly distracting, and must be aesthetical in appearance. This is due to the fact that many people will bring up vi and add you to their /etc/hosts file if your ads irritate them.
Services such as Mail.com that mysteriously stop working when you block the domains of their ads should be boycotted.
(I'm not positive about the last thing; I added the domain where mail.com's ads were coming from (*NOT* mail.com!), and I suddenly started getting nothing but error messages from localhost...
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suwain_2
I block various doubleclick services too, but I'm yet to find a way to block *anything* originating from doubleclick.net -- if it has a subdomain, I have to manually add that. It's a pain. Not to mention the sites that stop working when you block their ads... Of course, sites that do that will probably lose customers pretty quickly. (Before you tell me this is not possible: I at first agreed. But it seems that mail.com will load a pop-up ad, which *then* brings you to their main page, or something like that. I blocked the domain that mail.com's ads were coming from (and no, it wasn't mail.com itself...), and suddenly got all sorts of 404 errors from localhost.)
_________________________________________________
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Prodigy (back when it was a proprietary service, not just another ISP) had graphical ads on the bottom fifth of the screen since inception, IIRC. I'm sure lot of the other old proprietary online services did too.
I think I'm done with the web. I've shut the television off (save for The Simpsons). I see no more appealing content on the web and as many or more ads. What's the point? The suits have won.
I know this response is not banner related, but advert related, so. www.the-times.co.uk used to have an ad on the content page then passed through to the article and some others have ads embedded in the articles. Soon we will have adverts on the background images. What is next? What is best? (which is the worst of all evils?) I keep on gettin Gratisware.com popin up every other link i select. (Thats the most annoying ad for me) Does anybody have any links for imformation on advertising technologies so I can prepare defences against them in advance? Unless we start Internet v2.0 we seem to be stuck with ads. We need a commercial free station on the net :)
(.NOSPAM)
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I browse with lynx. To me, most ads look like "[LINK]", or, if they're bright enough to figure out the ALT tag, "Click Here!". This is not a deliberate attempt to block advertising, but the effect is the same. I am getting the content without "paying" for it, which is, in your words, "extremely immoral".
You say it's okay to ignore an ad, as long as you load it. Why should that be? Does the site get any money if I load the ad? No. They don't get money unless I click through. Therefore, it is "extremely immoral" not to click through.
What about the sponsor? Do they get any money from a click-through? No. They don't get any money unless I buy something. Therefore, it is "extremely immoral" to view a web site without buying something from the sponsor.
But not all sponsors sell things. Some are just advertising their own content. So now I have to visit their site and click through all of *their* banner ads, buying from any sponsor who has anything to sell, and so on ad infinitum. Anything less would be "extremely immoral."
Excuse me, I have to go get another job to pay for my web browsing habit now.
Hardly. It's more like driving so fast that you miss the scenery -- but you get to your destination that much more quickly.
1. Read Slashdot.com a lot.
2. Wait for safeWeb.Com banner ad at top of Slashdot.com.
3. Click safeWeb.Com banner ad at Slashdot.com.
4. Browse around, or enter "slashdot.com" in safeWeb.com Go box.
5. Click on Configure button.
6. Check "Block pop-up windows" under Miscellaneous, and click on "set these options permanently".
7. Bookmark slashdot in safeweb window.
8. From now on, use bookmark to get to slashdot. (You may have to log in again. Poor baby.)
9. Bliss out.
--Blair
[Begin quote]
Ironically, one thing that doesn't hurt CTRs is ad-blocking software like WebWasher and Proxomitron. Really, if you look carefully at the issue, these ad blockers actually help most of the advertising industry. First of all, I'm assuming that most, if not all, of the people who think that it's worth the time to obtain, install, configure, and use this software are the ones who would be least likely to respond to banner advertising. This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, given the trouble they are going to to avoid even seeing these web ads. Now, consider the effect that the use of these programs has on the various segments of the ad industry:
- Advertisers who pay per ad view are saving a lot of money here. Since these programs keep the ads from being viewed, and the people using them have no interest in seeing these ads, the advertisers aren't paying to show ads to people who won't respond.
- Advertisers who pay per click are not neccesarily saving money directly. However, their click-through rates will go up, because they are serving fewer ads and still getting as many clicks as they would if the indifferent visitors who are using the ad-blockers were viewing their ads.
- Sponsored sites who are paid per click are in the same situation...they don't lose any money from the visitors using the programs, since those visitors wouldn't click on their ads anwyay, and becuase they aren't serving as many ads, but are still getting the same number of clicks, their ratios get better, and their site looks more attractive to advertisers.
- Sponsored sites who are paid per ad view are the only ones who lose out when visitors use these ad blockers. Obviously, fewer visitors viewing their ads means less money from the advertisers. However...pay-per-view banner ads are very rare on the Web today, because of the declining CTRs. Most programs that I know of pay sponsored sites per click, not per view. As a result, there are few sites that would be negatively affected by these filtering and blocking programs.
[End quote]
--
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
yeah, cos i dont automatticly assume its a retarded javascript kiddie who opens a squillion window and then close it ://
i thought net adverts were supposed to die off, "OMG ADVERT CLICKS ARE DOWN, MEBE THEY NEED TO BE BIGGER!" (all marketing ppl shout)
1. Use Netscape 4.7x ;) The Web looks a *lot* nicer without Flash, BTW...
2. Use The Proxomitron to filter ads (if it doesn't do it out of the box, write your own filter for it!)
3. "Uninstall" Netscape's Flash plugin. There is no automatic uninstaller, but all you have to do to disable the plugin is rename the npswf32.dll file in your Plugins directory to npswf32.old or something else. If you really really really have to see a Flash animation, use IE or something...
DennyK
Anyone here ever read Maxim? I used to, for the first year it was pretty good. But shortly thereafter, it became deluged with advertising. Most magazines have!
A typical issue doesn't have its first real article until page 20 or 25! All these are are caltrops trying to trip me up as I try to find the articles I actually want to read.
Looks like the internet may head that same way.
"Your article will reappear in: (insert countdown). Please feel free to support our advertisers."
I can imagine ads that scroll down and follow you as you read, moving around to try and catch your attention.
Somewhere in this world is a happy symbiosis waiting to be found, a blanance of effective advertising for things that users might actually give a damn about and the freedom to ignore them if we chose. But that balance won't be found in the likes of the "Internet Advertising Bureau"
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
As long as slashdot, freshmeat, userfriendly, hamstercam.de, openbsd, and rpmfind don't do it who cares? Let the "netwits" TM fight the banners. I'll just do this: ipchains -A output -d 208.211.225.0/24 -j DENY Ain't UNIX grand?
I think one reason why banner ads don't work as well as ads in other types of media is that the are targeted so much that they blend in with the content. Some are targeted to relate to the website they are on and others to the user via cookies. TV ads rarely are advertising something similar to the TV show. For example, most ads that air during sporting events are not for athletic equipment, tickets, etc., they are for stuff like cars, beer, and soda. Most ads during news shows are not for newspapers and news magazines, they are for other things. So why are most ads on the internet for other websites? It seems like banners for fast food and soda would work just as well as billboards for them but you almost never see ads for anything other than websites and computer related things. I think the idea that the see an ad, go to a website and buy something happens relatively rarely, but see a banner ad, and when you get off the internet and go to a store, people might buy that brand they saw earlier, thus having the same effect as TV ads and radio ads.
MSNBC has this article on said topic. It includes a list of who the player's are here. The list includes everbody's favorites: AOL Time Warner, Yahoo!, MSN, Walt Disney Internet Group and DoubleClick. Now I will just have to make some additions to my Junkbusters proxy.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
Bigger banner adds aren't going to stop your banner filter.
well, they'll have *some* power. give a group of rich guys a concept to share and 3 BIG LETTERS to stand behind, and the slowest of the herd will get suckered.
so here's the deal, you want to prevent the propigation(sp?) of these new banners, then you have a choice:
you can voice your opinion.
if your favourite site adopts these ads, tell them it bothers you. if enough people complain, they will get pulled.
if you're a webmaster, don't run these ads. let's not allow this trend to become popular.
if you're a member of the "Internet Advertising Bureau" please -[kill yourself in a horrifying manner]- reconsider your actions. the more obtrusive the advertising, the more it's going to be ignored. you should pay attention to the people who already figured this out.
this has been a public service announcement... blah blah blah... noise...
***
***
umm... what's a sig? is that a 'hacking' thing?
it works. it's just that the advertisers don't know that.
***
***
umm... what's a sig? is that a 'hacking' thing?
that was pretty funny... i would post as annonymous so as not to offend, but im not worried cause mr. "time to check out" will be too busy watching the "real world" marathon on mtv tonight to do anything about it.
Advertisement is the basis of the American economy. Why? because they link the consumer to the producer:
Corporations need to motivate people to buy their products. People need to find the companies that make the products that they need. Advertisements are the way for the companies and customers to find each other. Without ads there would be no free market, only big monopolies could survive.
Capitalism requires product awareness in consumers to work at all. How can you promote ad removal software such as this? Don't you see that it threathens the very principles our modern society is based on?
I think the new ad sizes are a good thing. They will allow companies to promote their products better, and give consumers more information about the products. The only downside could be slower download times, decreasing the popularity of a site. But most of us have broadband by now.
--
$EnlightedEconomist$
how again does slashdot make money to keep up the massive bandwidth of their servers? all i see is one dinky ad at the top.
Agreed, for the advertiser the purpose of advertising is not to make things free. But tell me would you like to be able to use a website day after day with advertising or see it disappear into the mists of time with out ads? Regards Dhar
Free, you say? It's news to _me_ that online content is free. From where I'm standing, I have to _pay_ for web hosting, and do so without batting an eyelash, because I have content I want to put up, and I want people to be able to see it.
Are you arguing that I am supposed to be _paid_ for having content on the internet? Gee, that's nice of you, but what planet are you from? I am eternally grateful that I no longer have to pay for the paper and printing of fliers, pay for cassette tapes and duplicate them, etc etc all to just try and get content to a curious onlooker.
If you are really upset that you're not being paid just to have content available to curious onlookers, I suggest the quick and easy solution of not having content. You should be grateful you got to show me pictures of CK your dog without having to print them up on physical media and somehow get them to me... nice dog btw...
What exactly is less "immoral" about ignoring the ads once they appear on the page, rather than blocking the ads before the page is rendered?
If you say that we are morally bound to any sort of action when we view an ad-sponsored site, then by your argument ignoring a visible ad is immoral! Because the intent of the advertising is not simply that you display it on your screen, but that you LOOK at it, and seriously consider buying the product in question.
Okay...when you're watching TV, reading a magazine or listening to the radio and an ad comes on, you don't jump up and react to it right away (unless you have your handy CueCat by your side :)
/. is an add for ThinkGeek. Am I gonna click on it? Nope. For the same reason I don't rush to the store when I see a DiGiornos pizza ad - I'm in the middle of something.
However, when you go to the store, you may then remember the add when trying to decide between brands.
So, who is to say that Banner ads don't work the same way? Right now on
However, later on when my wife asks what I want for my birthday, I may tell her to go the the ThinkGeek site and get me the WTF? t-shirt.
So the ad works, it's just no the constant immediate revenue that is possible because I'm online.
How do they track how many people make a purchase out of how many banner impressions? I'd bet that MORE people make purchases from banner impressions than from banner clicks, but there's no direct way to track a relationship of Sales per banner display without seriously annoying the customer.
It's all bullshit, don't ya know?
We'll be adding a "friends list" RSN, that will let you know when people you've marked to watch have posted a new diary. It ought to help with the insta-scroll.
and the IRC channel is somewhat boring to me, and lacking varied discussion.
What? You mean sex, computers sex, sex, sex, and computers isn't enough variety for you?
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
--
The whole point of having search engines is to get that dross outta my face. There would be no problem with search engines if manufacturers and content producers would make as much of an effort in indexing their stuff as they do cutting down on their expense.
The bandwidth we fought so hard to get (like my ADSL conection wasn't a PITA to get from Verison,) is being chewed up by contentless noise.
The reason TV sucks, the real reason, is that you can't offend the advertisers. So we get lame-ass wrappers as ad delivery vehicles.
TV's a parc. That crap in reverse because its being used as a suppository. People are packing your fudge trying to get you to remember their name when you buy anti-inflamatory cream.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
One of the big bonuses of The Internet® is supposed to be "interactivity". While I actively avoid banner ads, I'd actively seek out, say, cartoons, downloadable movie clips (I'm still stuck with modem only lines as my only internet option at home for the moment), and so on - in which advertisers could pay the cartoonist/'netmovie producer/whatever for "product placement".
People going to, say, Joe Cartoon might be incredibly annoyed to have, say, a Coca-Cola ad pop up in front of them, but a substantial proportion of them might be quite eager to watch a flash animation of Mean Things Being Done To Gerbils With A Coca Cola Can(tm).
In short - Hey Advertisers! Put some CONTENT in those ads that we actually want, and maybe we'll pay attention!
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Just so people would have to go through 15 or 20 links just to find the news content or whatever they are interested in, making them pay whatever outrageous fees they can scam for minimal content.
Funny thing is that this was my impression of American (paper) magazines when I first opened one. You have to browse pages and pages and pages of dual-page ads before you finally find the contents page - and there is no way to tell where that contents page is because the number of "pre-content" ads seems to change for every issue.
I was used to magazines where the content page is basically always on page 6: cover (1), ad (2), editorial (3), double-page ad (4,5), content listing (6 and following). This is somewhat a non-written standard over here and it seems to work well...
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You may like my a cappella music
Tim Berners-Lee created the web, and wrote the first browser/editor on his NeXT at CERN [...] This was in the period of 1989 and 1990
I stand corrected. Thanks.
I suspect that non-free online services like Compuserve had similar advertising earlier.
Yip, but the original poster talked about the ads in internet sites. I think that concept is different enough to good old Compuserve etc.
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You may like my a cappella music
it's been what, almost a decade now since banners in their current form came into use.
The web didn't even exist a decade ago.
According to http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/, the first graphical browser Mosaic was available in 93.
And http://www.zeffgroup.com/followup/zeff/sld004.htm claims that the first banner ad appeared in 94.
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You may like my a cappella music
I look at it as: Either the people who use the website pays for the website, or everyone who buys the advertised product pays for the website.
Looked at that way, one approach is clearly more direct and fair than the other. Cost should always be tied to usage as directly as possible. (Which, BTW, is why I want to get rid of most taxes and privatize as many government services as possible.)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The newspaper analogy is not good IMHO. In newspapers sure everyone notices some ads, everyone sees the big full page (intrusive) ads, but who notices each and every small ad that is in a newspaper?
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Hey, 2.6 billion perverts can't be wrong (or at least they represent a LOT on money).
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
banner ad hell: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4950711.html? tag=tp_pr
:-(
cnet's ads are so big, IE slows to a crawl as it attempts to repaint the huge Flash ad. Try scrolling down the page. ouch..
cpeterso
As your screen resolution increases the size of banner ads start approaching zero.
Just remember to increase the size of your fonts to compensate.
I read "Daily Radar' pretty often (don't ask why, I don't even know).
Until recently, I just left JavaScript on because I didn't encounter popup ads often, and I was OK with most other aspects of leaving JavaScript enabled.
However, recently Daily Radar started having not just one small popup ad, but two popup ads - with the second ad about the size of my main browser window!
That did it for me, and now I've disabled JavaScript. So instead of increasing ad revenue, they just halved it for me. And also took away revenue from IGN as I no longer see thier (still acceptle to me) small popup ad.
As other people have said, the bigger they make the ads the more people will cross over the line into active evasion. If sites and advertisers were smart, they would opt for sponsorship of sites instead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
can be found on Canoe.ca. Particularly the "Bell Canada" ads where an image with a transparent background, about 100 X 100, slowly "falls" down the screen over top of the goddamn text. It is even more annoying as it falls about about the same rate that I read, such that I'm always trying to read around it.
Is it successful? God, no. Now I'll open up a link on Canoe, throw it in the background for 5 - 10 seconds while I read another page so that the ad is gone by the time I read the article.
Stop pestering us with ads dammit. I change the channels in between commercials (or mute it and read during that time). I close my eyes when I pee in public bathrooms because that damn Zoom media is everywhere. I throw fliers in the garbage. I do not read billboards along the street as I am driving because I'm driving. My attention is on the street. Don't take that to mean that you should buy the damn pavement and stick your logos there, because I'll look up into the sky to spite you. I ignore banner ads, popup ads, junk email, product placements, inserts, fliers, labels, branding, newspaper ads, magazine ads, advertising rags that try to pass themselves off as magazines, "reviews" which are really promotions, and any other forms of advertising I can possibly think of.
When I need or want your product, I'll research it. Until then, leave me alone.
becomes even less useful to me and my modem. Say what you will about /., at least they use frames and text intelligently enough to create a nice interface that loads well over a modem. Most 'news' sites think they are publishing a glossy magazine, repleat with a ton of bandwidth wasting garbage graphics.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
These "driving" metaphors are getting tiresome. Even Al Gore hasn't used the phrase "information superhighway" in years. The Internet is not a bloody freeway.
For more information, click here.
Why do they expect better feedback from internet ads than they get from TV? From newspapers and magazines? They don't get a single click-through from any traditional media. Also, for some reason they think everyone on the internet enjoys being annoyed. TV commercials and print ads are carefully crafted to either entertain or cram as much usefull information as possible into the given area. Banner ads flash, distract, and annoy the hell out of people. And they wonder why internet advertising isn't working? There are advertising strategies that work well on the internet. Sponsor a sight. I bought over $600 of merchandise (over several months) at www.countypaintball.com because they sponsored the model98 owner's group. If you're doing a banner, take the time to pick a specific site that caters to who you want to sell to and make the ad fit the sight design. Advertising is supposed to engender favorable brand recognition, not make people puke every time they see one of your products.
Curious how crippled it was to back legal, I checked it out, and about 200 pop up windows attacked me. For a second I thought I stumbled into a porn site.
Rader
Rader
NEW INTERACTIVE MARKETING UNITS
120 x 600 IMU Skyscraper 160 x 600 IMU Wide Skyscraper 300 x 250 IMU Medium Rectangle 336 x 280 IMU Large Rectangle 240 x 400 IMU Vertical Rectangle
From a design standpoint, most designers try to keep the left navigation less than 1/4 the size of the content. Hence, most of my navigation on the sites I design is equal to or less than 150 pixels wide - assuming a 600 pixel screen width. Now, if anyone were to use a skyscraper, and the left nav was 150 pixels wide, that's 270 - 300 pixels, up to half of the screen real-estate available. Not much room for articles. Bigger does not necessarily translate to better.
All of the sizes I've left in the list are unacceptably large. The reason people don't mind the 468x60 images is because they're not obtrusive. Horizontal ads are much easier to place than big blocks or "skyscrapers." I'd like to see site viewing statistics on sites that use these new banner sizes. Why did they skip a vertical version of the 468x60, and jump straight to an ad that is twice as wide?
I'm not saying this because it affects me, either. I personally keep an updated ad server list that blocks over 10,000 active servers - transforming any content they provide into a 1x1 pixel transparent gif. These sizes will provoke one of three reactions:
Even after users become accustomed to the new ad sizes, that doesn't mean they will *like* them.
I predict that customized proxy servers will start sprouting up, blocking ads the same way netnanny blocks porn. This of course will result in an arms-race between those who provide these services, and those who want ads to appear unmolested.
Then again, I'm giving apathy a fairly wide berth. Maybe banner blindness will just evolve to a new level.
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
"A day without banners is like a day without CowboyNeal"
Does Avantgo(my palm's too old to use it) have ad banners jammed into downloaded web sites to your Palm?
Same idea. (-:
No matter how big the banners are, they're still going to (eventually) become transparent to most webusers.
> Where will it all end? It won't.
Frightening quote of the day:
An ad exec quoted in an article on thestreet.com: Flagging Sales Have Net Advertisers Lowering the Banner
"It's [the banner ad's] not big enough [ ... ] It's not targetable enough. It's not intrusive enough."
Except Junkbuster doesn't really care how big the ad is, as long as the URL is expressible as a regexp. Fsck 'em.
ObMemePropagation:
All the ad agencies' base are belong to us!
I don't know exactly why you don't own a TV, but for me it was just because the content to noise ratio went below zero. And when there is a Film worth watching the advertising is placed at the most annoying moment, is annoyingly loud and colourfull, and just plain too long. To summarize: the advertisement is annoying. At the moment advertising on most websites is not too annoying (as in "we own your Browser and pop up windows all over the place, and if you click one away it will spawn two new ones") but tolerable. Nevertheless i switched off javascript because of advertising.
Sorry, but when the advertisement gets too much of the "in your Face" type and the advertisers obviously don't care about my being annoyed, then i choose to flush their business modell down the toilet, and good riddance. And if the site can only survive by popping screenwide Banners in my face then it better dies fast, because i don't care anyway, i won't look at those ads, if that means i can't look at the site, then so be it. If the content is worth paying i'll pay.
Apparently web advertising works well enough as it is now, No need to have bigger ads. But no, it's not enough, The ads must become bigger, what next, sounds and happy jingles i'm forced to listen to?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Sorry they don't need to give me the right, i already have the right to use any webbrowser i like, including ones that specifically blocks ads or ones that simply don't do fancy images (lynx). Just as i have the right to switch to another channel during a commercial break on TV. Also i didn't enter an agreement with the site owner to read advertisements for reading content. If he has 1.000.000 pagehits, but only 1.000 banners got accessed that is even more of a message than a friendly note. It simply says: the advertising on your site is too aggressive so we cut it out. Following your line of argumentation far enough we'll soon have TV's in every room of our homes we can't turn off. I have the right to ignore advertising. Even if i do that by technical means (filters). Maybe it's about time the advertisers rethink their strategy of "huge, blaring colours and loud" a little. I mean, the current way of advertising seems to be to annoy people into buying the product.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Now whenever I go to, for example, a news article at c|net (random example), I get a friendly little warning about accepting activex controls & plugins. I saw no, it goes away, I get a nice sedate page. The ad is still huge, but at least it's calm & easily handled. A better solution would be of course to tinker around with something like Junkbuster, but I haven't had the time.
Of course the obvious question at this point is "isn't that a pain? Aren't things less interesting without Flash?" to which the answers are "yes, and absolutely not." Examples of Flash files being actually useful are exceedingly rare, and I don't mind the encumbrance if I can filter them out of all the other pages. For the occasional file that I go to specifically for the Flash content (say, those wacky Mahir, Hatten, & AYBABTU movies...) it's easy enough to just click "yes" ever once in a while.
Yes. Surely some stupid Flash animation couldn't be any more obvious & intruding than an animated gif. Suuuure.....
Encouraging marketers to take advantage of what the web medium is capable of isn't a bad idea, but what it actually ends up meaning is making the page more obnoxious, which is a bad idea. I showed the c|net example (a Sun ad, as it happened) to our marketing agency (whose background is primarily from print advertising) and they were impressed that it kept everything within the page. That is, there was no page to click through, but rather you were shown more information without leaving the current article. It ended up being less of a distraction than normal banners, which try to get you to abandon whatever you were looking at previously.
On a semi-related note <really free associating now>, it occurred to me that day that a fundamental difference between marketing on the web and marketing in other media is that the latter force you to have one clearly defined message that can be conveyed in a short space (a sound bite, a slogan, a couple of lines of text, etc), while the web doesn't really have that restriction. Rather than one clearly defined message, it's possible a medley of messages, variations on a theme, such that one customer, drawn to one topic, may go after one part of your site, while other customers can be drawn to other messages etc. That is, traditional media force you to have depth and not breadth, or perhaps vice versa, whereas with the web you aren't forced to make a choice -- you can have either and at best you should have both.
I am not really sure how this plays into the ideas behind web marketing (I'm not so naive as to think that I'm the first one to have thought of this), but it seems like it opens up a peephole into a much more interesting and dynamic kind of marketing. For example, a "banner" for a weather related site might be not just one image to click on, but an image map of a geographic map -- "don't just tell me about your weather abilities, tell me what the weather is going to be in Boston!" Ditto for news sites, etc. It's kind of a waste to have a banner -- especially the big banners this article is warning about -- to only link to one place. Better by far would be for it to allow many links, and compressed information, that would genuinely interest people, rather than just trying to be shinier than all the competitors. It should be obvious by now that most people see right through that kind of crap...</free associating / thinking aloud>
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Banner ads as they exist today are much too small to effectively deliver a message. I think there is a point at which you have enough real estate to be effective.
I would argue that it's not the purpose of banner ads to deliver much of a message at all. Take the "Shock the monkey" (or whatever it is) ads. There's no message there, the company just wants you to click through to their page.
I'm beginning to suspect that the gorgeous models used to advertise just about everything under the sun are mostly there to get our attention. Think I'm on to something?
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Remember that the advertising budget, obviously, is paid for by the buyer of the product: the margin of the product pays for the advertisement budget. Instead of paying for dishonest information I'd rather pay for objective and true information.
Maybe it is a necessary evil (up to a certain point), but it is better to do without. Instead, there should be objective consumer organisations that test products and publish such test results.
Producers can send press releases to objective organisations that summarize and organize information on new and existing products, and present that in an honest and efficient way to potential consumers.
There are numerous countries where (state) television does not or hardly have advertisements. The programs are paid for by tax. Americans may not like tax, but what is the difference between paying a "tax" on products (you know, the advertisements are paid for by the profits on products) or a tax to the state that can finance honest and objective programs from that.
Then there are organisations (such as the dutch consumer-union) that you can become member of for about $20 a year, you get monthly testreports on all kind of goods (televisions, washpowder, insurances, you name it) that enable you to pick the right product for you.
For more specific products (like, what UNIX server do I need) there are professional magazines that do (hopefully) objective tests and write about the products. You can be sure that that information is more trustworthy than the information coming directly from the producers.
No, I really don't see how advertisements can be a good thing, and people believing ads and buying based on that "information" are fools.
You don't want ads, and you don't want to do micropayments. How is online content supposed to work? It costs money/time to make good stuff - and someone needs to be compensated. What about TV-style ads that only occur every n minutes, then go away? Free will only last so long...
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
ummmm.... tivo and banner ads relate exactly how?
Back in 1940s or so, a dreadful series of space opera (precursor to Sci-Fi) was written. The Lensman Series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. It was a seminal work. I will avoid the particulars, but there is a minor sight gag that still rings true. AND BONUS, it's ON TOPIC today!
Early in the series, a main character is speeding on a motorcycle or car or something, heading for somewhere I forget. We learn of his annoyance and apathy at bigger and worse advertisements just in passing, but it comes back to haunt him many chapters (or is it several books?) later.
He's now got the mind-expanding powers of the mystic Lens artifact on his wrist, and he's visiting Rigel IV. On Rigel IV, apparently, the natives didn't evolve a sense of sight, since there wasn't much visible light there anyway. Instead, they evolved a sense of "knowing" where objects were spatially. The main character is tapping into a taxi-driver's sense of matter, while the taxi-driver zooms around recklessly.
The main character notes that there are these very strange areas, domes of opaque-like matter where this matter-sensing ability seems to stop. He asks the driver, and the driver replies, "Oh, those are just advertisements. I guess I just ignore them." The driver pays more attention to them, and inside the domes can now be discerned many mind-catching moving objects, pleading passersby to buy this product, or use that product.
Undercurrent: we all ignore ads, regardless of what race we are. Okay, long story for such a small anecdote, but did anyone else read this damn series?
[
I'm confused. Let's see if I understand what you're saying:
ok, i posted that knowing full well i'd get responses (a troll really), but i was hoping for well-formed responses: i'm sorry, but you're just plain stupid.
no dumbass: ignoring as in not reading the fucking page, or going to the site. i "ignore" television programs by not owning a TV. but even if i meant "ignore," as in "view it anyways" it would mean "don't look at," not "never have it viewed at all."
i encourage responses, but you're a dipshit.
- j
and if those ads are so bad that we block them, then they deserve to be blocked.
just because the ads don't sit right with you doesn't give you the right to read the ad-sponsored content while blocking the ads. if you have issues with the size of the advertisements, you should stop reading the content, not just blocking the ads. perhaps send a friendly note to the system administer?
- j
amen! the truth is, i don't completely agree with everything i wrote, but i wanted to troll and see how slashdotters would respond to these aligations. it's quite true that a significant number of people who regularly post on this site are only concerned with getting stuff for free. they don't seem to realize that a lot of the freebies we take for granted are subsidized by corporations, and eventually that gravy train is going to stop. the question is, are you willing to start paying for it?
the funny thing is, it's not like any of these advertising-sponsored freebies fill any real need: they're not food or water, or even transportation. they're little luxuries that people seem to take for granted, and don't want to give up. they "cheat the system" just because they can. most people here seem to take the stance that these sights shouldn't be advertising-sponsored, but instead of just not reading the goddamned sites they read them anyhow and say "i don't like your business model, so i'm going to try to ruin it."
is this behaviour unethical? perhaps, but that would entirely depend on your point of view. is this behaviour rediculously childish? absolutely. but then slashdot readers have never been known for their maturity (pass the Nerf gun).
incidentally, while i found the responses painfully funny, the fact that i was moderated up to 5 is disturbing; further proof that the slashdot moderation system is completely broken. but then that's why is started trolling here ages ago (that is, intelligent trolling, to provoke emotions, entice arguments and to provide an alternate point of view in discussions).
- j
Sure I could do this with a proxy but handling the problem client side is easier.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ignoring the page the ad links to is NOT THE SAME AS IGNORING THE AD. I don't object to outpost.com selling things, I object to big flashy popup windows that interrupt what I'm doing and TELLING ME HOW GREAT OUTPOST.COM IS!!!! (Or whatever website.)
Additionally, calling people dumbass trolls isn't likely to make them respect your position any more. Also, if blocking ads is stealing bandwidth... er... exactly whose bandwidth is being stolen? I'm paying for the bandwidth I used to download the ad just as much as they're paying for the bandwidth to send it. I simply choose to waste MY bandwidth by not ever viewing the content that came with it. If the ad appears on the web page I'm looking at, but I didn't want to see it, aren't they stealing my bandwidth by showing me crap I don't want to see?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Targetting advertising works well. General untargeted banner ads don't work weel. Does anyone have any real data on whether bigger banner ads are actually more effective than normal sized banner ads?
Also, I think a factor is how the space is used. The skyscrapper ads on nytimes.com aren't bad. The huge block ads on CNET suck and are annoying. Granted the CENT huge block visually can't be missed, but one purposely looks away from it and does not read it because it is a huge blob. In contrast the nytimes.com skyscrapper is at the side of the page and more often lures people's attention I think. This is probably partly due to the quality of design of banners in the two spaces as well.
I agree. Flashier ads won't help. Text ads are the way to go. The only ads I've clicked on in over two years were some 'adwords' on google. However, I will probably not click on those things again. Why? Because although the ads were inoffensive, properly targeted, and logical, the pages they linked to were bloated, content-free crap that took so long to download I gave up in each case. So I think the successful strategy would be google adwords + google-hosted, google-designed pages that actually make a coherent offer.
Ads continue to suck because they are marketing fluff that would only appeal to an idiot. What would an effective ad be? An offer to sell a well-known product cheaper than it's available anywhere else. An offer of a niche product or service that meets my needs and that I didn't know existed.
In case that's not crystal clear, an offer is a sequence of words that essentially says, "If you give me X, I'll give you Y." Images might be useful as illustrations, but they don't go to the core of the offer. This is why web ads continue to suck.
Imagine a salesman who wants to sell mainframe computers to Acme corporation. He finally gets a 15 appointment with Acme's CIO. He shows up in a clown suit, does a little dance, looses his pet monkey who smashes everything in the office, and ends by throwing a cream pie in the CIO's face.
Has he made a big impression? Yes. Will he sell anything? No.
This is exactly what web ads do - they throw away a golden opportunity to tell potential customers why they should buy a product, choosing instead to entertain or irritate with distracting gimmicks.
I can. Have you patented this idea yet? The 'e-book movement' is all about the IP cartel assuming this level of control over reading. Let's go one step further: Can you imagine someone being locked in prison for helping you shut off the paragraph-morphing feature of your e-book? I can.
Get used to it folks. One way or another the bills must be paid. If you don't want to pay for web access and web services in dollarts you need to pay for it in advertising that works.
Banners are majoritively ignored therefor they are worth almost nothing.
You have three choices, be it web sites or CDs:
(1) Pay the artists/creators in money.
(2) Put up with ads intrusive enough to be worth the advertisers financing your recreation.
(3) Lose the IP from society altogether as the creators go broke and go into other lines of
work.
(BTW for those who don't know TANSTAAFL == "There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch")
Actually, everyone doing clickthrough/sales commission advertisements now has standard text-based advertisements to include on your site. The advertisers have realized that text with links is FAR more useful than the banner ads, because people looking for information are more likely to read it than filter it out.
CNet's new ads are noisy and intrusive. Because of them, I've actually started to avoid CNet. For companies that intend to do java, shockwave or pop-up advertising, I will do everything in my power to disable them because they interfere with my ability to use my computer. For banner advertising, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring them if I want, but some of these new advertising methods are too much.
For me, it's not that I want free music and movies -- it's that I want the freedom to decide how, where and when I listen to or watch those movies. I completely oppose SDMI and friends because it would prevent me from burning audio tracks onto a standard CD-R to listen to in my truck , or from making MP3 discs to play on my laptop or DVD player. Or that I'll be able to listen to the music on my desktop computer, but not on my laptop, or vice versa. I'm also very concerned in the potential for this to make entertainment a completely pay-per-use world. That's rather analogous to saying that channel surfing (or fast forwarding on a tape) during commercials on TV is stealing. I have a right to do whatever I please with the content that comes into my system so long as I don't infringe on someone's copyrights. The fact of the matter is that most people don't block and most people don't channel surf between ads, and that should be enough.I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
"And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone."
<p>Not me. I would consider accepting payment to allow advertising. I WILL NOT PAY to avoid ads! If they want to advertise to me, let THEM pay up front for it, and pay ME. Otherwise, they can all piss off.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The problem ISN'T that we don't notice the ads. The problem is that we just don't care enough to click them.
We need ads for products that we will actually WANT to buy. This is where targeted ads come in. Then you get offered products that they know you might be interested in. It's a win/win situation. More interest = more clicks. More ads we want to see = more cool gadgets for us.
Don't bother to scream "privacy invasion" at this. I don't want any replies from the weekly-world-news reading paranoid people.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I'll attach some code you you. Refer to the URL in the comment for info about how it works. I believe there's a windoze version you can download somewhere, if you're stuck with a microsoft system.
* and "ANIMEXTS1.0" with different strings, so that
* netscape will be tricked into thinking all animated
* gifs are not to be looped. This is nice, since those
* annoying ads will play once and then stop.
*
* For more info, see this page:
* http://simmons.starkville.ms.us/tips/081097/
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#define NETSCAPE "/usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator"
#define STR1 "NETSCAPE2.0"
#define STR2 "ANIMEXTS1.0"
const unsigned char *memstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle, int size);
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd, r, pos;
struct stat nsstat;
unsigned char *buf, *p;
r = stat(NETSCAPE, &nsstat);
if (r != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "File %s doesn't exist\n", NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
buf = (unsigned char *)malloc(nsstat.st_size);
if (buf == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to allocate %ld bytes of memory\n",
(long)nsstat.st_size);
exit(1);
}
fd = open(NETSCAPE, O_RDWR);
if (fd < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to open %s for read/write access\n",
NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = read(fd, buf, nsstat.st_size);
if (r != nsstat.st_size) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to read %ld bytes from %s\n",
(long)nsstat.st_size, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
p = (unsigned char *)memstr(buf, STR1, nsstat.st_size);
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Didn't find string \"%s\" within %s\n",
STR1, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
pos = (int)(p - buf);
r = lseek(fd, pos, SEEK_SET);
if (r != pos) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to seek to offset=%d within %s\n",
pos, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = write(fd, "NO_ANIM_GIF", strlen(STR1));
if (r != strlen(STR1)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error writing to %s at offset %d\n",
NETSCAPE, pos);
exit(1);
}
p = (unsigned char *)memstr(buf, STR2, nsstat.st_size);
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Didn't find string \"%s\" within %s\n",
STR2, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
pos = (int)(p - buf);
r = lseek(fd, pos, SEEK_SET);
if (r != pos) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to seek to offset=%d within %s\n",
pos, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = write(fd, "NO_ANIM_GIF", strlen(STR1));
if (r != strlen(STR1)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error writing to %s at offset %d\n",
NETSCAPE, pos);
exit(1);
}
close(fd);
return 0;
}
const unsigned char *memstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle, int size)
{
const char *p;
int len;
len = strlen(needle);
while (size > 0) {
p = memchr(haystack, *needle, size);
if (p == NULL) return NULL;
size -= (int)(p - haystack);
if (size >= len && memcmp(p, needle, len) == 0) {
return p;
}
p++;
haystack = p;
}
return NULL;
}
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
would you pay 10 bucks a year if you could walk up to any computer and not get a pop up window, banner ad, or spam email? not that it's feasable. just for fun, would you? how about 50? I think I would pay between 50 and 100 dollars if I could avoid everything like that.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Making the ads bigger doesn't mean they're going to get through Mozillas image blocking or a webfilter any easier.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Resolutions increase over time anyway. Once we hit 600 dpi, we'll be calling those monster-sized banners "icons".
I'd take the story more seriously if it hadn't appeared directly underneath a standard-sized banner.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Of course, it won't be long before every appliance has built in advertising. You'll have a flat LCD screen attached to your fridge that runs ads 24/7...ugh.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
However, the problem isn't that the banners aren't being seen so much as they're being ignored.
I disagree. I think up to now banner ads are too small to be able to effectively deliver a message. Clearly the model can work, because newspaper ads are very effective. But you just can't say very much in the "traditional" banner ad size.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Nothing but ads forever without end.
I can just imagine using one of the adbusting softwares, and having it come up with a blank page.
[which reminds me, we need to rewrite lyrics for Lennon's song Imagine, to cover internet issues like spam, etc.]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As usual, if you feel inclined to contact them directly, please use at least two brain cells and leave the flame gear in storage. (High Voltage might be okay, however.)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Anyways, I hate banner ads too, but with it being cheaper for an everyday person like you or me to have broadband, we'll see a resurgance of hobbyists online yet. The commercial internet has had it's heydey of it's present form, and now we are going to see more people online for fun again, and a refinement of online commerce to not be so annoying. But then again, I could be wrong.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I got that too. However, I think the page probably looks fine and doesn't suffer from that with Lynx. A page that is actually readable in Lynx (however it may behave in other browsers) is a rare and delicious treat, though. I'll take his/her word that mojo is among them.
I do not have a signature
1. Always select "printable" to ease readability
2. Always select "single-page format" to reduce necessary clicks (and artificial pageviews)
sulli
RTFJ.
...a benefactor system, like arstechnica has.
if you don't want to see advertising, don't read sites that have advertising: that's your choice. there's good reason to get pissed off about billboard advertising, as you can't "opt-out," but reading sites with advertising and purposefully blocking out that advertising is extremely immoral.
Immoral? You're extremely confused.
I am downloading data that they are making freely available on the internet. To imply that I cannot take that data, and transform it in any manner I wish, is offensive. If I don't wish to view banner ads, I will filter them out, period. It is not immoral, it is called PERSONAL FREEDOM.
If, in turn, they wish to make it more difficult to block those ads... that is THEIR RIGHT.
Please do not force your version of morality onto others... that's what's wrong with the world.
-thomas
"And like that
Hell, it worked for TV.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Since they seem to be citing specific sizes, this could work to our advantage. It's easy to use the The Proxomitron to filter anything by custom HTML matching rules, and easy to use KillAd to bock specific sizes of popups of Windows. And you can block popups from the browser level in Mozilla too.
But what does this tell us about advertisers? They're realizing that people are learning to ignore and block the standard banners. I'm sure that they see this as moving into something that's bigger and better. The 160 x 600 pixel ads should be interesting because they're really tall. People are used to seeing wide banner ads, and we haven't learned to instinctively ignore big tall images.
And what does this tell us about netizens in general? Most people are slow to react to ads and slow to try to block them...it's been what, almost a decade now since banners in their current form came into use? CNET's been using those humongous ads for a while now and I haven't added a filter to my Proxomitron yet to block them...and I'm a slashdotter! I just press the stop button in mozilla before the ads loads.
So what do we do know? If you like ads, the fine. Watch them and see them steal your the data you put into website forms and send it to doubleclick. And if you don't, the update your filtering proxys and promote junkbuster. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to let my tiny 31.2k modem connection (nothing else available here) be saturated by my personal info going upstream and their ads going downstream. That's just what I think anyways.
A side note: My finger got caught in a cheese slicer yesterday and as a result I might have made a few typos. I hope I corrected them all.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
For example, take the ThinkGeek advertisement we see so often at the top of this very website. ThinkGeek have the reputation they now have in part due to the repetitive nature of their advertisement. We all recognise an advert by them, and whilst it will most probably not result in thinking "Oh I absolutely must buy that new coffee mug", its reputation as a fair and good company is enhanced by the continuity of advertisements. This equates to the same measures by which you measure television advertisements.
Granted some advertiments appear to be completely random to the page on which they are viewed, and these can only be looked down upon. Advertisments showing relevent information however must be viewed in as positive a light as any television commercials. We don't especially like them, no, but they are there nevertheless. Occasionally they prove useful, occasionally provide light entertainment, and at the very least give you just cause to moan about the speed of the page loading!
Long live idiots who use 640x480
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I no longer visit a number of sites because they display pop-up ads, JAVA (I assume anyway, they're interactive) ads which crash or slow my browser, or sites that display more advertisement than material. I could set things up so that the annoyances wouldn't appear, but I'd rather just ignore the site. Oh yeah, add rapidly flashing ads to the list of things that will turn me off (i.e., the morons at X-10)
All of this can be distilled down to an observation that advertisers should listen to. No matter how slick you think the advertisement is, no matter how many hours you spent on it or no matter how "ground breaking" it is, you've failed miserably if you turn off your target audience.
Market droids should also realize that it isn't the size of their adds that are stopping me from clicking through, its the fact that I already know the product or service or I'm just not interested.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Advertising becomes annoying, leading to advertising being blocked, leading to larger banner ads for those who don't block... wash, rinse, repeat...
Text-based Ads or Google's fantastic AdWords are the way forward, I feel.
I don't have a problem with advertiser supported sites running banner ads along the top or bottom of the page. Heck, even the sidebar ads like The Register uses aren't really that annoying. I think most people's biggest complaint is that they slow down load times for many pages.
This latest "development" seems to underscore the point that advertising online isn't working. It seems that banner ads are becoming like billboards along the highway. They're there, you sort of notice them, but when was the last time you really paid attention and were influenced by them? So the advertisers are nowing going to go to greater and greater lengths to grab interest by making it nearly impossible to miss the ads on the pages. So, they're making the "standard" sizes larger. Or they stick the ad in the middle of the page. But the vast majority of users will continue to just tune them out.
In the end, we'll probably just have a handful of companies like doubleclick that serve out these ads, and lower and lower click-through prices being paid to the sites that host the banners. Maybe someday someone will develop a formula that works better, for people viewing a site as well as advertisers, than the current crop of banners that are populating the web.
DigitalRover
They wanted bigger ad sizes to make advertisements that look even more convincingly like Windoze dialog boxes. You and I laugh at these things, but one person I met doesn't visit shockwave.com because when they went there, "a message box said there was a problem with my browser."
I would not. Yes, I would rather pay money from my own pocket for an ad-free life. I would like to read magazines that are all content. I would like to watch television that is all content. I would like to read websites that are all content. I would like to carry a cellular telephone past a store without getting a page telling me the store has a sale on Dadjiframmises today only. And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone.
Reading a web page nowadays is not unlike being in a Vegas casino. The effort required to concentrate on the purpose of your visit (a news story, a tutorial, a game of cards) in the face of things that move and flash and beep quickly makes the entire experience a headache-inducing grind. And it's simply not worth it.
Like many, I browse less and less because of the growing in-your-face nature of advertising. When a site is nice enough to serve their ads from an easily-filtered URL, I do it. When they are not, I decamp, never to return. In an ideal world, the bargain-conscious/cheapskates (choose your term depending on where you stand) would not be able to let their penny-pinching grasp dictate the terms of everyone's experience. Sadly, in the land of the fee and the home of the slave, they do.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Stonethrow Glasshouse, spokesperson for the Internet Advertising Bureau, clarified their stance on "Pop-Up Ads." Speaking with reports for CBS (Completely Boring Schills), he stated,
"Due to the vast lead in Internet profits held by pornographic web sites over not-smutty websites, we are suggesting the pop-up ad as the be all, end all of advertising. Visit your run-of-the-mill urine-drinking web site, and you'll be inundated by a glorious procession of advertising bliss, running the gamut from penile enlargment to bestiality. These windows open faster than the eye can follow, providing a fast, subliminal injection of images!"
By the end of this statement, Mr. Glasshouse was panting, no doubt as a result of his enthusiasm for his chosen profession. Once he regained his composure, he closed with,
"Just imagine the ramifications for printer toner sales, weight loss drugs and money-making schemes!"
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Thats ok. I'm going to start running ascii art banner ads just for you!
That's funny, I went to that story and all I saw there was this large beige box with some distorted/stretched text that seems to say "advertising blocked by squid.redir"
Pardon the sweeping generalizations...
Everybody hates the commercialization of the internet when they have to close popup windows, download banners, and deal with spam. But everybody loves the commercial factor when they need a hard-to-find book and locate it by doing a quick search on Google or Ebay. Personally, I can do most all of my Christmas shopping on Amazon. And I like being able to put in my wish list and just email relatives about it.
I can deal with spam and banner ads. I get maybe one piece of spam a week and I use Junkbuster to filter most banner ads. But take away all commercial entities from the 'net and I might have to - gasp - go to the mall.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
We are a website for user-created communities and online journaling. At one point, we tried banner ads on all non-member journal pages. What we discovered was that we had about 25% fewer new users due to banner ads. The amount of money we received from banner ads was a very small proportion of what we received from memberships. It became obvious to us that for every quarter we were making, we were annoying 1000 other people.
We have since removed banner ads, relying instead on funding from our members. We have also encouraged goodwill by moving towards open sourcing all our software and encouraging users to help support and develop the site.
The results? We have received about $30,000 in member donations in the past 5 months or so, have over 100 volunteers, and have 65,000 users, doubling in size every three months.
It's worth pointing out that the sites who really make money on banner ads aren't the tiny "mom & pop" websites. To really make money on banner ads, you need to be big enough that you can offer advertisers very specific, pinpointed demographics. As the demise of so many dotcoms has shown, banner ads in and of themselves do not constitute a stable, scalable business model.
They should do whatever it takes that will make them money.
I think a lot of people -- too many people -- forget that these web sites take money to run. Either advertisers pay for it, or you pay for it directly. Personally, I would rather have advertisers pay for it.
If it takes bigger ads to make them effective, then make them bigger.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The result of this will be successful at first, but after a time people will learn to filter out the new bigger ads too.
I don't think that's true. Newspaper ads are effective, and there is not an "arms race" to make them bigger and bigger. Clearly bigger is better, however.
Banner ads as they exist today are much too small to effectively deliver a message. I think there is a point at which you have enough real estate to be effective.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
In a long-anticipated move, many web sites are converting over to the "banner content" model. These web sites consist of full-screen ads with a 468 x 60 pixel banner at the top where all user-requested content is displayed. In order to access these web sites, all that the user needs is Internet Explorer 5.5 (or later), Macromedia Flash and Shockwave, IPIX Viewer, InstallShield's InstallFromTheWeb, Javascript, cookies, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime, Adobe Acrobat, ActiveX, PhotoJam, VivoActive Player, and Liquid MusicPlayer. These web sites will feature a rich, multimedia experience rivalling that found in television commercials. Of course, for maximum enjoyment, a T3 or faster connection is recommended.
dammit.
Oh, whatever. I think that these people need to form a political union and push for this stupid change like so many Lincoln bedrooms sleeping PAC lobbyists, because they realize deep down that they really DON'T have the power.
Who has the power is the geeks who make the system work, make their stupid ads load, and edit those ads out when they get home, with a little script. The ad companies are at the beck and call of these people, really.
What costs all the damn money that makes websites need ads? You need expensive business software that a few companies including Microsoft promulgated as standards and then jacked up the price for.
Labor costs are also high, and those need to be reduced as well.
Goat sex free since 2001
This whole idea is based on the notion that the effectiveness of an ad is somehow proportional to its size. I, personally, don't choose to not click on an ad because it is small and goes by unnoticed. I choose to not click on an ad because I'm not interested it what it's selling.
They say in the article that they want more size to make things more "emotional." If this refers to the content of the ad, make the fonts smaller. If it refers to the impact of the ad on the page, I am decidedly less likely to click on an obnoxious ad, just like when I hang up on telemarketers.
--------------------------------
The advertisers seem to be under the mistaken impression that end users don't click on their ads because they don't see them. The obvious solution? Make the ads more visible. This is just one of the internet advertising industry's myriad failures to catch a clue.
Lucky for them I'm here to tell them what's what.
The internet advertising model is based loosely on the model that has worked successfully for broadcast and print media for decades, and everybody's all confused as to why it doesn't work online.
Clue #1: It is working online. Or put more cynically, it isn't working any better in traditional channels. In old-school advertising, you don't have any way to tell how many people take immediate action upon seeing your ad. Advertisers spent the GNP of a small country to get their name spoken during the Super Bowl. Suppose they had some way to determine how many people immediately stopped watching football so they could go buy a Pepsi at the corner store, or how many people immediately started trying to find information about a new Volkswagon. If advertisers used that standard, would they be satisfied at the results? Would they feel they'd gotten their money's worth? Doubtful. But the very notion would leave a stupified frown on the faces of most sane people. The idea behind advertising is NOT that people immediately drop what they're doing to find out more about your product. It's about name recognition. It's about the moment when people do decide that they need a new car, or a tasty and refreshing cola beverage. In this respect internet advertising is done completely bass-ackwards. Internet advertising is based on "click-throughs." The higher the number of clicks, the more successful the ad is judged to be. This system is fraught with problems. The highest click generator has GOT to be that stupid "punch the monkey" ad. That's why it was everywhere. But does anybody really know or care what was being advertised? But people clicked, so it was a success. In the meantime, the top of the page I'm looking at now contains a pleasantly understated ad for Penguin Computing. I'm not going to click on it now. I have better things to do, such as composing this comment. But when I start building a new home server in a few months, I will likely check them out -- not by coming back to Slashdot and looking for an ad, but by going directly to the source. In a practical sense, the ad was successful, but because there is no logfile indicating a causal link between the ad and my potential future purchase, the ad will be judged to have failed in my case. Clue the first is, therefore, Do not have unrealistic expectations about customer response to ads. You have the technology to track it. You need the will to ignore it.
Clue #2: Trying schemes, tricks and gimmicks to get users to click builds up bad karma with customers. Your clickthrough counts may go up, but your sales will likely go way down. I have personally threatened to boycott multiple sites that carried that ad with the animated balloon floating across the browser window. It obstructed the content I was there to look at. The obvious tactic there is that people will click on the balloon to try to get rid of it -- and be taken to the advertiser's site, thus creating a successful ad. Nevermind the fact that hardly anybody actually cares what the balloon links to. This is the most extreme case (I've seen) of a disturbing trend of trying to trick or irritate people into clicking. Blindingly flashing ads, fake forms and "game" ads -- which usually don't even tell you what they're pushing -- all fall into this category. Now ridiculously huge Flash-based page-dominating ads are joining this dubious collection of tactics. At least the big ads have the virtue of a sort of honesty. Their only strength is greater power to distract and annoy. The masses come for the content, not the ads, and the more you try to pull them away from the content, the more you'll push them away altogether. You don't win more customers. You just erode the user base of otherwise good content sites. Thus clue the second is, Thou shalt not annoy thy customer, for he is fickle and will take his money elsewhere in a heartbeat.
In the "ideal" situation, there's this constant tension, kind of a romantic triangle, among the content provider, the advertiser and the user. The user wants the content. The advertiser wants money from the user. The content provider wants money from the advertiser. In reverse, the affections are more tepid. The advertisers use the content providers only as a way to get to the users. The content providers feel forever forced to choose between the advertisers and the users (they often really like the users, but the advertisers have the money). And the users view the advertisers as a somewhat necessary evil, but really wish they'd just go away altogether. Any one of them can upset the balance here. The users can decide the content isn't worth putting up with the ads. The content providers can decide they really do love their users more after all. The advertisers can decide they aren't getting enough commitment from users to justify the money they pay. This last is what's happening. The fallout in a few cases will be poor but happy relationships between content providers and users, but most will be torn apart, with the content providers left wondering why nobody loves them anymore. It's sad, but inevitable unless people reevaluate their expectations.
Check out this CNET story about how AOL is starting to test putting ADs into ICQ.
Anyway, look at the story -- it isn't a banner ad, but it's a gigantic ad that is right in the middle of the fscking text. UGGH!
------------
CitizenC
>free sites put up large advertisements
;)
>great, let's block those ads! it's my
>God-given right to have free Internet
>content!
If you don't want to put up something for all to see for free, ask for money before you let people in, like all the pr0n sites do. We have no problem with it. And, if your contents are good enough, we might even pay to enter your site.
However, if you put up stuffs together for all to see with advertisements, we have every right to block them, just as we have the right to switch channels on TV during the commercial periods.
In short: you're asking for it.
>commercial software (especially MacOS X for
>some reason) open source it! now now now!
>and not so that we can add better
>functionality and improve
>the product, but so that we can port it to
>Linux (ie, steal it).
Nobody forces software authors to open source things. They CHOOSE to do so themselves. And I've never heard "receiving a gift" is equivalent to "stealing".
>secure music/content
>rip it! crack it! (but only after it's in
>the marketplace). we have a right to free
>music and movies!
You don't understand. Some of us (at least myself) don't think we have a right to free music and movies. However, anything that increases the power of corporations to rip off consitutional rights (e.g. fair use) of ours HAVE TO BE CRACKED. It has nothing to do with "free right to free music and movies".
>but i still don't see what's wrong with
>putting some advertisements, no matter the
>size, on commercial-provided free content.
>people: advertising is not inherently evil.
I don't either. They have every right to put whatever they damn please on their web sites.
>if you don't want to see advertising, don't
>read sites that have advertising: that's
>your choice. there's good reason to get
>pissed off about billboard advertising, as
>you can't "opt-out," but reading sites with
>advertising and purposefully blocking out
>that advertising is extremely immoral.
So you're saying they can control how I use my eyes. I must see everything, or nothing. Give me a break. If they don't provide a way to opt-out for me, I'd do it myself. It is NOT IMMORAL. IT IS JUST A WAY I ASSIST MYSELF TO IGNORE THE ADS.
>there are ways to properly fight the misuse
>of advertising, including ignoring
>advertising-sponsored content.
So you agree I can ignore them. Blocking is just a method I find effective at making myself ignore the ads.
>but blocking that advertising is nothing but >stealing.
>(and yes, it is stealing despite the fact
>that it's "digital." it's stealing
>bandwidth).
Even if it were stealing. Hey, it steals my bandwidth as well. So we're even. If they finds a way to send advertisements my way without stealing even 1 bit of my bandwidth, I'd be happy to read them all
The problem with advertising on the web is not the size of the ads.
With magazines and newspapers, we have print ads... print media - print ads
With radio we have audio ads... audio media - audio ads.
With television we have video ads... video media - video ads.
With the Internet, we have print ads... interactive media - print ads.
Surely, animated GIFs and Flash animations do make a difference, but for the most part the Internet is filled with print ads. Until advertisors think of some innovative way of advertising on the web, their advertisements will be ignored.
What could be interesting? Why not advertise WITH the media as opposed to just in it? What's wrong with HTML ads? Nice moderately lenghted texts with links to relevent sites explaining why product X is good.
> they are widely seen as a failure, garnering
> response rates of about one in 200, down from
> one in 50 when they were first launched.
Why are they counting click rates as the only reference of effective web advertising? No wonder they think it is a failure... Where did these people come up with that? It's not like every time you see a TV ad you click on it, or send any response at at - at that time.
The way to do it is at least twofold: simply getting your brand out there (Like standard TV - "This program is brought to you by XYZ") - make sure people know you exist when they are ready to make a purchase. The second plan is to make you aware of a product and then you might think about that as you are laying in bed, and might make the decision to purchase it the next day, or next week, or next paycheck, etc.
Getting the eyeshare out there is the point of reference. Why they expect to pay the web site only if the user drops what they are doing and goes to their site immediately makes to sense to me.
I know that when I am out on the web, I am already doing something in particular, whether doing research for work, slashdotting, or whatever. No way am I going to drop what I am doing right then to go look at the site. Instead, if I see something interesting I will mentally note it, and I may later go check it out.
Case in point, about a month ago, I saw a banner ad for Outpost.com saying that they offer free overnight shipping for all orders over $100. I ad nothing right at that time I wanted to buy. Clicking the ad right then would be pointless, I was not ready to make a purchase. Last week, I needed to buy a router and a 100 MB switch. I went to buy.com on the recommendation of a friend, was almost ready to buy, then remembered I had seen the outpost banner ad. I went and checked out Outpost's prices on the same items, Outpost's BASE price was higher, but overnight shipping was free, while buy.com's was $16.95. So, I bought my products at outpost.com based on a banner ad that I DID NOT CLICK ON!
It's the band/product impression. What's made web ads seem a failure is bad expectations. A click on a banner ad means nothing. Instead, look at total online sales after a certain banner ad campaign.
Plus, the advertiser's have used this bullshit story about how ineffective web ads are to force down their cost per ad. They whine to the web content people, who then have stupidly folded and let themselves be paid only per click instead of per impression (display of the ad on their web page).
We can go full-on conspiracy mode and look at it this way: Most of the big advertising companies are owned/controlled by big old world publishing companies. The old companies are trying to move their publishing monopolies onto the web. So these big ad companies push this bullshit story on the web people, who cannot make ends meet off the paltry amount paid per click, go out of business, allowing the old companies to fill their niches, one by one, until they have the amount of saturation they are shooting for, once all the other web ad players are irrelevant, and then begin selling ads on these replacement sites, slowly raising the price they are charging for ads to where they begin to make a return on their investment again, after putting the rest out of business with their bullshit story. What they like out of this plan is that in the meantime, while they are moving to put the others out of business, they are pretty much getting free advertising via the per-impression advertising that they know is the real money maker from their decades of TV and magazine advertising. They are just playing a parasitic smoke and mirror game with the existing web, trying to steal it for their own.
I think slashdot is running this story to give us the impression that this is inevitable. That way we won't complain so much when they implement these ads.
First doubleclick, then java ads and finally popups.
You really can't blame them for this though.
VA Linux has fallen on very hard times. Espescially the OSDN online division.
The product line manager for the OSDN online division is under tremendous pressure to increase banner add revenue. Normally he wouldn't be able to affect slashdot since their contract gives Taco and Hemos complete control.
But VA found a loophole.
You see, the product line manager for OSDN online is Jeff Bates (AKA Hemos). He CAN force slashdot to do what it takes to increase ad revenue.
Enjoy this interface while it lasts boys, because the slashdot layout is about to become a lot more cluttered.
==Shoeboy
It's time for webvertisers to recognize the same thing. It isn't the click that counts, it's the mind space. That doesn't change just cause the ad is on a web site.
--
Last year, the Poynter Institute did an eyetracking study of how people read news on the web. They found that graphics were largely ignored. It probably doesn't matter what size they are, they'll still be ignored.
--
AOL Time Warner announced today that the decision to remove all content except for advertiser banner ads had been implemented on their sites more than 18 months ago and that the IAB was behind the times.
"We've been pleasantly surprised at how many of our subscribers haven't noticed a single change" said Steve Case, CEO of the merged companies. "We thought there would a huge outcry, but apparently no-one's using our service for anything beyond easy dial-up access".
Bill Gates was reportedly "livid" at not having thought up the idea of removing all relevant content from Microsoft's sites sooner, but vowed to catch up and dominate another industry "as soon as the DOJ gets off my back".
why are most slashdot users so cheap?
i always wonder this. it seems that the majority of people here want everything for free. it's one thing to dislike corporate America, but most of what i see here is childish "gimmie gimmie gimmie!"
examples:
great, let's block those ads! it's my God-given right to have free Internet content!
open source it! now now now! and not so that we can add better functionality and improve the product, but so that we can port it to Linux (ie, steal it).
rip it! crack it! (but only after it's in the marketplace). we have a right to free music and movies!
seriously people, this is getting disturbing. there's a difference between fighting a misuse of technology, but many people here have gone way beyond that into a "me! me! me!" attitude that make middle-age yuppies look like ghandi.
personally, i'm not keen on advertising, i despise over-consumption, and i don't own a car for purely ethical reasons. heck, i don't even own a television for christ's sake! but i still don't see what's wrong with putting some advertisements, no matter the size, on commercial-provided free content. people: advertising is not inherently evil. if you don't want to see advertising, don't read sites that have advertising: that's your choice. there's good reason to get pissed off about billboard advertising, as you can't "opt-out," but reading sites with advertising and purposefully blocking out that advertising is extremely immoral.
there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth).
seriously, grow up.
- j
It is well known that everyone ignore banner ads these days, as everyone is inured to them and filters them out of their mental bandwidth.
Not everyone ignores them. I say this, cause I'm one of the offenders - I buy ad space. Would I buy a 250 x 250 pixel popup? HELL NO. I don't want to annoy people, just little ways of catching thier attention, and get them to check out my product(s). (More on that in a minute.) Do people click-through on banners and button ads? Well, my limited experience so far - yep. But there's more to it than that...
We should be encouraging the banner ad makers to be inventive, and use flash and the like, rather than just being more obvious and intruding.
I *SO* disagree with this. First off, one of the reasons why ads are failing for most people is simple - they are missplaced (when is the last time you even noticed an ad on a chat area like /.? You aren't LOOKING for information on, oh, XML, so O'Reilly's ad for XML in a nutshell is mentally filtered.) I program games - so, the places I'm advertising are all game related (two shareware sites, one gaming site.) People are looking for games to download, or information on games - thier eyes are open to this sort of ad suddenly.
Second, unless it's cross-platform, and works on all browsers, why would you use it to create an advertisement you can't garantee will show up? You are just wasting money then. And for the ones that DO show it, you'll just end up waisting thier time as they download the ad - something else I learned, people don't wait for ads to load, unless the page is structured so that the ad has to be fully loaded before the page displays.
Whatever you do, it needs to be tight, quick loading, and viewable everywhere. But even more importantly, it needs to be targeted at the right place. Since advertisers are desperite at the moment, well, they will happily sell you space on Breast Cancer Discussion areas, even though your product is a First Person Shooter.
More focused ads, better advertising, etc. would improve the current problems. However, most advertisers are looking for 'eyeballs' more than anything else, trying to build brand recognition at any cost. Me, I just try and focus on selling the product at hand.
And, PLEASE, let's not get to the point where not only are there full-motion, sterio sound ads, but, that we have 3 or 4 of them per site battling it out! When it gets to that point, well, I guess I'll start resorting to junk buster :-(
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I don't use JunkBuster becuase to be honest, banner ads don't bother me. I see them, hell, I even click on them from time to time... but it they got really big, I'd block them.
It seems counter-productive in the long term to annoy the consumer.
Think about the ads on the TV that are best... they're funny ones, ones you like. You're not going to be affected so well by an ad that you don't like.
They're missing the point. People don't ignore banner ads because they're too small, they do it because they're annoying.
When I first used the Internet, all the banner ads caught my eye. After a few days, only the really flashy ones did. Now, years later, my eyes/brain ignore them automatically. They don't even register. The ones that force themselves to be obvious just annoy me even more, and at that point I'm ready to NOT buy whatever is on my screen, even if it's something cool.
Perhaps one out of every thousand banner ads I see contains an ad for something I'm interested in. But they are generally things I've read/heard about already. Television commercials work because they take over your entire screen, are targeted at a specific group of viewers, and are usually semi-entertaining to watch. Banner ads just use bandwidth, slow down the page loading and just basically get in the way.
Entertainment on the Internet usually comes in the form of reading. Yes, some sites stream video/audio, but for the most part, the viewer is reading something. You watch things on TV, not read them. It's far less annoying to have 'watching' interrupted than reading interrupted. Can you image a book that had a paragraph on each page automatically morph into an advertisement? Ick.
Go back to the drawing board, folks.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I'm switching to Lynx
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The way that advertisers get around this in other media is to make the ads more interesting or flashy, but on the web this is not an option. The only option is to make them bigger and more intrusive.
The result of this will be successful at first, but after a time people will learn to filter out the new bigger ads too. Then advertisers will call to make them even larger.
Where will it all end? It won't.
I think until such time as banner ads incude sound and video, and can hence be creative and entertaining, they will just become more and more obnoxious.
We should be encouraging the banner ad makers to be inventive, and use flash and the like, rather than just being more obvious and intruding.
It is really the only way forward.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.