Slashdot Mirror
Making Banner Ads Suck Less
My name is Kurt Gray, I'm the lead programmer for OSDN's ad system which serves ad banners on sites like Slashdot, Freshmeat, SourceForge, Themes, and partnering deal with Kuro5hin, etc. I open sourced our ad delivery code sometime last year and have been maintaining it in-house here as well. My quest now is to create a better ad banner delivery system, not only better for you the audience but also more useful to our sponsors. So I have some ideas about our ad system that we want to pitch to you all sitting out there reading this and your feedback on these ideas would be of great value to us. Note that this is being posted to both K5 and Slashdot because we want to get feedback from everyone we can.
First let me address two issues that have been discussed on Slashdot just recently on Micropayments instead of ads and Ad banners may soon get bigger and how these issues pertain to ad banners on the OSDN sites.
Why run ad banners? What about a tip-jar, or subscription
fees, or micropayments, or donations, or bill-the-ISPs instead of ad banners?
When you're running a web site, depending on your content, your audience, the size of your staff, your overhead costs, the size and nature of your audience, and many other factors, it might be possible to get by on just subscription fees, or micropayments, or some other revenue model that does not involve selling banner ads. But the size of the audience on OSDN's web sites and the nature of the content within is such that the subscription models break down. For a network of this size and content ad banners are the only realistic way to cover costs and hopefully earn a little profit (someday we hope). Another way of looking at it is to ask yourself why does Yahoo, CNet, and ZDNet still rely on banner ads? Because for a web sites that have a lot of traffic no one has proven that there is a better way to earn more revenue with less overhead. In any large media company, advertising is it. Even with print magazines the subscription fees and cover prices don't come close to covering the costs for a large circulation magazine: the subscription fees and cover price is just a barrier-of-entry to assure the advertisers that the readership paid to read the content and therefore is the right audience to see their ads.
....but ad banners don't work! There's too many ad filters now days!
Yes, a lot of people, even entire ISPs, have ad filters and proxy rules to block out banner ads but even still there are plenty enough ad impressions delivered every day. In fact those who filter ads are doing web publishers and advertisers a favor by making sure that no time, bandwidth, or impressions are wasted on people who definately will not respond to any kind of ad. So please, filter the ads out if you feel that strongly about it, in fact, I'll pitch you some ideas further on in this article in which our ad system could help you filter out the ads which is why I'm posting this.
...but too many people ignore banner ads, and nobody clicks on them! Advertising sucks! Free your head! Prioritize, man!
Yes, many people, including myself, scroll right past banner ads and ignore them completely. But chances are you did glance at many of the ads in a web given page, perhaps you saw a logo or brand name. In that sense the ad delivered just what it intended. It's called "branding": advertising for the sake of increased brand recognition and its most of what large advertisers hope for when advertsing in any medium including the web. Smaller advertisers will obsess over response to each ad, whether that be a click, or even a sale, and thus they become very unhappy when the click-thru is not to their satisfaction. So just because click-thru percentages are low across the board doesn't mean Internet advertising is doomed, but rather advertisers expectations and ad pricing schemes are changing accordingly. The smallest fish in the pond may be doomed but the pond remains.
What can we expect from OSDN web sites as far as ad banners? Bigger
fatter ads? More ads per page? Flashing noisy ads that will read my
browser cache and report all suspicous keywords to the NSA?
As you might expect, we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business. Right now we are not competitive in many areas: we only accept the most basic ad formats, most OSDN sites only accept one ad size, our average click-thru rate is as low as anywhere else, and our rate card prices are higher than most. We've been able to get away with it so far because our web sites are very well known and our audience has just the kind of demographics advertisers drool over, but lately its become a buyers market, the ad budgets are drying up and the few big advertisers still spending online are having their way with the web publishers left groveling for the business. It's times like these when advertisers can force outrageous new ad formats down the throats of the web publishers, and other web publishers are stepping up their ad offerings to entice advertisers to their space -- it's a free market economy after all.
So what are we doing about it? First we're telling our sales people to go after more main stream advertising accounts: entertainment, auto makers, food and beverage, whatever we think fits our audience. Second, we're looking at which newer ad formats and what we're willing to accept. Third, I have to rewrite our ad delivery system to improve our ad targeting: platform targeting, geotargeting, and topic targeting at the very least. Along these lines I also have some ideas I want to bounce off you there reading this here article...
Let the users control the ad delivery. User preferences. Ad
filtering. User feedback. Interactive, or as George W. would say "Interactivfulness"
Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:
Comment forums for each ad banner:
What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum? So if an ad bothers you, offends you, confuses you, entices you, anything about that ad, you can speak and be heard. Let's face it, many ad banners suck because nobody tells the ad agency that the creative needs improvement. On the other hand the ad may be messing with your browser and you just want someone to know about it. Or maybe you wanted whatever was being advertised, you clicked, and you still didn't get the information you were looking for, the ad feedback forum would be the place to get a response on that.
Turning off annoying ads:
Suppose you become absolutely sick and tired of seeing that "Fawking DSL!" ad or that "Punch the monkey" banner, suppose you could click a link right next to the banner "Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security." And you just click that link and bam, you'll never see that ad again. The number of people who turn off a particular ad could be a way of truly knowing how counter productive certain ads are.
Choice of ad topics and categories:
What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see? For example what if you could explicately set your ad preferences so that you're are more about networking, movies, gadgets, and events but you don't want to see ads for alcohol, web design, or luxury items... and these ad preferences would apply to you within whole OSDN network of web sites. Would we use your information to for demographic studies? Yes absolutely, we'd tell advertisers that we have X number of people over here who explicately told us that they'd prefer to see ads about their kind of product. The overall effect we won't waste our effort chasing after advertsiers that have nothing of interest to our community and we won't waste your bandwidth downloading ads you don't want.
What about ad system karma?
I'm thinking there could be a point-based reward system that gives you credit for everything you do that helps our advertising business. As you accumulate karma points in our ad system you could redeem them gain access to an extended set of features in the ad system itself...
To increase your ad system karma you could (Hypothetical examples)
- 1 point for every time you load a paid ad
- 0 points for clicking on an ad (I don't want to encourage excessive ad clicking)
- 50 points for loading bigger ads
- 100 points for loading a pop-up ad
- 500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
- 100 points for loading a Flash ad
- 300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
- 200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
- 500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live
Redeem your points to gain access to such features as (Hypothetical examples)
- Turn off all ads
- Upload your own ads
- Get stats on the ads you uploaded
- Specify which sites you want your ads to run on
- Whetever else anyone can think of...
How would ad system karma affect web site user karma?
It wouldn't. The ad system is totally disconnected from any web site user database. Our ad system runs ads on many web sites, so even if we felt compelled to tie it into the user accounts of any web site it would be a lot of work, too much work, and I don't see any reason to even attempt it.
So the ad system would have its own user accounts independant and unrelated to web site accounts. Does that complicate things? No, the ad system user account is low maintenance, transparent, maybe as simple as cookie, nothing too visible, not in your face all the time nagging you to come play. The ad system preferences web page could be one click away, simple web form, nothing too fancy.
Hey I don't like you spying on me! I'm going to wear a metal bowl on my
head and warn the others that you're all sneaky opportunist-type
people. You are one of them.
That's OK. I have my metal bowl on too. As far as these ad system ideas go, you wouldn't need to have an ad system user account if you want to be anonymous and outside the loop as far as the ad delivery goes that's fine. This user account would be something you'd actively choose to create, and if you don't bother doing so then fine, you're anonymous, unknown, you'll see the normal general rotation of banner ads, and maybe later hopefully you'll find that out food tastes better when you try out some of these features and take advantage of the bonuses.
We're a community, damnit! We're not your ad-clicking sheep! If you
can't sell ads then that's your problem! One day this web site will be
free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will
leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!
These web sites have grown way beyond the realm of affordable to operate by volunteers and donors. If OSDN and/or VA collapsed someday then the OSDN web sites would not be simply released back into the wild but rather be liquidated as assets to the highest bidder, and you can bet the new owners would gladly run these sites into the ground for every last penny they can quickly earn from them. So at least you can be glad the original founders of these web sites still work here and they care a lot about how this web site works for you, the community. And if we're not able to turn a profit here despite our best efforts, whoever ends up grabbing our helm here will most likely toss this whole crew overboard, and I can assure you that the new crew will care far less about "community" then we ever did. But that's not your problem anyway because there are plenty of other web sites out there like this one, and if you log off now you may even discover that there is whole world of amazing life outside the Internet, I don't know much about that myself so I can't descibe it to you but I've downloaded pictures of it. So is this as good as it gets for these web sites? No, we can do better here, and last week resolved to be a lot more focused. We're determined not to give Jesse Berst and his ilk any reason to gloat.
So I can't think of what else I was going to pitch here. So please if you have feedback on any of the ideas pitched above then post them here.
Kurt Gray, OSDN, ad system engineer
You tell them, brother-man. We can do whatever the hell we want with our own sites, users be damned!
Don't like what we're doing? Tough shit. It's our site, and we get to decide what to do.
Hey! Wait! Where are you guys going?! Come back here right now! Your supposed to be using my website! How dare you leave!
---
It's your ball, and you can dictate which game your going to play,
but don't be surprised when the other kids decide to play hopscotch instead.
And yet you expect to read Slashdot everyday for free.
It works the same way the political stories did, the owners of the site want to know their demographic and what better way and cheaper to get that done than to use the forum to collect data. You all think Slashdot is just a friendly geek community run by an innocuous crew of like minded individuals. You're wrong. It is owned by a corporation and decisions are made by guys in suits who's only concern is the bottom line.
When the boom was on and the stock price was double digits you didn't see the effects directly. Now that everything has gone south and a profit is out of sight you'll notice the screws tightening.
What's weird is, I don't know if they listened to me, or if lots of people complained, but they stopped. Then they started doing flash banners, which is great when you have flash turned off ;-)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Yeah really, to sabotage this business model, have the client download the image, but send it straight to /dev/null ... hell, you could even have the browser designed to FOLLOW ad links, and send the whole page straight to the trash. The ad networks would see click throughs, the sites would get paid, the bandwidth would get wasted, and the client wouldn't ever have to display the hideous ads. Everyone's happy!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Man that would be so great, distracting ads (even non banner ads) could be hidden with a click.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I totally agree with this critique. The ad system has to be compelling enough that we turn the junkbuster off to take part in the network. The ads need to have value to us as readers, not just value to 'you' as advertisers.
Penny-arcade.com is breaking the mold, maybe the OSDN can too.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I've found good companies and stuff I didn't know about through some of the ads.
I can honestly say I've never found anything remotely useful by clicking an ad - if I'm going to spend money on something, I'll go and check out Google/Deja and see what real people have to say (about the product, not about the ad).
From the article: we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business
Well judging by cnet, you stick a massive image right in the middle of the story and annoy your readers even more... Honestly, if I was paying money to Slashdot it'd be because I wanted it to continue - not because I wanted to buy my way free of ads.
-dair
Nope, those are paid for by whoever bought the food and then gave it away.
The correct form of the law under discussion is "Every lunch is paid for", which covers exceptions like these.
My god... I'm using Lynx right now as I currently don't havea graphical text browser. Guess that means I'm even worse than Satan's spawn as I don't even have the ability to turn banner ads on.
Well, you still get the alt-text and the possibility of clicking on the ad link, I presume? I don't even get that much. :-)
If you give people interesting ads, they will click. It's different to the real world. Since the success of ads is measured by clickthroughs (i.e. internet advertising is a direct sales route), then what you have to do is give people things they are directly interested in.
Amen to that.
Please, OSDN, give me:
- relevant adverts for me
- relevant adverts for the geographic region I come from. Cheap DSL in Utah is not really very interesting to a Scotsman living in Scotland!!! Everybodies time and money is wasted if you try to sell me something I can't buy.
- the ability to turn off adverts that I hate. Show me something irritating too often and I can guarantee that I will actively buy a competitors product.
Simple user profiles for adverts sound like a brilliant idea...and unlike doubleclick, OSDN sites have the neural capability to actually *use* the information for _their_ gain.
Well, Google seems to do fine with only very minor and unobtrusive advertisments. Moreover, Altavista started as a research project at Digital, went to become a showcase of Digital, and only went fully commercial after it was spun off.
I can very well imagine such web services to be provided by research institutions or by sponsors. The pure prestige value of being able to say "All of the Web - indexed by SUN computers" is probably worth more than all of the advertising on AltaVista.
Stephan
Hey, I read kuro5hin all the time and I thought to myself, "Oh, good, it's one of those assholes who always says, "-1, already on Slashdot." Heh, I just happened to see this on my weekly pilgrimage to the troll mecca. Funny post, but I sincerely hope you don't do this on kuro5hin. :-)
-regeya
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I currently use iCab on the Mac and filter out about 98% of the banner ads I see (and I am getting the rules set up enough that pop-ups are a rare occasion).
/. from school (where I have to put up with the ads), I get the stupid "See hot babes, and get fired" ad. If I turned that one off, I think that OSDN would simply have to rotate through the other three ads that I ever see.
If OSDN gave me the ability to custom tune what ads I see, and gave me the ability to comment on them, I would seriously consider turning off the filter for OSDN web sites.
I think that the system will only work if OSDN gets a lot of different ads. It seems that every time I check
Ad karma just sucks. I will leave it at that. Customizing ads cool, ad karma just stupid.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
There are certainly people who fall in neither of your categories: Who can't or aren't willing to pay and who hate seeing ads. There may still be merit in the idea that paying a subscription could get some users extra services, but in my opinion, those should always be in the form of "extras" without which the service is still entirely useable.
Paid subscriptions could go toward an extra set of servers to improve performance, for example. Those servers wouldn't exist without the funds contributed by these "patron" users (hello, M-Netters), so non-paying users wouldn't lose anything.
Personally, I put up an ad filter because I don't like advertising. It's great that /. is messing around with other ideas for their advertising system. I'm thrilled.
/. ; should that turn out to be the case, I'd suggest that they look into a different way of getting income. Although I don't want to have to pay to use it either. Not very fair of me, I know, but that's how things are.
I will still not turn off the filter however. I don't like advertising, regardless of the specifics of it. When I feel that I want to get something, I'll research it on my own and generally feel better about it for having done so.
Besides which, I've got no obligation to see the ads, even if they're incredibly discreet and tasteful. I don't care if it harms
-- 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.
I mean, I know I can't do anything with it but I've still effectively retired my low-four-digit-id account in large part because I've been conditioned to value karma and it bothers me at some level to see it get whittled away.
I don't if it's just me, but I've never been modded down, as far as I can think. I also have a fairly old (4-digit ID) account, I post relatively regularly, I try to only post when I've something to say, (or to derail discussion with nitpicking), but apart from the really obvious Petrified First Post on Natlie Portman's Hot Grits Meept! type posts, it seems fairly hard to lose karma, notwithstanding that it's not useful for anything at all.
(man that was a long sentence)
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
The text mentions ISPs with ad-filters installed on their servers. Can anybody please give me examples of this?
Thanks.
- Tal Cohen
Love the sig line. I hate Zippy as well.
---- "First came stats, pulling habits out of rats
well I've seen a lot of people trashing the "See hot sexy women...and get fired" ad and I think that it is one of the funniest I've seen in a while, and bunch of other people agree with me, so, I guess if this system gets implemented there will be a lot of adds that dropped by half the population and regarded as amusing by the other half...setting us back to status quo
---
I post links to stuff here
Boss: Congratulations, James. We're "promoting" you to marketing, since you seem to be good at it and enjoy doing it.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
FWIW:
I don't currently filter ads, but I would if a site that I use frequently, like slashdot, started using popups. I like banner ads, the business model works for me. I'm even in favour of adding a vertical format ad on the left or right if you need the cash, but opening a new window every time I reload would tip the balance too far.
I use NS 4.73, which is barely stable as it is, I don't need my RAM chewed up any faster.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
For example: The ability of a user to choose the category of ads he/she wants to see would be better if, alongside, he/she can choose what kind of ads they like. What I mean is not only choosing whether they like car ads or computer ads but also whether they like pop-up ads or animated ads.
The idea of being able to click on a link and never see the ad next to the link ever again is also nice but there are so many ads that one will never see the end of it. On the other hand, if the user can choose his/her categories and be able to individually ban ads, the ad system will be a lot more flexible to the preferences of the user.
The karma system, even though, a good idea, is probably the one that would not work as excpected (in my opinion). The reason for that is the fact that, as soon as, anyone accumulates enough points to turn off all ads, he/she will do it and the user will never see ads again. Given long enough time and enough users, no one will be looking at the ads the ad system has. If, on the other hand, the 'turn off all ads' feature is time-limited, it would create a lot of angry users, when one they ads start poping up on their screens again.
Finally, as I said before, I think that some kind of combination of the presented ideas will work better then the ideas by themselves. But this is only my opinion, I could be wrong!
I have more bandwidth then God!!
Why go to the expense of redeveloping the banner ad system, before you even bother giving PayPal a chance? Give the readers a chance to trial different sponsorship/subscription plans, before you write off those methods as "unworthy".
Most people I know are aware of how much it costs (esp. in terms of maintenance work) to keep a web site online. We'd be willing to contribute some amount on an irregular basis. Heck - maybe we'd even be willing to "tip" for good stories. Where's a Jon Katz story when I've got a few spare dollars? ;)
Maybe then the editors would realise that I like certain types of article, and hate others (because when they write the ones I like, they get more money).
s/Hemos/Kurt/
My brain hurts.
It's one thing to know that its one's own site, and one can do anything one pleases with it. But its another, completely, to totally ignore one's audience.
I run my own, well (not as well as slashdot, of course), visited site. (Gratuitous plug: VCL) I occassionally drop the line that 'the bottom line is, it's my site, and I can do what I want with it'. But if I was to take that line all the time, I'd have no visitors left, and no incentive to run the site anymore.
So... apart from the backend DB stuff that visitors never see, I always throw my ideas to the visitors. Not only do I get feedback about the new idea, (It's great! It sucks! Ehh... who cares), which can influence wether I go ahead with the feature or not, but sometimes I also get different ideas I may not have considered.
So, Hemos is doing exactly the right thing by airing his ideas here. Good on ya!
So, how do you account for Picadilly Circus?
> What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see
OK, I really don't want to see *any* ads. Does anyone *want* to see ads? Advertising is a broadcast medium, i.e. one-way, from them to us.
But I don't want to see some useful sites dry up and blow away, so I'll live with a few ads. I don't care what the ads say, because I ignore them (the ones I don't block, anyway).
I think the idea of discussing the ads will turn into a discussion of the products or services being advertised, which advertisers don't really want. It'd be great for consumers, but how long before the first lawsuit for posting derogatory stuff about an advertisor?
Sorry, I don't have a solution to offer. It's a hard problem.
Excellent idea. It doesn't even have to be a /. t-shirt. The advertisers could provide t-shirts, mugs, yo-yo's, etc. (I'm just looking around the office here). There would be incentive to the advertiser, since basically getting these items into the hands of the consumer means some seriously long-term impressions with the company logo.
At every tech convention I go to, the booths that are giving away t-shirts are absolutely *packed*. Every geek is a sucker for a free shirt!
One of the best features in IE5 and Mozilla is the ability for the browser to only show the first frame of an animated GIF. Mozilla also has an option to only to show one loop of an animated GIF once then stop.
The problem for advertisers is that most animated banner adds have no useful information in the first frame. Most of the time I don't even know the company paying for the ad much less what they're advertising. If you're going to tell the advertisers something beneficial, tell them to put everything they want to relay in the first frame. Otherwise they're pissing in the wind.
I wish I could submit a form where I could tell my intrests and advertisers would use it (via cookies?). I mean, I want to see ads of interesting things, not about diapers (at least now.) The problem is that I don't want this information been connected any ways to my identity. It would probably need protection via law.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they can't be seen. Stephen Hawking
Stop telling God what to do. Niels Bohr
(Sorry for the off-topic, I just had to...)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
I don't find ads objectionable in and of themselves. What does annoy me greatly, though is when a web page (actually or apparantly) holds its content hostage while waiting for some massive animated advertisement to download, especially when the ad is for something I would never have the slightest interest in.
Display the web page content first, then, when I'm finished, if the ad is there, I may even click on it.
However, it might interest all banner-ad people to know I have found myself clicking-through on some banner ads lately. I guess the last were a couple of Think-Geek ads. Why? They showed me, right away, the product advertised. In one case it was a digital camera, and the banner ad showed me enoguh details about it for me to click through for more information.
So I guess that the guidelines that apply to banner ads and myself are:
As a side not, I'd like to point out that whenever I fill web site surveys, that try to target the ads, the 'activities and hobbies' lists usually just don't cut it. For instance, I might tick the 'travel' box, as I like travelling around. Yet, I do budget travelling, and only to specific locations. I'm definitelly not interested in an offer from the Club Med or a car rental company. I could say similar things about ticking the 'music', 'movies' or 'computers' check boxes.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
*ahem*
(Article posted @ 8:02, above comment posted 8:00...you guys could at least throw a "first post!" in there when utilizing insider FP privileges...)
heh. it looks like the story was posted at 8:00 to me... mebbe Mr. Hemos changed it?
oh, uh, good story, nice post, uhm, all you hot grits belong to us?
Don't ask. Go see.
Maybe every 50th ad check my email account and use the banner ad space to tell me if I have new mail. ....
jeezie criminy, man! are you gonna give your email account info to the ad-men? i sure ain't
Don't ask. Go see.
I'd be happy to pay AU$25 a year or so to /. so that I never saw banner ads when I was logged in as me.
--
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
We want a revolution! RMS says: Fuck the system!
Death to advertising! Death to the market economy!
May Alan Greenspan raise interest rates 100 points
and plow salt into the NASDAQ! Free slashdot
from the robber-barons at Andover.net! Install HURD into CmdrTaco's testicles! Resistance is futile! We need more exclamation marks!
- undoware.ca
Obviously, being able to specify one's interests in ads is a no brainer. Targeting of ads is better, with (possibly) higher click-throughs and the users don't have to put up with ads for products they'll never use (good-bye low interest credit cards!)
.3 seconds to recognize the same ad).
However, there is one downside, if you specify only a few areas, you are likely to see the same ad again and again. This encourages one to ignore the ad and even the "branding" is less effective. (Instead of taking 1 second to scan the ad, you take
Personally, I think a big step would be to get advertisers to spend the money to come up with the many more different ads for the same product. I suspect you could fairly easily double the effectiveness of individual ads. Banner ads can't be that much work can they?
Admittedly, clever ads are not easy to put together, but most banner ads, especially at the web sites you are dealing with, are more information conveyance devices than entertainment. Given most people are going to see ads from the same place repeatedly, you can afford to put a different snippet of information in each ad (for example, advertise a different config of Linux workstation in each ad).
We all know about the "superbowl" ads. And some of may remember when ads first appeared on pay-tv channels and movie theaters. The ads were "different". They had a little more creativity and were a little more "out there".
The problem is that if all your ads are like that, then soon enough they lose effectiveness. Likewise, seeing the ad day in and day out eliminates the effectiveness of the ad. I rarely laugh at an ad the third time I've seen it. Familiarity really does breed contempt in the ad world.
Perhaps a "reward" for ad karma (or even just repeated viewing) might be the occasional exposure to the "higher class" ad. The ads that actually produce a chuckle the first time one sees them. The ads that one mentions to a colleague the next day for one reason or another.
Of course, there's tremendous pressure to release a "good" ad absolutely everywhere, but in doing so, you diminish not just the power of the "good" ad, but also the ad's ability to draw people into reading other ads, just in case they too might be worth seeing. As it is now, if I skip an ad banner, I can be reasonably assured that I'll see it another 40 or 50 times (until even if it was "good", it's lost all impact).
Exclusivity and rarity are powerful incentives...
I don't mind the ads if they have content that's of my interest. I'd vote for the system that allows me to set the category of advertising.
I'd also like the ability to adjust the percentage allowed in of advertising outside of my selected interest. You might find something cool that you could have missed.
The problem I have with the karma is that people are clicking on ads just to gain points. This runs out the impression count that the advertiser has paid for faster and corrupts the data on whether the ad was effective. In the end, I don't think the advertisers would go for this.
What about an ad slashbox?
Well, I can't say much more about this article than that I really like the idea - especially the things about the "ad karma". And, hey, if I should ever need to create a fancy ad system, you already know where I will steal my ideas. Or maybe I could patent the "ad karma" thing and earn lots of money by collecting licensing fess from OSDN? (Or am I too late for that?)
I like the idea. Slashboxes for ads...even the idea about a forum for comments on ads is starting to grow on me the more I think about it. More empowerment to the end user--cool beans.
(Article posted @ 8:02, above comment posted 8:00...you guys could at least throw a "first post!" in there when utilizing insider FP privileges...)
_
props to all dead homiez
Sadly, they tend to be spoiled by the fake this-is-an-image-that-looks-like-a-form, poo-on-you for-clicking-it ads.
Not being a US citizen bars about 90% of slashdot's ads from me so they are now on my 'enemies list'
www.adsoff.com has become a saviour to me these last couple of months. Sites are going crazy with popup windows and annoying ads. Well worth it.
Since this is Slashdot, and this community is rather defensive, if not tyrranical, about proper diction, it is necessary for me to point out your misuse of the word 'ethics' and recommend the replacement of 'morals.' Ethics are of a personal nature - a governing body of conscience of a smaller scale (personal) than morals, which affect a (sub)culture.
My ethics happen to conflict with a number of ideas you've taken for granted in your argument. I, for one, believe that the Internet is a medium for progressive scalable communication. It is meant for distributing (and re-distributing) information. As it was created, engineered, and still largely funded by the U.S. Government (i.e. tax dollars), I believe that U.S. citizens have a right to use the Government-created and still much-subsidized network without the hassles and frustrations as banner ads, popup ads, etc. I believe that it is in the best interest of the U.S. Government to extend this flexible resource to other Governments, which may choose to participate.
In this perspective, I see little difference between the Internet and the national library infrastructure. Books are shared between libraries and information is made available to the user. This is equally subsidized by the U.S. Government, and suffers from no equivalent of banner ads or popups.
My morals tend to agree with you, that for the sake of the existing culture, circumventing the ads that pay for services that are free (to the user, as in beer) and which are enjoyed and used. My morals take note of the counterproductive actions being taken, and I dislike the means in which the banner-ad problem has been dealt with. Nonetheless, these moral evaluations do not override my ethical judgement that advertising of this sort has no place in a still-largely government subsidized network infrastructure.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
I'd be really interested to see a legal case where the parent company of a website was sued for nested pop-up ads and banner ads, which were unwillingly using a customer's bandwidth for unauthorized purposes (aka a DoS attack)... it'd be an excellent legal precedent for the sake of upholding a customer's right to control what data comes across their connection.
Anyone seen anything like this happen yet?
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Shouldn't it really be Micro$of~1?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I dont mind banners on /. since they usually depict stuff I'm interested in. BUT, one thing I've wanted for a long time is some sort of assurance that the product being hawked complies with strict standards of quality, geekiness, usefulness, etc. as defined by the owners/moderators/spirit of /.
/., and I know that Hemos et al. don't let just any dumb company occupy that space, I might click on that banner much more readily, thus making it more effective to the advertiser.
If company A is advertising its product B on
Think of it as a structured word-of-mouth model.
Click-through might decrease, but click-through-SALE would increase.
Morel
I'd click on a lot more advertisements if I knew what I would be getting into when I did. Clicking on a banner advertisement is the Russian roulette of web browsing: the page could appear in the existing browser or new browser window, clicking could forward you to page after page making it difficult to return to the original page, there could be new pop-up ads, cookies, or even the dreaded 'whack-a-mole' sites.
Make all advertisements from your site go to a standard-sized (length, width, bytes) web page with a few pictures, relevant links, an email address for additional information, and make the whole thing load in a new browser window. Then, let us know that'd you've done this on your site, and I think you'll see a change of opinions about banner advertisements.
I've downloaded pictures of this outside world you speak of; I thought I'd take a visit.
I'm concerned about the lack of naked women.
I also think that "save this ad for later" is valuable.
You should also be able to use these features without giving an email address -- the person using it shouldn't need to provide anything except click on a "i will accept an ad login cookie" and then they can get features.
Another related useful idea would be "see ad history", for whenever you saw an ad, and then later want to go back and look.
Finally, if you do click through, you should be able to rate whatever you clicked through via the ad system:
1. see an ad
2. click on it
3. it turns out the site is an "only works with ie5 on windows2000 with the latest shockwave and windows media player" one.
4. go back one page, click on "rate this ad", give them the -1, Proprietary Web Features .
If we do allow "community" ads based on ad karma, an additional option would be "support this ad". If you see an ad (or a "art-ad") that you think is cool and is a "community" ad, being able to click on a link to say "spend some of my karma to keep running this ad" would be cool.
Remember, if you have any sense of ethics, blocking banner ads is stealing content.
Really, now? And what then, of the "banner" ads that fail to load, causing the entire browser to wait up, not displaying any of the content I was actually AFTER? Or how about the idiotic flash-based ads that pop up big graphics over top of the browser and can't be moved or dismissed (End of Days online ads were one such example)?
These block the websites themselves. Is that somehow NOT stealing content? I am perfectly capable of ignoring normal web banner ads, and most of the time I do. But if an advertiser... ANY advertiser... starts aggressively getting in my face, I'm going to do something about it, and I will not be called "unethical" for doing so. Start yelling ads in my face, and I'll probably knock you to the ground. Start popping obnoxious ads over my browser, and I'll start blocking them. This is hardly unexpected behavior for most people.
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Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
It's not the ad itself that matters...it's what's behind the ad. What I mean is, what if I clicked on an ad and got an interesting article or something informative, rather than a flashy pop-up ridden webpage that is trying to cram consumerism down my throat. I don't think marketing departments care too much about their customers to take the time and offer something like this. So show me that you care whether or not I click on that ad and I'll click on it. Challenge my mind and I might be more apt to click on your ad.
For example...Thinkgeek could give an article about DVD player, comparisons, etc, then try to sell it too me. Rather than just cram it down my throat.
Maybe the Karma thing could go both ways. Part of the system might include some manner of tracking Karma for an add and for an advertiser. Maybe some combination of Click-rate, a poll (in the extended add system), or whatever else. Then that add gets more play, and when its Karma goes back down it gets less and less play. New adds from that same advertiser would automatically get an alotment of Karma to start with and have more views initially.
I like this idea and frankly I'd like to see something like it spread to more than just OSDN.
That's my problem with targeted ad schemes: they all disclose personal information about me to people who have no business knowing it, at which point I lose control over it. I shut down everything that uses cookies and Javascript for this very reason.
The only privacy-respecting way to handle this is to let my information remain mine, on my computer. My browser would hold a list of my preferences. Each page would come with a list of ads, and each ad in the list would come tagged with a unique identifier and a set of product categories and associations (numbers between -1 and 1 which measure how well they fit; for example, Viagra gets -1 in the feminine hygiene category). My browser picks an ad and loads it through an anonymizing proxy which tells the banner-ad company what the referring page is (so the site owner can get credit) but not who I am. If I click "Never show me this ad again", I never see the ad again... but the information does not go beyond my own machine.
The exchange of information could go both ways. If the site requires ad revenue to survive it could require a cryptographically-signed "magic number" from the banner-ad company before it lets you beyond the main page. This number would identify the ad, not you (the ad company doesn't know who you are). This achieves accountability (in theory; spoofing to artifically run up ad counts would be possible, but it's just as possible today) while maintaining anonymity.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Another thing that'd make me happier and more likely to read the ads:
Give me the option to display 2 static ads per page to replace the one animated ad. It's hard to read with a stupid ad going blink, blink the whole time.
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314-15-9265
Taking a leak during a TV commercial is different, and here's why: Web sites usually get paid per banner impression. For every thousand banner ads that are loaded they get 50 cents or so (Slashdot probably gets more, smaller sites probably get less, but it's a lot less that the $2 and up that was obtainable just 6 months ago). If you block the banner ad, that website earns less revenue, because they have fewer banner impressions.
Going to the bathroom during a commercial break doesn't deny the TV station or network any revenue. TV ads are paid based on ratings of the shows, not "how many people saw the commercial".
Another thing i would like to see, is text only banners that inform me of a specific product and a mailto link for more information.
;-)
I am sick of reading something intresting in a banner only to discover that when i click the ad, i am thrown into a huge, bad designed website where i can't IMMEDIATELY find what i wanted to read about. So the mailto link would just send an email to a special account that would send me back a mail with information about the specific product (moreover i personally prefer reading text-only mail that a complete web page)
Of course the companies will start abusing these emails and when they do we will use the interesting proposed feature of voting the company ad down
Take an advert for a recruitment company as an example. The current trend would be to flash "Working late again", for about five seconds, then "Tired of working for a company that doesn't appreciate you?" for another few seconds, after a few of these it will flash the name of the company (a) for branding (b) so that a few people may even click on the link. Most people will not sit there and read the whole advert. Most will instantly recognise it as an advert and ignore it.
Imagine a text alternative. In a normal font/style: "Jo Bloggs Recruiting is a well established agency specialising in IT based jobs across the US. We will help you find the right job without pushing into something you don't want. Visit our website to view the jobs we currently have on offer. Jo Bloggs Recritment help funds slashdot."
I think I may well be tempted to follow that link if I was looking for the job and I lived in the US. Plus, for us, no more animated gifs, less annoying, less to download, text based adverts may even be useful. Just a thought.
You will forget this sig before you next see it
At one time, I tried banner ads.
Rather than taking me to to what they were advertising, they dropped me at the home page and expected me to be motivated enough to actually track down their offering.
Instead, I used search engines and tracked down the item for 30% less.
Now, I just ignore them. If they flash or flutter about, all the more reason to ignore them. At least on Yahoo, they (used to) go through one flashing rotation and then stop.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I think the seperate system described here is better - it's important to seperate church and state as they say; i.e. Slashdot has as little as possible to do with the adds.
That way, there's no point in advertisers trying to influence slashdot, etc.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
You're right about one thing. TV doesn't use clickthrough's or ad banners for it's advertising. Fortunately, I haven't seen too many sites that interrupt their content so that you can't see it for anywhere from a minute to 3 because you're looking at ads instead.
Of course someone will get the bright idea to do something like this with a flash animation that doesn't let you into more content until it's done. Just wait.
Having the system figure out what you like would be a waste of time. Just put a new section in the user preferences to select kinds of ads to view. Opera does this for their ad-ware browser, and it works just fine. My wife set up our copy at home to cover our combined interests as soon as she got into the prefs.
Constitutionally Correct
Exactly! If you know you're never going to respond to ads, it makes sense that you'll save the advertiser money if they don't have to deliver the ad to you. If the advertiser is smart, anyway...he should be paying the publisher a small rate for views and a higher rate for click-thrus. This is more of a gamble for the publisher, who will want to get a high CTR to break even, since views alone (at a lower rate) will not pay off as well...maybe not enough to cover his bandwidth costs.
I keep this link on my homepage for just such times as this. Go read it.
Constitutionally Correct
I think it would be great to be able to filter out specific ads I'm not interested in (rather than simply filtering the entire ad server like I usually do now), and I wouldn't mind giving feed back if I had time. I also think it would be much nicer to be able to select preferences and rate ads. I don't mind tasteful advertising at all. If it is helpful, then why should I?
I've seen a lot of people on this thread try and say that all advertising is useless or whatever. But really, how can you hear about a new product if you never see any advertising? Maybe you are thinking, "Well, I could use a new colocation company," so you go to exodus because you've heard of them. Never mind that there may be alternatives, since you pay no attention to advertising you don't know about them.
Maybe you would be interested in a product, but you don't even know it exists. Sure, sometimes you hear from a friend about something, from cars to construction to computers, but can you always find a friend who happens to be a new toothpaste marketing specialist to tell you about caff-o-brush caffeinated toothpaste? Probably not.
I also liked the idea mentioned earlier about being able to specify keywords to get targetting advertisements. eg, show me ads with the keywords "hard drive" since I'm about to buy a new one.
Even better, the ads should be SEARCHABLE in this fashion also. There should be a description of the product and the ad itself, so if I remember I was interested in an ad with boxing gloves, but I don't actually remember the product, I could say "show me ads with the keyword boxing gloves that are in the technology category" and viola I have the ad I was looking for.
-- Braeus Sabaco
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
We recently build an adserver that delivers ads to this site. I know that Engage are currently building user profiling into their Adbureau software - the problem is that no advertiser ever asks for it. The most a client ever asks is that we cap the number of impressions any user receives of a particular advert - but some advertisers even dispute whether this is counter-productive. Clients aren't asking for user profiling because they are already targeting the ads to the required level simply by choosing their list of websites that they advertise upon.
You made the comment that subscription fees and cover prices alone can't even come close to covering the cost of producing a magazine. I would like to employ a proof by contradiction to show that this statement is false. Mad Magazine has been producing monthly issues for decades, with no advertising at all in the magazines. The entire magazine, from cover to cover, is just content - no ads whatsoever. It is all completely funded by subscription fees and cover prices.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Actually, that's a pretty good idea. Make it so EVERY time you load that page, a special ad will come: It looks like a normal ad, but when you put your mouse over it, it tells you your email or a story from CNN. That way, they have to SEE the brand before using the ad.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
If anything, we should get some kind of compensation from slashdot, and I think no banner ads is a good tradeoff.
--
Free Mac Mini
This may work fine for the /.'rs or K5'rs out there that are willing to wade through a sea of links to get some ads turned off and such. I like the Karma idea though, but how would this be tracked on a per user basis and would people at that point not start screaming bloody murder about your tracking of what banner is shown on which system? Personally, I don't give a rats ass but others will. Or did I simply read this wrong in my effort to get first post? :D
Joe McGuire, tinfoil.music http://music.tinfoil.net
Joe McGuire
tinfoil.music
tinfoilmedia
Kurt, I like many of the ideas in your article. I also like many of DickBreath's suggestions. I will, however, add in a few of my own. I personally think it would be wonderful to be allowed to setup an account with the ad company. This will allow you to store your preferences and contact information on their server. Then have a cookie in their web browser to keep track of the users. This the ad company could get geographic details (just don't ask for too much) and get user feedback. The addvertisers would also be able to contact the users of new products and such if the user asked to be notified about future information or similar products by the advertiser. I do not however, like the advertiser to have my email address, and I would be cautious of the ad company having it. An account on the ad companies webpage would allow also allow you to fill out a questionaire about what you are interested in. Instead of saying that all slashdot people are interested in science, find out what the individual people are interested in. I cann't stress this enough. If more internet ads were of interest to me, I would stop ignoring them and pay more attention. Another sugestion I have is implementing a adbar as a feature which users have access to. This would allow them to navigate backwards and forwards through ads, rate them in interest (giving the ad company a better idea of what kinds of products the user likes. Ex: video cards, but not other types of hardware), not showing a particular add again, or bookmarking an ad for future viewing. Also allow the users to go to the ad companies website to view ads which are categorized. I will occasionally want to find a certian product (CD-R discs for example). This would be a good way to find out companies which sell similar items. Going back to the adbar and bookmarking, they can go to the ad companies webpage to view ads which they have bookmarked to look at later. This would allow me to finish reading that interesting article without having to open that 17th Opera window to hold the ad link for me to look at later. I personally don't think the message board and karma would work out. I don't agree with giving users prividges to the amount of ads displayed. Just allow the users to have access to additional features which will also benifit you in addition to the user. If you don't implement the message board and instead let you contact the advertiser, then that would cut down on "I hate this add" comments. And in the end if this doesn't cut it, allow users to pay you a subscription fee to you to not view ads. This way you get money, and don't make those people who wouldn't click be forced to see ads. How much money is it worth to let webpages load faster?
According to an ongoing poll on Slashdot 61% of readers think a day without ad banners is like a day without a rash!
Now why would you post this story knowing that?
it was peguin computing....the ad is still on the site
Ryan Singer
In general, I like the idea. I'd have to see it spelled out in specifics before I wave my green flag though. Anyone in sales will tell you that a top factor is the relationship with the customer. The current system does not permit one. Your ideas, good or bad, will be a step towards that. It's good to see someone engaging thier brain about this!
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
...Web advertizing is here to stay.
Anything that can be done to make it more useful, or at least less annoying, should be welcomed.
I like the idea of being able to provide feedback to the advertizers. If we don't have the ability to do that, how can we expect them to change?
I've been on the 'Net since 1987, so I know what it was like before the Web and all the commercial crap. In a lot of ways the 'Net has become much more useful, even though a lot of things have been lost in the process.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle, people. So, we might as well learn to work within the system to get the changes we want...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Bring it on.
I have to heartily agree. I don't like banner ads, but they form the basis for the economic model that allows me to post this comment on this site as we speak. So, at least until somebody figures out a way of keeping sites like /. alive and making Some Money (tm), I'll take them. OTOH, ads like the punch the monkey one should be terminated....
Now that we have someone suggesting an ad page where you can select ads to block, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out that this ad page could also serve as a place where users can find ads that they thought were interesting or enjoyable.
"Think before you post.
"Everybody knows what's best for you" - Bad Religion"
Oh, the irony.
"I don't doubt that users of such software as Junkbuster would be more than happy to steal the content just like they steal their music and software, but their behavior negatively affects those of us who do wish to play by the rules."
I dont like ads, so i block them with Junkbuster (and the blocklist at www.waldherr.org).
I like music, so i buy cds (mp3`s sound fucking terrible).
"blocking banner ads is stealing content"
What are you like mate?
"This is stupid. You all know that without banner ads, the web wouldn't be what it is today. "
Slow and bloated with loads of useless companies clogging up bandwith with animated gifs for their rubbish that people only click on by accident, or because they`ve made them look like windows controls? Yeah, where would we be without ads on the net! (At least if they replaced content, like on tv, you could go take a dump or skin up or something!)
We could have a banner ad appreciation week, with a parade were everyone would wear a nice hat shaped like a banner ad and then they could get an endorsment by the Backstreet Boys and print T-shirts that would say "It's OK to Suck!". Imagine all the possibilities....
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
My point: The real estate at the top of the screen is going to be filled with some sort of advertising anyhow. If I can exercise some sort of control over what ads I see, then great! Now, I can choose to filter all these ads out but I will miss ads like the ThinkGeek one. But if I know that the advertising is going to be of interest to me then the chance of a click-thru are higher and I feel better about the advertiser.
So from the article and the posts here, a few thumbs-up.
- Let me choose the type of ads I want to see.
- Let me ban an ad I hate.
- Let me mark an ad for later viewing
Just a few thoughts and re-interations. A good idea: anything that makes for a better and more friendly ad system, the better.This way the advertiser knows that the ads are being viewed by the exact demographic that are interested in their business.
The advertiser will soon work out which ads are annoying the audience and change 'em. Also, gives me more control - now I'll look at every ad and weigh up whether to kill it. I feel good, and the advertiser shows me the ad every time.
Mentioned by another reader, this is good. An interesting ad comes up, but I'm busy reading about how all my bases are now belonging to someone else. I click the "add the ad" button and I can view it later, when I'm less worked up.
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Move every "sig"
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Tarkwyn.
How about getting a life.
Upon cursory investigation it apeared that they used some poorly implemented threading code. It worked fine under windows, but it put the whammy on my Solaris NS every time.
The ONE problem that I have with banner ads is that they don't EVER advertise any sort of products that I am intrested in.
For instance, porn banners. Anybody who did any sort of research on my web habits would see that the only porn sites that I have ever been to are ones that banner's popped up in my face when I tried to close the banners window. I don't visit porn sites, so why are companies wasting their bandwidth delivering ads for porn sites?
I do not have any investments of any sorts in the stock market, why the hell am I getting ads for e*trade and such other types of services?
The answer of course is that Banner Ads are not targeted at individual people, but rather they are targeted at the visitors to web sites. Just because alot of system administrators visit Slashdot.org does not neccisarily mean that I am a system administrator. Even if I am one, it does not mean that I am the one in charge of making purchases for my company. Sorry to tell you guys, but all those banner's on Slashdot are doing you no good! In fact, I could care less about branding, hell, even if I *WANT* some product, I can't neccisarly AFFORD the product. Heck, almost everybody knows what a Ferrari is, great job of branding there, heh, but hardly anyone can actualy afford to purchase one!
Now then, I DO often visit Pricewatch.com. In fact I *AM* a systems assembler/purchase advisor. (basicaly it means that I get to spend other peoples money, but not corporate type money, heh). I am always looking for great new small companies to get supplies from. It just so happens that Banner ads offer NO help in this. In fact, I have to go and LOOK for a product myself, yet all the time while I am doing this, banner ads are flashing advertisments for OTHER TYPES of products that I *AM NOT INTRESTED IN*.
Do you see the connection here? I am MORE then willing to give up a tad wee little bit of privacy if in turn I can have a banner ad appear telling me where I can get the hottest deal product type XYZ. Heck, as it is right now banners are basicaly popping up things that are consistent from day to day (/. always has Linux product ads, its a guarnteed thing) but *I* am not consistent from day to day. Hell, one day I may be looking for Oni (I was yesterday in fact, in RealLife though, and couldn't find it.) and the next day searching around for a new book.
If I do a search for "Piers Anthony" in Google then there is NOT a *SINGLE* reason as to why a banner cannot appear at the top of my screen alerting me to a special discount that such-and-such.com is having on Fantasy books and that they just happen to have a few Piers Anthony books in stock, which the Ad companies records show that I have not purchased online yet. (They cannot know about my offline purchases of course.)
Now then, I may not be looking for a Piers Anthony book to buy right at that moment, but it is quite obvious to anybody with half a brain that I *AM* looking up some sort of data on Piers Anthony and that from the ad companies perspective I have been known to buy his books in the past, so there is a damn good chance that if they DO show me a _REALLY_ great deal on one of his books, that I will indeed go out and buy it at that moment.
Grocery stores have been doing this for ages now, in fact it is quite a common activity. From almost the second that you step in the store you are lead along a path of product. When you are in the meat section getting sausauge, you are also shown that there is a sale on Lean Ham. It is quite obvious that you are out there purchasing meat, and more often then not, if the sale is good enough, you will indeed also purchase a piece of Lean Ham. In fact you actualy are more then happy to have this happen. After all, the store had to put the product on special to encourage you to buy it in an impulsive manner. So in the end you saved money. The store has made a sale that they might not otherwise have made, so they are happy too. The only problem is that of all the attempts of implementing such a system online, they have all failed.
When you do a search on almost any major search engine, it will ask you if you want to try that search at "Barns and Noble.com" or "Amazon.com" or who ever the search engine has signed their contract with.
Now marketers, I know that you are *not* the smartest people out there, but come on already. Do you REALLY THINK that I am going to interupt my search to please YOU? Hell, if I wanted a book I WOULD HAVE WENT TO BARNESANDNOBLE.COM IN THE FIRST PLACE! Yah really, takes rocket science to figure that one out doesn't it? When I want to look up a word I go to dictionary.com, I don't even try to use Askjeeves or such (well, any more, used to, but I quickly learned differently).
I guess what I am trying to say is that banner ads need to learn to embrace the consumers wishs and desires, and work for and help out the consumer, as opposed to just being another visual obstruction on the Internet.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
It feels good seeing that there is finally an advertiser that cares even a little bit about his audience. My vote is yes, I would be more than happy to cooperate with such a system.
You guarantee that we only get the ads we want, and we'll bring you some money!.
-b
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I know that I hate banner ads as does everyone else. The fact of the matter is, someone has to pay the bills. Many people have said that Banners don't do any good (as was mentione in the article). I almost never click on these ads, in fact probably clicked on one in the years I have been searching the net. But, I do know there have been times when I need to look into purchasing an item and I didn't know where to go. Then I remembered that banner ad that my eye happened to catch and bang, I'm searching for the web site and usually buying. Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but for a hick turned network engineer, they aren't really that bad, and they have even helped me on occasion. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I think the important point is to let the users determine what categories of ads they will see. If the user is shopping for a specific item then ads about that will be much more successful.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
Also, if any of these ideas are implemented, then it's obvious that user profiles will be kept by OSDN. I would want assurance that information on me and what specific ads I look at is not sold to sponsors. Keeping demographics on which specific ads are popular or not is fine, as is keeping track of which type of ads I like.
This would truly be shopping through advertising, something the advertisers wish people did more often.
/. what I was in the market for all the time. I want a new monitor, a RAID controller and FRS Radios. Then I could be reading slashdot and be shopping at the same time. The nice thing about this, is that I'd be really paying attention to the ads cause I'd be looking for ads for products I'm shopping for. If /. snuck in some ads that aren't part of my preferences I'd have to look at them cause I'm gonna think they might be for the items I said I was looking for.
CJ allows merchants to upload a DB of product/service offerings. If merchants could upload a template for a banner ad, that filled in the text and price or other info for a particular product based on user preferences... that would be very keen.
I think I would tell
- I can see that you need ads to afford to run this site (which I want also)
- I absolutely hate some ads
- I like some ads
The overall affect that this has on me is that I ignore banner ads, or become frustrated at some of them - generally because I have no interest in them (e.g. American ADSL when I like in the UK) or flashing (or equivalent) ads. Some ads I actually like seeing (such as the ThinkGeek ones) - and I will click through on them and consider what they're offering. How do we reconcile these two extremes? We all already know the answer, directed advertising should keep everyone happy - I should see what I want to see, and the advertiser should be happy because I'll buy their product. So I'm all for increasing my control over what I see - and yes - the advertisers should be in favour of that too... In fact, this should be an internet global system... so for instance I don't like pr0n banners, and I never click on them (in fact they often disgust me) so why bother showing me them? I would have concerns over who holds my preferences - and any other data about me, and also how much that can be related back to me as a person. Why do I like so many people feel like this? Essentially we don't trust those big companies who misuse our data and use it to target us with stuff we don't want. If you want my opinions, want to store more data about me, and want me to choose what I see - thats more power to me - and you've got my vote. -Robbut then, I use iCab... and it has the best feature set of any browser.
"Do you realize that Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot that..." yeah, i am dreadfully concerned about my precious bodily fluids so i drink Bourbon and branch water, why don't you
Microsoft would NEVER be able to post ads on SlashDot with this system.
Banner ads can be interactive. Flash ads are appearing in places.
Tv ads are just there.
How many times have you rung up a number or mailed an address that you saw on the TV?
Banner ads can be removed with filters.
The TV channel can be changed.
Banner ads lead to much better targetting of an audience than TV. /. wont show ads for knitting machines. I imagine. Whereas it does show techie stuff.
At the end of the day banner ads are now more evil than TV ads. JM
If they merely ignore us, we'll end up with the inet equivalent of Dilbert.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Back before I moved to Lynx, I had images disabled in Netscrape. "Onvia.com. Work. Wisely." is probably the most effective ad I saw, because all the others were "Click Here!"
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
1. Implement an option ad targeting system that can track preferences without compromising privacy. How to do this - set up a sign up system at OSDN where you can pick a passworded user name and select your preferences without having to give any "real world" information. Include an e-mail address accessable by web browser so if you want more information, the advertiser can send it to that address - not to my regular e-mail. Allow one e-mail per request - no spam, even if it is an ad e-mail address.
2. Along with the traditional click through, provide an option to have more information e-mailed to you at the e-mail address detailed above. The address could be accessed by a cookie, so all you need do is click and go on about your browsing. This allows one to get information that can be viewed at a later time. There have been times when something looks interesting, but I currently do not have time to persue it.
3. Advertiser indexes. There are many times that an item pops up that I have no interest in now, but later the need suddenly develops. Allow "click through" from the index. That way /. gets credit for me buying something through advertiser X, even if the I didn't use the pop-up at the time.
4. Allow for ad preferences. The "shoot/punch/tranmorgify" the monkey ad was cute the first time, but after that it became annoying. Allow me to get rid of it and see something new or different.
Beware of Sleestak
You Amreicans
Is that a Bushism? I couldn't find it on Slate.
--
Freeper Logic
It should be dead simple to use - like a little +1 and -1 box to rate annoyance/approval of an ad - annoyance rating also should permanently get rid of the ad (acting as a small reward as well). You'd only have a few points to start with (say, three)
If you use up your points regulary, you'd get a higher number (say, up to ten, twenty?) giving you a little more power to ban annoying ads forever from your life.
As far as other karma awards, about the only thing I can think of is coupons off sites you've actually clicked through to
As far as trust registering goes: Assume no trust and no registering - you'd get a cookie or something similary no-effort that ID's you and that's it on the minimal level. That's about where I'd be. I can't comment for anyone with enough time to actually go fill out a banner-server's survey as far as what would work for them.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Dear Mr. Grey,
If the "upload your own ad" thing does go through, how do you anticipate handling that? You've indicated that it might possibly be in reward for ad karma gained (if THAT goes into effect). What I'm curious about is, given the competitiveness in the ad market at present, how could you justify loading the ad que with banners who's owners paid nothing to have them there? And if you've instead decided to charge them for the privilidge, how is this a reward, and how does it differ from being a regular, paying, ad customer?
Respectfully yours,
Akardam
You'd be the same as a regular customer, but you'd be earning the credit towards putting ads up in a different way - not just dollars and cents.
If that's the case, have you discussed what those different ways might be? Things that occur right off the top of my head are, for example, prime ad placing. But that argues some sort of ad targeting regime. I could be missing something, but it seems to my (insert "soggy, only 6:30am brain") can't find any other way that it could work.
Akardam Out
There I said it. There is a big difference between willingly specifying the ads you want to recieve, your locale, etc. and having the information gathered without your knowlege or consent.
As much as people want adverts to go away without having to resort to blocking software, they wont. Ads as a business model does suck, but they do help pay for some sites.
Ads on the web are a necessary evil, like on TV. However, there are greater and lesser evils.
So, props to the guy for trying to deal with the issue in an open and honest matter. I for one would register interest/locale with ODSN, provided that the data is only used for demographic purposes - and nothing else. I think that being able to have a degree of control over the ads I get served is a good idea. Specifically, voting on ads suckiness, banishing some ("FAWKING DSL" et al) forever, and voluntarily registering my interests.
In addition - why must ads be images? The ad-space would be much better taken up (in my view) with links to "coming soon", "download now!" + feature summary or whatever - rather than crap obviously created by people who wouldn't know good animation if it hit them over the head with a sauce-pan and ran in to a mouse-hole.
Targeted advertising is actually pretty cool; I use Altavista as a search engine, and they target ads based on search criteria; occasionally the ad shows what I'm looking for faster than the actual search results. And even when it's not exactly what I'm looking for, at least it shows more interesting things than that nasty monkey banner. With the OSDN sites, it would have to be preference-page based, because there's no other easy place to get input (unless the ad system was hooked up to check what kind of articles you click-through/post to and based ads off of that?). However, I would much prefer to look at ads that are interesting. I also _really_ like the idea of being able to post comments on ads; there are some that could really use improvement, and the advertisers just haven't done their research. Re: Ad karma, I'd be willing to put up with bigger/more active ads just for the ability to "turn off" the offending ones. If I never have to see another porn banner, I'd be happy. --Yostinso
--Yostinso--
I guess that's what you get for submitting something at the time that Slashdot goes on the blink for a few minutes. It would be nice to at least cancel your own posts, but....
*Sigh*
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I could be interested in a subscription for other reasons, such as keeping the site running. But if the only reason for the subscription is to get something I already have, well....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
One thing that might get me to look at ads is if they ever contained something I was interested in. Unfortunately, since ads cost money, only companies buy ads, so that is what I'm stuck looking (or rather, ignoring).
Why not set aside a certain percentage of ads (say 5%, 10%) to give away to charitable causes, like open source software. It would break the monotony if every once in a while you saw an ad for PHP or KDE or Apache or something.
However, I don't need 50pt text to read adds, I use 10pt for the main content which I can read just fine. Any movement in the adds distracts my eyes giving me a headache when I'm trying to read the more important content.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
Or maybe a "Save this ad for later" feature. Then when you log in to the ad system you'd have to option of viewing (and deleteing) your saved ads as well as changing your user preferences.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Does anybody remember eBay and AOL conveniently resetting user preferences behind their backs?
What's to stop the ad agencies from doing the same?
If I can't trust the world's largest e-marketer to keep my preferences where I want them, how can I trust anybody else to do the same?
Filters are still the best solution.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
What a shame.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
A way that I can click on a banner, have it send me, via email, more information, so I can read it later. Registered users of OSDN sites with their email address on file would be given that option.
:(
I don't want every advertiser to have my email address tho. I want OSDN to be the intermediary - have THEM email me more detailed info about the ad I clicked on. Popups would be an alternative, but I HATE having my reading interrupted. I have enough distractions already.
creation science book
On the UI side of things, work on integration. If you have a 468x60 banner at the top of every page, they're more likely to get scrolled past. Consider interstitials (general comment, might not be a good idea for OSDN) for high dollar partnerships where the content contained therein may be targeted specificly to a qualified consumer (and for goodness sake, preload the content - who doesn't close the window immediately rather than wait for the content to fill in?).
Note: I've been using the Internet for a long time, and I still glance at ad banners. I even click them from time to time. The problem is, I rarely see one that interests me.
cha-ching.
> Is it also immoral to get up to take a leak during a television commercial? Or to use "technological means" to flip to another station?
The main difference between web ads and a television commercial is that the tv commercial has already been paid for. Slashdot, or most any other site, don't get paid for showing ads unless people look/clickthrough/whatever. So if you don't look at the ads, the website you patronize for free doesn't get paid, and you don't get to read it anymore when they go under. Just imagine what would happen if viewers had to watch a commercial for NBC to get paid. And you think not being able to skip ads on DVDs is annoying...
So the ultimate ad would be 1x1 pixel pornography which you would get paid $1 for viewing, except that it's filterred out?
My god... I'm using Lynx right now as I currently don't havea graphical text browser.
Guess that means I'm even worse than Satan's spawn as I don't even have the ability to turn banner ads on.
I feel so....evil....now.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
It just seems like creating an account and being openly tracked by the ad companies seems like a REALLY bad idea. Yeah, it is done to some extent today, but imagine how much easier it would be if people willing cooperated with it! Sure, you could turn off a certain ad, but now with that personalized information what other information would you be bombarded with. And if you created an account, your email would most likely be linked to it also...
It's your ball, and you can dictate which game your going to play,
but don't be surprised when the other kids decide to play hopscotch instead.
That's all well and good, but trying to make up the rules as you go along is madness. You can't run a website (aka a business) the way you might play Calvinball. It just doesn't work.
Mercata tried that, and now they're out of business.
John
The drops of water don't know themselves to be a river; and yet the river flows.
I agree completely. I don't have a problem with ads, generally. Somebody has to pay for all this stuff and I try not to let it be me any more than I am willing to participate in. And sometimes I find interesting things in ads.
I do have a rather large problem with ads that cause my page to reload constantly, set a million cookies, complain that I don't have XyzPlugin installed, pop up windows over what I am trying to read or make me ill with shiny flashy things.
So I don't load images at all so I don't have to look at annoying shiny flashy things, and turn off javascript so I can read without annoying popups filling up my screen.
You would think that with all the possible browers and configurations, web advertisers would at least consider alt text, in the same way that tv ad folks think about how it will look with the sound off and soforth.
On this very page I am writing this message in right now, there is a banner ad. And it has alt text! That is amazing. But what does it say? "Please click here." Now *that* makes me want to take a look, oh yes.
Nethack still requires a direct line for ranged attacks? That sucks - Angband fixed that years ago.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I'd continue to click on interesting banners, and filter stupid ones with this new model. I wouldn't whore AdKarma(c) for the sake of new options -- but if I I knew it could get a /. shirt out of it, I would be a little bit more inclined to check out some of the ads.
After my first Ad-Generated slashdot shirt came in the mail, I'd be an AdKarma Whore(c). Sort of like when the dealer gives someone that first line/rock/whatever - "The first one's always free."
But to tell someone to view xxx number of ads in order to quit seeing them is oxymoronic.
Crystalize your tears, dried upon The Cross
Blood drips on your pain, time to ride The Light
Crystalize your tears, dried upon The Cross
Blood drips on your pain, time to ride The Light
As soon as Mozilla 0.9 comes out with the UI for enabling this released, expect to see a lot more use of the feature. I may decide to experiment with it a little. Currently, I have animations set to "none", so I do not see anything at all in the ad space. I will try setting it to "once" and see what effect that has. Basically, I expect to have to wait longer (loading all frames vs. loading only the first frame). Probably the ad will remain motionless at the top.
This does affect my previous comment about collecting your banners in a page for easy browsing. I think that is still useful, but if more people take up the idea of controlling animation inside the browser, it will affect the ad-page display. I really do want to be able to find useful ads collected in one place, but loading that page would be hell on bandwidth if everything was animated. When I want to go back and find a specific ad to click on, I don't want to wait forever for every single ad to load its stupid boxing tux or whatever.
So, if Moz-based browsers take over the world, or if IE contains any of these ad-busting features, then advertisers will really have to re-think their methods. I find ads occasionally useful, but I prefer to be able to browse the ads at my liesure, rather than interrupting my surfing to click through. Find a way to present ads so I can mentally note the interesting ones, then give me a way to easily come back later and click-through on only the interesting ads when I am in the mood for shopping.
I can envisage banner ads changing a little as time goes by.. say, three buttons on each side to "control" the adverts that are delivered to you. Each 'consumer' can have a profile which basically says which ads they like, don't like, and so on. For the consumer, it's ideal - only the 'right' ads will get shown, and being able to turn them off would be wonderful. For the advertisers, it's a dream come true - people build up their *own* demographic profile for you - a simple database query, and you can figure out how many people on Freshmeat like ThinkGeek compared to the number on Slashdot that are interested in GNU/Linux-based hosting.
This, of course, would allow each site to have an 'average profile', based on what its visitors think are the better/more preferred ads - what's nice about this, from a consumer point of view, is that you're not bombarded with the same adverts time after time when you surf between the different OSDN sites.
IMHO, this could be very cool stuff. And I hate banner ads. Normally. ;)
What I want to know is, who moderated him up to 5?
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
I, for one, refuse to click on any link on the web if the link is
* obfuscated.
* too complex to figure out where it goes.
All ads in my experience fall into one of these categories.
In my experience, people only ever try to deliberately confuse you when they don't want you to see them screw you over. Sorry, not interested. Thus, I do not click on any ads, ever. I like to KNOW, not guess, where that link will take me.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
It is the single worst ad I have ever seen on the web, bar none (been online only 4 years though, so maybe there was something worse before my time ;). Then those flashing ads for miniature webcams you find on porn sites are #2 (God, they get under my skin). The "optimize your connection" ads are only #3.
Whoever came up with "Shock the Monkey" deserves to be tied down and killed slowly with an electric cattle prod.
Can anyone tell me what this ad is even SELLING? Does it sell ANYTHING? Or are they just deliberately wasting my bandwidth on an insipid little java game I don't even want? All this ad does is waste the bandwidth to download it and then hog all my limited system resources as it tracks my mouse. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find it was created by the makers of Tylenol because people weren't getting ENOUGH headaches as it was.
Grrrr!
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Interactive, or as George W. would say "Interactivfulness"
Here's a few scenerios...
I goof on Dubya's enunciation problems as much as anyone, but I try to avoid grammatical errors as I'm doing it.
The "pledge drive" model won't work here. It works for PBS because they are non-profit and therefore a tax deduction . We are talking about a for-profit (well, hopefully!) corporation here.
Some of the other ideas may work, but not this one!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
my daily taste of what i want changes without notice, even to me!
so, if you are going to keep track of what i'm going to be bombarded with,
then could you at least allow me the access of what adds i'm willing to see, and not see?
thannnnnnnnnnnnnnnks
Tell advertisers what you want? Why would I waste my time? My time is limited, and I certainly don't have any time to 'tailor' my ads to my own taste. As a previous poster said, let the ad companies do it. They do a good job of it, because the better they do, the more money they make. Let the advertisers find me. If they can offer me a product or service I'm interested in, I'll buy. Otherwise I won't. It's very simple.
See, this is what it's all about. Start off completely rational ("ads pay for content"). Add a hidden premise ("ads are mandatory"). Then end up with a totally bizarre conclusion ("blocking ads is stealing") that just enough crazies believe in that they carry the discussion for you. Nice!
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Businesses make money by having a product or service. What is Slashdot's product?
News? No, that's submitted by readers. Plus, there's precious little actual NEWS here--a couple of big industry stories, a bunch of OS-specific stuff and all the rest is nanobots.
The editorial writeup? I include this only for the humor value.
The comment system? Sure, that's a product--but it's also a commodity. Hundreds of sites provide the same service....for free. Can't beat that with a stick.
No, your only product was a sense of community. I say "was" because there's precious little of that now. Some will blame this on the influx of trolls, but I point the causal arrow the other direction. The trolls are a symptom, not a cause. In any case, no one will pay for the sense of community--that's an oxymoron.
I was going to end this post with a comment about "so many other sites provide this stuff for free because of the owner's passion" but that will just degrade into a useless "Taco gotta eat" discussion. I'll just leave the above alone and let people try to find a flaw in the logic that, no matter how much they want or need to make money, they can't.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
You may be missing the point. For instance, in the case of:
My point is that while it's not like getting a paycheck, it could help some of us small fish save some $$ on things we'd have to shell out for under different circumstances.
Anyway, I'm not fond of ads myself, but the idea of have so-called 'smart' ads is much better than just having ads shoved down your throat without a way to stop it other than zapping all ads. Advertising is a double-edged sword, because while it provides info about available products and services, it's also viral, annoying and sometimes downright intrusive. If allowing user feedback cuts back on advertisers wasting my time, I'm all for it.
-- "I'll be posting more crap soon, I swear!"
-- "I'll be posting more crap soon, I swear!"
www.dynamanga.net
At first I also just blocked ads because they constantly flashed in my face (and still do when running netscape on linux) but for IE I have a simpler method. I go into tools->internet options->advanced and click off play animations and play videos. Some regular pictures on the internet don't look right but hey- I get most stuff, and I am really just looking to read content.
Now the new thing where windows pop up out of nowhere pisses me off to no end. I have disabled java script due to that one. I consider it an invasion of privacy when a website starts opening up stuff on my desktop that I did not ask for or give permission to do so.
If someone knows a way to kill the pop up window without killing java script, I am all ears!
I miss the Karma Whores.
People keep talking about how /. karma has no value. It always makes me want to open a store just so that I can offer a discount to /.ers w/ high karma.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
I also enjoy targeted ads that are clever. My current favorite is the one where the power goes off on a CA based server :-) (The ad offers a discount on moving to a TX server.)
I don't read the newspaper for that reason. That, by the way, nearly pays for my internet access.
All I'm saying is that in the grand scheme of things, slashdot is not worth more than a few bux a year.
I mean, I go months without looking at it.
I would rather pay $25 bux for a nice dinner than pay for slashdot for 10 years. You figure it out.
Also, as to my response, check earlier in the posting, there's a longer, more detailed version.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Essentially, Slashdot is trying to make money from readers, in order to pay for operations.
I think it's a worthy goal, but,
If I want to buy a mouse, I go to my local dealer.
If I want a car I go to my local dealer.
If I want a box of cereal, I go to my local dealer.
I even go to the local bookstore to buy a book. Don't take me wrong, I like Amazon and stuff, but I like to take it out of the shelf, leaf through it, read the chapter headings, some text, and decide if I like it. At that point, I can pay for it, and presto, I am at the coffee shop next door, reading my new book, sipping on some latté.
So, I just absolutely ignore the ads. I mean, I don't even know they are there. I think of them as the back arrow on my toolbar. Ever since I use ALT left-arrow, I just tune it out completely. It's sort of like breathing. If I feel like controlling my breathing, I can, but no more than a few minutes, and you know what, I go months without doing it...
Now, there are a few things I like to look at (besides Porn-which I don't pay for). They are:
And that's it.
Would I pay for anything on the net? No.
Would I stop going to a web site because it annoyed me with just too many ads, bad content, and tried to charge me? You bet.
OK. So what would I pay for?
I recently paid 2 bux to http://www.useit.com/ via the amazon micropayment thingy because I really like what the man has to say. I even bought his $45 book (again, at my local store).
Why?
Content.
That's all.
As far as having to pay for bandwith, I disagree. Make your site cleaner, meaning, keep your HTML as close to W3 recommended style as possible, have zero graphics (that'll really chafe Adobe), and get rid of all fancy design. In my opinion, a page that needs more than 25k is being wasteful somewhere.
On the ad thing, I would prefer a hyperlink and a description, sort of like: Visit www.somesponsor.com and learn about the new gizmo to anything else.
Remember, if I want to get bombarded with ads, I go to the supermarket or the mall. I use the web to learn, not be treated like a sheep. Bleeehhh.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Just exactly how does it help slashdot to put ad huge giant blinking ad at the top of every page?
They need money, true. They need money to buy more bandwidth to server more ads... Humm.
Ok. What if I consider the value of slashdot to me to be to the tune of $3 per year? How do I pay that? Do I make monthly payments of $0.4? Do I make a lump sum payment of $3? Do I negate that three bux because they subjected me to the flashing demons at the top who want to sell me overpriced junk?
"Piter, too, is dead."
Just a thought
"Piter, too, is dead."
yeah ... right ;)
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
The ability for a user to turn off ads they don't like would be a major step forward in online advertising. Not only do I now have to put up with rubbish 100 frame gifs which eat up my bandwidth and mentally scar me for life, but tracking this info also tells advertising companies that they're ads suck and they need to work harder (or not so hard, in some cases ;)
He only sez that when he posts anonymously.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
What bothers me most about banner ads (apart from those who trick you into thinking they're interactive when they're not) is the lack of targetting. True, many sites ask you for your favorite topics when you login, but most people just leave everything unchecked for the fear of being spammed to death. There could be something like a cookie all sites could read which contained your preferences for ads. This cookie would be only writable by you. This way sites wouldnt have to ask you everytime you logged to a new site, and you wouldn't need giving your e-mail address, and the possibility of being spammed would be reduced. As for the points system it would be very difficult to avoid having someone taking advantage of it (Ad Karma whores?)
User interaction will give people more sense of control which usually translates into more acceptance, even if people never exercise control. Banner adds are done to us. Changing that relationship might help. For low bandwidth users, for example, if they could tell the system their parameters and the add system would actually pick the text version, smaller version, etc, then one objection goes away.
If you had the option of a subscription that would turn off adds for you, would you take it?
-1, I already saw this on Kuro5hin.
Ads on other sites seem to run through some predetermined list based on an overall demographic of site users. Most of the ads don't interest me and I just filter them out with Proxomitron.
On the other hand, if I could choose the type of ads to receive and the range of products for which I would be interested in seeing ads, then I would want to view those ads.
Ads can be a link to useful and interesting information and the ability to let users select useful ads out of all the noise would be a marvelous benefit to this site.
How about a "Punch the guy who wrote the 'punch the monkey'" ad? Now THAT I'd click!
Its what prevents you from developing a real civilised culture
1) "Its" is being used improperly. Try "it is" or "it's".
2) The word "civilised" [sic] is properly spelled "civilized".
All your grammar are belong to me!!
Why does an banner ad company need to use cookies, etc. to track the ads that I as an individual look at? seems like an overly complex solution.
If ads had a This sucks button, and if banner companies know the page the ad is being displayed on - shouldn't that be enough? Isn't this generally how TV / printed media ads work? Eventually the advertising agents will figure out that advertising tampons during a monster truck show isn't a good idea. If banner ad companies track the ads that suck on a given page that should be plenty of 'demographic' information.
In short, track the ads that are not filtered, and are not flagged as ones that suck and correlate that to the web page (or site if the page content varies to much). Technically simple solution, alleviates privacy concerns and gathers a lot of useful information about the types of ads that are useful.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
"Smart ads", I like it. Many of the ads spammed at me miss the mark WILDLY, but the ones that DO interest me, I don't mind at all. That's how I found Linux. And I've got a lot of bookmarks I found through good banners. My wallet is open - if you know how to sell me.
I guess my claim to fame is spending way over $5000 on Linux / BSD / BeOS books, CD's, donations, and other stuff. I'm not an idiot, I'm just willing to pay for my freedom from you-know-who and support something better. And if your banner ad has Pamela Anderson offering me a Linux bathmat, I'm reaching for my VISA.
I'm sorry, but innovations of the internet are DEAD! Dead because the end user and advertiser has way too much control over everything. This isn't so with television and radio. There's no way for people to "filter" out ads, or measure exact click-thrus, or ignore the ads effectivly.
But look what has happened as a result. Massive amounts of money can be made with tv and radio, and thus you have innovation in special effects, professionalism, entertainment, etc...
Not so with the internet. Back a year ago indeed it was truly innovative. People were coming up with new ways of doing things all the time. But look at now... because the very audience that benefits from the web are too stingy to respond to ads, use programs to filter out banners while leeching information from the websites that spent a long time creating content, privacy paranoia, etc...
All the while the advertisers forget about the benefits of branding, and want to measure everything in terms of click-thrus. Yeah right when was the last time you clicked through a Coke ad on tv? Sometimes these things don't work until later on when you have to make a decision. That's where the true power of advertising is in, not those measly click-thrus. Besides, if an advertiser made a banner that was un-attractive, so the website hosting it be responsible for the poor performance of it? I think not.
So there you have it folks. The internet is DOOMED by the very people it benefits. Nobody wants to spend money online. They don't want to click on banners. All they want are free stuff like Napster music. I'm telling you. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be innovating anymore. You see pets.com disappear, free internet access providers close down, content sites go broke, and innovation goes to hell.
So tell me, are you all happy? Good because it's gonna get a lot worse. The internet in 5 years will be worse than it is today. The total amount of useful websites will deminish greatly. Sad but true. The internet will never be like television. Instead it'll always be like channel 58, where bad reception is the norm, and good content will be harder to find.
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Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
Well, for starters, we wouldn't have free services like AltaVista or Yahoo!, because they rely on banner revenue for the majority of their income. Hell, I don't even think that Slashdot would be here if it weren't for banners, because they couldn't afford to pay for hosting and other such expenses (or, in VA's case, they couldn't justify the expense).
Think before you post.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Well, for starters, you would have to pay for most sites. How else do you think a ton of websites can justify the expense of maintainence? Imagine having to pay for something like a search engine, which have a huge cost of maintainence (for running the databases and such).
Is your company running tools written by ma
This is stupid. You all know that without banner ads, the web wouldn't be what it is today. You wouldn't have all these free services like SourceForge or search engines if they weren't able to pay for their bandwidth and equipment expenses somehow.
Personally, I think that no one here who has used a free internet service has a right to complain about banners in any form, because there is NO such thing as a free lunch. If you want to get something for "free," you will have to give something back.
I think this attitude should ideally be present in most of the people here, since the GNU GPL holds the ideal that if someone uses your code, they will have to keep their changes open, so that they are contributing something back to the community. Ergo, they don't get a free lunch.
So, stop whining.
Is your company running tools written by ma
GGenerally, I tend to buy things that are not
advertised. The more I see an ad, the more
irritated I become, and the less likely I am
to buy a given product. Commercialism has driven
me to become an anti-consumer.
I have some reasons for this. The ads are
redundant, and many of them are aimed at
the 'typical' person. And they irritate me
a little bit. Say, for the sake of argument,
you see an ad several thousand times and it
irritates you a little bit the first time.
How do you feel about it the hundredth time,
or the thousandth time?
Well to the point. I occasionally click on
a banner that is not to blaring, is correctly
demographed (is that a word?), is interesting,
and has not been overly done. If this system
can cut down on the redundant ads, and make
them more demographically appropriate, I am
all for them. (being a realist, and knowing that
commercialism is here to stay, i will settle for
trying to improve the quality)
my 2{/hit}
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum?
I think that's an outstanding idea. Slashdot is, after all, a forum for discussion. The number of comments posted here shows that we like to share information and opinions. The advertisers would benefit from the feedback: a bad banner would be flamed and (hopefully) fixed, and a successful ad would generate a productive discussion of the product or service.
"Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security."
Most of the time I ignore banner ads that don't interest me, but (advertisers& webmasters write this down) I have actually stopped visiting sites because of banner ads. In one case, the flashing was so annoying I didn't want it on my screen, and in another, I didn't want the risque girlie pictures in the ads on my screen at work. Those sites wouldn't have lost me as a visitor if I could have turned off those ads.
And don't tell me about the programs I could have loaded to shut off the banner ads-- I actually look at banner ads, and I've bought products because of them. I dislike banners that don't explain what they're selling, but good relevant banners actually bring value to a site.
What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see?
That depends entirely on the site and how much I trust them. Amazon.com knows a lot about me. I like their policies and I've been a customer for years. I don't know you from a hole in the ground. Why should I share my private demographic information with you without knowing who you'll sell it to?
As you accumulate karma points in our ad system...
While a karma-based system would work on a gearhead site like slashdot, it would be hopeless for mainstream sites where the users are lucky if they can enter a boolean search correctly.
This concept would require a lot of thought and a lot of work to make it cheat-proof, and I'm not sure the benefit is there.
One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!
Just strain the food through that metal colander you're wearing on your head: it does wonders. And you wouldn't want the trolls to leave! Just as chili powder, paprika, and cilantro add flavor to your food, trolls add flavor to a discussion forum. It's the people who don't know how to deal with trolls that get annoying. Besides, think how much better Linux would be if Microsoft took it over, and how many fewer bugs there'd be if every new baby in the country was issued a handgun and a once-per-lifetime "get out of jail for shooting a programmer who failed to test and document his braindead kludge" card.
Geez...it is hard for me to believe that advertising works on intelligent people. I don't buy anything without checking its value in terms of price, quality, and availability. My decision to buy one brand or another is based soley on those criteria.
__________________ Hey Moderators!! Fuck Off! Thanks.
Anyway, for more information on what is wrong with your country see here and here
Enjoy, USA-boy, safe in the knowledge that the rest of the world thinks you are a bunch of polluting, arrogant, moneygrabbing morons.
However, I am afraid you have made yourself look rather foolish, since civilsed is spelled like I originally spelled it. You Amreicans have put 'z''s in many words which are correctly spelled with an 's'. It is one of your more irritating habits.
Please do not bother linking to dictionary.com since I know how to spell the English language, since I am ENGLISH.
In Britian, we do not see the need to turn every free surface into an advertisement hoarding, or to pollute the sides of our roads with thousands of glowing neon signs (we think about the environment).
So when thinking about banner ads, it is very clear it is the American culture of placing a dollar value on absolutely everything, and never stopping to think about true values (integrity, honesty, etc) that is to blame.
For once you Americans should try, just try to think about life in terms other than dollars and cents. Its what prevents you from developing a real civilised culture, as opposed to the 'MTV McDisney' culture you have at the present time.
I would be willing to give up marginal, read MARGINAL profile information to get targetted ads. And if those targetted ads suck or don't interest me, or are for services I can't buy right away, i will dump the ad service, like pronto.
If you are only willing to give up _marginal_ profile information, only expect to receive _marginally_ on target advertising. Simple logic.
The other extreme would be: "Hello Dave, I noticed you just ran out of TP. After a careful genetic analysis of your ass-tissue makeup, may I suggest switching to Squeezin' the Charmin? Some privacy? I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
Slashdot: rejecting tech news in favor of rubber band guns since 1997.
What this article discusses changes the whole dynamic of advertizing; the reason ads are annoying is becuase you are inundated with information you don't wan't, you don't like, and that you didn't ask for.
If you could control what ads you were presented with, they would be more constructive than bothersome.
----- PPP
:because there is NO such thing as a free lunch
What about at Soup Kitchens?
----- PPP
I don't think it is such a bad idea.
;-)
I personally would love the ability to advertise some of my open-source projects, rants, etc. on sites such as Slashdot or Freshmeat.
The problem here is that most ads people like myself would upload would suck and probably not be the sort of thing OSDN would want on their sites (well.. not my ads specifically... because mine would be so keen!
In order for something like that to work, there would have to be some sort of reviewing process for the ads.
How about a community review?
Comment forums for each ad banner
I really do like this suggestion, especially on sites such as the OSDN ones where the audience is so specialized.
And I like the idea of being able to give feedback on advertisements. Traditionally, ads are forced down my throat (unless I filter them) without me having any ability to give my input on them. I would love to be able to tell those that make horrible ads that they bug the hell out of me, or tell those that make good ads that I have gained an interest in their products because of it.
Truthfully, I find that I take the ads I see on the OSDN sites more seriously than ads I find on other sites, simply because they deal with things I am interested in or directly concern me.
Turning off annoying ads
This is also where the ad forum site could come in handy. I know that I would be visitting a site like this regularily to turn off those ads I can't stand seeing (what's the deal with the one with the BIG FAT GUYS ASS?)
Choice of ad topics and categories Not that I particularily like being targetted for advertising.... I'd still love to be able to not have to see ads for products/services I don't want.
The problem with modification of the Slash source code would be that this sort of change may leave a bad taste in many open-source developer's mouths (since Slash is open-source, afterall).
But I do agree that a hybrid aproach may work. The vast majority of uses (I suspect) would opt not to pay (since the vast majority of Slashdot readers do not really even participate in these forums!)... so they would not be able to base much of their revenue on subscriptions. But, as an extra bonus... it should work.
Now this is a good idea. Not much money making involved (I wouldn't imagine) but it would be something pretty kewl nonetheless.
>I had a similar experience with a Sun Microsystems ad
Freestyle did that one also. 8) The Sun campaign is long gone but the game can still be played at URL:
http://www.freestyleinteractive.com/clients/sun/
Karim
A secret of the advertising world is that 50% of all advertising is wasted. But nobody knows which 50% ! So they keep buying So internet advertising, suffers from too much information. You know exactly which adds dont work on the internet. And getting even more info using this rewards systems, may only make the problem worst Also, targetting can be done without asking any info from the user. Using an ad network, which solves the targeting problem by traking users across many sites. And also solves the problem of having the right ad to send once you know the preference! Of course and ad network will take 50% or more of your sales. Thats no fun. Maybe you can add an ad network capability to your soft, so that sites can exchange high CPM targetted banners for free ?!
I am one of those people that has an amazing ability to be oblivious to banner ads. On the flip side, the single most effective internet advertising I've experienced has been amazon's subscriptions where they periodically email me a newsletter reviewing books in a category of interest to me. I have bought really a lot of books from this. If banner ads could target my interests with that degree of granularity, then I would start paying attention to the adds. To this end, I think the ad user account could be a really good idea, much more so than the "choose a category" approach. The choosing category thing wouldn't be specific enough.
For me, it all comes down to targeting. I don't care if a 20-50k banner comes down with every page I download, but the reason I don't click on many banner ads is because they just.. suck!
For example, at the top of this page I have some thing saying 'CLUELESSNESS' then it changes to 'BLAME' then to 'We've got NEW motivators' with a 'ThinkGeek' logo. Okay, what the heck does that ad mean? It's an awful advert, why should I want to click on it?
If I saw, however, 'XYZCorp Credit Card 2.5% APR first 6 months!' or '128mb MP3 Player $75' then I might be tempted!
Banners, and their technologies, are going to have to go through the same 'usability revolution' that Web pages are going through. Currently, too many ads just make no sense and take too long to read.. so why should I bother?
I even wrote a feature on this over at iBoost, Banner Usability
mogorific carpentry experiments
I honestly think whether you block ad's or whether they are there or not you're still paying for whatever site you are viewing in some way. Think about it like this:
If companies are putting ads online and they aren't directly benefitting from sales increases then obviously their price markup increases to cover the cost of this advertising overhead. The truth is _lots_ of companies advertise online as well as sell things at stores in malls/shopping centres, so in some way you are paying for the sites you are seeing by simply buying goods.
Another way of thinking is that if sites are able to stay online because they charge ISPs to be able to view that site.. ISPs will up their rates to include this increase in cost to them in providing you the service.. So once again, whether you like it or not, you're paying.
The truth is, advertising is ultimately paid for by consumers. So unless you somehow avoid purchasing products from any company that advertises on the net, you can't escape paying for the sites you see.
I bet a lot of you are thinking.. "but i never buy from the companies that advertise on the sites I read".. that may be true.. but i'm sure you buy from companies that advertise on sites you don't read.. and im sure people that read sites that you dont are buying from companies that advertise on the sites that you DO read.. so in effect, you're paying for each others internet experiences, but in the end, it doesn't really matter to you because:
You pay, either way...
---------------
People who live in stucco houses shouldn't throw quiche.
---------------
People who live in stucco houses shouldn't throw quiche.
http://lsd.eclinic.com.au
Good idea. I need some reason other than adds to look at the top of my screen, and news or weather reports or whatever would be good. The Ad companies get their precious "Branding," /. gets revenue, and I get to know what the outside world is like periodically.
I don' think I would trust ad companies with my emial adress, no matter what.
Maybe if there had to be karma points they could up the percentage of non-adds that are piped to users.
Seems to me that in every discussion concerning banner ads, there's always someone who suggests that I am the spawn of Satan for daring to use an ad blocker, and therefore depriving good, honest, useful websites of the revenue they need to survive. Its interesting to see someone involved with the ad business say that I'm doing advertisers a favour by blocking their ads 'cos I wouldn't have responded anyway. Saves them bandwidth and saves them money, too. Not everyone's unhappy ;-)
As for the "ad karma".. well, as the Cowboy Neal interview showed, Slashdot karma is a game, no matter how much the editors don't want it to be. If "ad karma" engendered the same feelings, hey, I'd almost be tempted to turn off the filter for OSDN sites to I could play too!
Gawd - 3-4 years ago, Intel was preparing to launch the Xeon. They produced a banner ad that ran my poor little Pentium-120 into the red. I mean, it flattened my machine - I barely had the processing power to shut down Netscape.
Happened every time I ran across that ad. I suppose it could have been unintentional bad programming, but it seemed Intel was trying to highlight the inadequacies of my processor. And nearly forced me into a hard reboot in the process.
I think that one banner ad pissed me off more than all the 'Punch the Monkey' 'Fawking DSL' and 'Hot Horny Women' ads combined. I haven't bought an Intel product since.
Another example of the Open Source community leading the pack. Y'know, even if OSDN doesn't develop this, I bet you'll see this sort of thing become standard over the next year. It addresses the declining value of ads without offending readers. It also encourages users to get a login, increasing the stickiness of the site.
If I were running cnet.com I'd be all over this - it's a damn sight better than putting big, distracting ads right in the middle of the 'content'...
I like the t-shirt or other prizes idea, I din't think of that right off just for the sake of simplicity. Thanks for suggesting that.
I like the idea you pitched of posting a reason why the ad is being turned off, that's helpful. Also I would strongly object to sharing user contact info with advertisers, that'd be like selling Slashdot's user database, a total violation of trust with an audience that is too valuable to us.
Yes! Being able to bookmark ads! That's cool idea. One could have a single page listing hte ads they bookmarked for later.
One huge downside to a subscription system is that every subscriber is a paying customer, so if you have thousands of individual paid subscribers then you also need an additonal staff of customer service reps to help and support all those customers. Sure, you could farm all that to some other company who handles that sort of business for you but how much is that going to cost you? There's a certain break-even point where the cost to support a large base of subscribers makes the endeavor pay for itself and then some, so we seriously doubt we could even make a subscription service even pay for itself on any OSDN let alone make it profitbale.
I also watched "Merchants of Cool" and it is easy to see the parallel that cool up-and-coming web sites can sell out just like cool up-and-coming bands sell out, and then the small artsist are made into willing participants the "demand generation" machine. The ethics of the businesses talked about in "Merchants of Cool" is far more bothersome in that it demonstrates a commercial machine feeding on the emotional needs of teenagers. On the other hand I'd like to think we can break the web advertising demand cycle for more ads, bigger ads, by giving more direct control to the users. So I think the feedback loop is ethically OK as long as each participant is fully aware of the situation and allowed to knowlingly participate in how it plays out.
Since this *is* a user-driven website, don't you think that it is in his best interest to get user feedback on any proposed changes to the ad system? This is the first time in my life that an ad-man has ever asked *me* what I want, instead of shoveling crap down my throat, hoping against hope that I will buy their stupid products.
I am actually excited about the 'click to never show this particular ad again' and the 'discussion forums for ad banners' ideas. The AdKarma doesn't seem like it will work, but he's just throwing out ideas here! Don't rake the guy over the coals because he had the audacity to ask the users of the sites that he serves ads for what *they* want.
AFAICT, Mr Gray is *not* asking us to do his job for him. He's inviting us to a discussion, and throwing out some ideas, and maybe his ideas will spark even better ones.
More power to ya' Kurt!
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Most ads directly offend the customer: "Here's how stupid you are: we can increase your likelihood of buying our car by simply showing you a hot chick, some nice music, driving through an unpolluted landscape on free roads, and then tell you that you can get $2000 cash back (without telling you the price of the car in the first place). You are such a stupid fuck, you don't even care about mileage, security ratings or features. Now have a nice day and don't forget to buy Ford."
The most dangerous effect of advertising is that it repeatedly hammers the same message into our heads: "BUY MORE STUFF AND YOU'LL BE HAPPY!!" Instead of merely satisfying the people's material needs, as is the purpose of any economy, advertising constantly tries to create bogus new needs. This insanity has got to stop and ads should therefore be outlawed.
No government agency is needed to enforce an advertising ban: simply let competitors sue each other for advertising. There is no first amendment issue here because economical speech doesn't enjoy full protection anyway.
--
I'll pay media companies cash money to never show me another fake windows alert banner again. It's insulting, played out and irrelevant to Macintosh, Linux and Unix. I'm continuously amazed at the lack of OS-awareness of the banner servers: a large part of the banners served to me on my Macintosh (which is what I usually use) hawk Windows-only software, Windows-only hardware or are dumbed down for the AOL-Wintel-AIM market.
"Your Internet connection is not optimized" my ass.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I am not one bit interested in giving the ad-men any more information about myself than absolutely necessary. And I certainly am not interested in "rating" advertisements. If I am interested in an advertisement I click on it, if I am not, I don't.
Slashdot is actually a good example of how this can work correctly. I find that many of the ads here on /. are quire interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I have on occassion actually clicked on their advertising link to find one of their sponsors. Slashdot may not get the amount of raw views that Yahoo! does, but it is fairly easy to guess what the denizens of /. are going to be interested in.
Thinking that Slashdot is just Andover's site is like thinking that NYSE is just some buildings in Wall Street.
This is a community. The sinister Andover keiretsu puts the infrastructure, I am putting this comment, you are putting the reading, the advertisers put the money.
If these elements start to fail, the community suffers. No infrastructure leads to bad user experience. No monay leads to bad infrastructure. No readers lead to no advertisers...
This land is your land, this land is my land.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I also find the ads on Slashdot to already be fairly well targeted to my tastes. However, I would love to be able to set my preferences to make the targeting even more fine-grained.
In fact, all the ideas listed except for ad karma sounded quite good to me.
One other point. I'd like to specify what speed connection I have, so I can get fancy animated ads only when I'm connected via a high-bandwidth connection.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I love the idea of being able to disable particular ads. The "Punch The Monkey" ad is the perfect example. Not only is it the most annoying ad in the universe, but I can't even tell what those people are selling.
The idea of being able to opt in and out of certain categories is also appealing. Probably upwards of 75% of the ads I see are for products or services I couldn't care less about. I'd prefer the ads I do have to look at to be at least marginally interesting. And the key factor is that I trust OSDN a hell of a lot more than I trust Doubleclick, as far as tracking my ad-viewing and whatnot, knowwhatImsayin?
The karma system...? Kinda seems silly.
MoNsTeR
I will pay /. $10 a year to have the banners blocked for me. Sure, I could just run junkbuster, but honestly the entertainment value of /. is worth $10 a year for me.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I too have found some neat stuff from slashdot ads. X10, TeamExcess... and yes, the FAWKING DSL add pissed me off. if I could pick and choose my ad! wonderful! If I could earn points to run my own ads? nirvana.
---
I post links to stuff here
There was a great article over at A List Apart a while ago that dealt with the problem of online advertising. The problem is far deeper than just targeting the audience better. The real problem is that banner ads, by their very nature, are not enticing to readers. What the online publications need to do is to make advertising an integral part of the site. One big problem is that banners are not constant. If I see an ad for Acme corporation and later want to learn more, I can't simply reload the page to find out about Acme. Instead, I will get another ad alltogether. How many times have you had that problem with a magazine? Also, banners usually have little or no actual information on them. This can't be good. You need information to be integrated with the ad. What needs to be done is more effort needs to be put into online advertising. Instead of regarding it as an additon to a site that pays the bills, it should be made an inseperable part of that site.
--neutrino
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
Its so infrequent that I can even recall the
last click through- ThinkGeek on this site.
I guess this is about one in ten thousand response.
Eh? Making up the rules as you go along is better known as innovation. Lots of businesses manage to thrive on it.
The points, just go into little perks from using their credit card and such. Similar to the mileage plus perks. I usually click on ads, it works, and it's quite non-intrusive. They send light weight emails out, with a brief description of the product and how many points you receive.
Best ad campaign I have seen.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
(But when you come down to it, this one-and-only ad that caught my attention: it was probably just and ad for Philip and Alex's guide to website design. A book I'd already bought and read, or else I wouldn't have recognized Greenspun's photo. So even in this case, the ad was useless: my opinion is that advertising is doomed, as are most commercial web sties... without a new revenue model, the internet is going to return to a volunteer-supported activity. What a shame that would be, eh?)
The whole idea behind a karma-type system is that you want to reward behavior that you want, and discourage behavior you don't want. Unless you're omniscient, you're not going to build the perfect karma system on the first or even the second, third or fourth tries. It requires tuning and adjustment. People *will* find holes in your system, and exploit them. So you make adjustments, and eventually you make the costs of exploiting holes not really worth it. Most of the complaints about slashdot karma stem from the fact that it really hasn't undergone a lot of tuning.
A good example of a karma-like system is the shops in the game nethack. The devteam has generally indicated that there are two 'approved' ways to get objects from shops: paying for them, and getting your pet to steal from the shop for you. This was originally enforced by making shopkeepers tough (generally tougher than the average adventurer can have a hope of killing), and having them be human, with an in-game penalty for killing a fellow human. To make simply teleporting out of a shop with stuff less attractive, the Keystone Kops were added. Also the shopkeeper himself would track you down and beat the stuffing out of you.
This was roughly the state of shops when I started playing back in version 2.2. There were literally dozens of ways around these deterrents to shoplifting-- dig a hole in the shop's floor and jump through, dig a second entrance to the shop, use a high-powered wand on the shopkeeper, teleport objects out of the shop and go grab them elsewhere, etc. Over the years, things have been added to the game that negate these: if you jump down a hole in a shop, the shopkeeper grabs your pack so then he has all your stuff, shopkeepers repair holes in shop walls, shopkeepers stay out of direct wand path when you're a distance away from them, shopkeepers keep track of stuff teleported out of the shop and charge you for them anyways, etc. The effect is that nowadays, the 'approved' ways to get items from shops are generally the easiest. The game has been tuned that way in response to player abuse.
So, yes of course, no karma system is perfect. But it doesn't have to be-- all it has to do is keep up with those who try to abuse it. Takes a little effort, but what doesn't?
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
OlympicSponsor,
The fact that you are being attacked anonymously sickens me. I cannot allow this to continue without doing my part to help rectify the situation.
You are a jackass.
There, now you've got at least one person expressing his opinion of you while logged in.
HTH
--Shoeboy
The banner at the top of this page has an ALT text tag with "Click Here!". That's it. *Why?* Why on earth would I click on that?
If it said "IBM 75GXP. 7200rpm. ATA/100. $200." I'd click. But if it said "Click here for great savings on hardware", I would NOT click.
See the pattern here? Give me information that actually makes me interested, and I might follow up. Give me a teaser and I won't be bothered, because they almost always lead to something lame. Advertise what you're selling! That's what you want me to buy, isn't it? If it's not good enough or cheap enough, I'm not going to buy it even if I do click through.
And on the issue of popups and redirects: for crying out loud, don't advertisers realise they have competitors? Competitors who have the same goods at the same prices and *didn't* waste 30 seconds of my precious time! Who will I buy from? Some moron apparently did a study and discovered that annoying ads are remembered best by viewers. No kidding. We remember them in the same way that we hold a grudge.
(And gee I'm glad people are starting to use Flash for ads. It means I can now load all the images on a page and still not have to see the ads.)
If you get the impression that I think advertisers are morons and their own worst enemies... well I guess that would be just about right.
But the question was more about innovative features. So here's my idea. When you're surfing, you're interested in something else than the ads. But you might see something that interests you and you might check out later. But how do you get that link back later on? Figure out a technology where I can flag ads as interesting and return to them later on, without interrupting my browsing experience at the time. Obviously this can't involve re-loading the page after indicating interest; that's too obtrusive and time-consuming. It can't add the link to my personal bookmarks for every ad; that would just be a PITA. But it could add a single link (if it didn't already exist) to a page that has all the links from ads I was interested in; something cookie-based I guess. I don't know how this might be done, but that's something I would actually use.
It might be that a fool and his money are easily parted, but it's time advertisers realised the true implication of this: there aren't many fools who have money.
That's why I call it YASIBM. It's the same deal that C(l)ue(less)Cat discovered: if the customer can find a workaround, the customer will find a workaround. And use it.
If you don't want your e-business to be YASIBM, then you need to do one of the following:
- use a scheme that the users can't work around, or
- use a scheme that won't hurt you too much if the users do work around it.
Notice that users do work around televison commercials, but the t-business model is designed where the networks don't die when that happens. By contrast, e-business is trying a more heavy-handed approach, and companies are dying as a result.Like everything else in life, e-businesses need to consider the difference between what they can do and what they should do. (In this case, I use "should" in the sense of "if they are smart" rather than "if they are ethical".)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Taking a leak during a TV commercial is different, and here's why: Web sites usually get paid per banner impression.
OK, you've convinced me that the e-advertising business is based on YASIBM (Yet Another Stupid Internet Business Model). I'm having a little trouble working up any sympathy for them, as the saying goes.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I suspect that the karma idea might not work. Maybe. My gut feeling is that the simpler the idea, the more effective. I suspect the response rate to the karma idea might make it unfeasible.
However, my main complaint about banner ads is the fact that (A) the html code for the banner ad rarely, in my experience, has the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes filled in. This means, naturally, that the page can't really start to load properly until it has received that gif image from the ad server. (B) It would appear that many ad servers are running very slow machines ["No, no. They can't be running on a '286! It just feels that way!"] or have a narrow pipe or whatever, because the ad is frequently the last bloody file to load to my browser!
See, that's the problem. These might be good ideas for advertisers (the illusion of interactivity is good for getting attention), but the content wouldn't be taken at face value.
If someone clicks "I really hate this ad, never show it to me again!" the people who made it go "Yay! They looked at it! They saw it so many times they got sick of it! We're geniuses!" and work on the next generation of even more annoying ads.
This, of course, isn't considering the obvious trick: fake feedback tools. Seriously, you don't think 90% of "This ad sucks" links will just link to the same page?
---
That's a very interesting idea, but I don't think it would work just that simply. Everybody would just set the ad threshold very up and nobody would be any wiser.
But... Combine ad karma and moderator karma, as in the postings. The moderators could moderate some ads up and some down. Then the system could generally give them out according to the karma level. Even low-karma ads would be shown, but not as often as the high-karma ones (which should be most interesting to the audience).
Being a moderator and moderating would be a wanted thing exactly the same way as being a post-moderator is: you can directly affect the appearance of the site. Every user (who is willing to be a moderator) has a karma level that affects how often (s)he gets moderator access.
The main problem would be rating the moderators. A simple way of doing it would be to check similarity with other moderators. If 50+ people moderate an ad up and one moderates it down, then the moderator gets a -1 hit (the karma level should probably be invisible to the user - otherwise somebody could get angry). With time the individuals who have a differing opinion from the main population would start getting moderation access fewer and fewer times.
Another method to rate moderators would be through some kind of meta-moderation.
Of course, this does not take into account individual wishes. Therefore everybody (who logs in) could set +5 for this category and -10 for that company. They could affect what ads they see, but not remove them (without ad filters). (Of course, moderating an ad could at the same time moderate its category, style, advertiser, company, etc.)
This system would give response to the advertisers too, in the form of a karma level (I doubt very much response would be given in discussion forums, except for really bad ads. And a -64 karma should say just about the same thing anyway...). All in all, the system might just become a self-fulfilling moderating system from which everybody (or at least the vast majority) benefits.
As to the comment on persistent ads, I don't think that would really work. Advertisers want to get as many different ads to you as possible. Instead, there could be a page where you could browse the latest ads you've seen. Or perhaps a link "View the ads I've seen on this page before?". Or like was replied a "Save/bookmark this ad" link.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
what you want is a checkbox on your user advertising profile that says "texts only ads."
--
+&x
Some sites already do this. I just got a $50 Circuit City gift card for occasionally clicking on sites sent to me by MyPoints (www.mypoints.com). They give you a few points for visiting the site, some more for actually registering with or buying from a site, and then you can redeem them for Valuable Prizes (tm). If you have a spam-catcher account and a little free time, give it a try.
For more information, click here.
I'm probably alone on Slashdot, in that I don't have a mild case of paranoia about advertisers knowing all about me. I want advertisers to know about me.
There's an awful lot of products out there in the world, and most of them are pretty hard to find without good ole advertising and the web. My Eclipse desklamp, for example, I discovered on a Slashdot banner ad. I love it. I wish I would have found a Philips Expandium CD-MP3 player banner ad instead of searching for it for the perfect CD-MP3 player for a week.
What do I want? I want to be able to comment on ads definately. I want to be able to mark certain ad categories as interesting to me. I'd love to be able to turn certain ad categories off. And most importantly, I'd like to see fewer animated ads.
Ten dollar pearls? Where can I purchase this
exquisite finery? I shall be the, erm, queen
of the Internet!
- undoware.ca
Hangs head in shame.
Best Slashdot Co
I dunno, Kuro5hin does pretty well using that model.
Best Slashdot Co
Kurt, You must think about what advertising is and what advertising is not. Advertising is not a banner ad outside the borders of the content screen. If you want to run ads, I mean real ads for big money, run ads as stories. Make them part of a certain category if you want people to be allowed to disable them (like Katz stories). Allow comments just like regular stories. Then people can flame ads for companies that they don't like, and even negative attention is good attention for advertisers. Or other people can point out more useful insightful information about the thing brought up. Ads of course would have to have some interesting text that gets the message across and not just buzwords or attempts to get click-throughs. The articles would be marked as advertisements. If you are going to advertise, advertise. Make sure /. gets paid big bucks for it.
Oh, I forgot to mention. No images in the ads! No animation, and no special coloring.
This advice does not apply to kuro5hin of course since articles are chosen by the readers.
(if you object to this idea and not banners, I'd like to know what the difference is)
#ifndef troll
#define troll
This_is_spam.c:5: unbalanced `#endif'
#endif
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"Comment forums for each ad banner"
;) Ok, maybe I'm just still pumped from last night's Frontline ("The Merchants of Cool"), but I'm really fed up with vicious circle of "demand generation". Instead of just trying to increase the speed of the process (let's find better ways to make ads to catch more people who will have to find better ways to avoid ads so that we have to find better ways to make ads to...), I think we should be trying to find ways out of this advertising nightmare. Ok, so perhaps micropayments aren't the silver bullet. I'd still like to be able to click a button and give some change as a tip after reading a good article, than be surrounded by advertising everywhere I go. Maybe that's not enough, but shit, "tough". Perhaps sites will revert back to smaller, more intense communities, who are more willing to shell out for real content...instead of site after banal site of regurgitated, non-differentiated content supporting itself by banners...how dreary. (ok, perhaps I'm smoking on the nostalgia pipe).
So we can do your market research for you?
"What about ad system karma?"
So OSDN will devolve into the flashy ads network?
"That's OK. I have my metal bowl on too."
Yeah, that sucks. Perhaps we should be coming up with different, better solutions?
"We're a community, damnit! We're not your ad-clicking sheep! If you can't sell ads then that's your problem! One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!"
Amen
I'd seriously plunk down a micropayment, for, e.g., some of the interviews Slashdot has done, or reviews of technology, etc. Same for the in-depth reviews on Ars-Technica, Tom's Hardware, and some of the good articles on Wired. Not only would I not have to deal with ads, but I'd get the warm fuzzy feeling of doing the "right thing" while at the same time building up a loyalty to the site because I know that I'm probably one of the exclusive in-club that actually *does* tip.
Let's stop trying to get the addict to help us design better drugs, and instead try to get the addict OFF the drugs.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You have a bunch of people with similar core interests... why not try to negotiate discounts for certain products while receiving a kick back for each Slashdot-purchase? Many companies can be suckered into a lower margin if they think they can get higher volume.
If you have enough "karma ad" points, then you can get the latest cool item at thinkgeek. _That_ might work. You'll have to face the problem of cheating though...
I'd like it to be easy to get a list of the banner adds on a site. Occasionally I notice an add, click on something else (the story of the day or something), then remember that I wanted to see that add only it's too late. A nice - easy to get to index of adds served on the page would be helpful here.
The advertising potential of slashdot us huge. I have spent so much money on stuff that has been suggested by slashdot articles or that I read about in somebody's comments. I maybe once looked for some gifts by clicking on a slashdot ad.
The problem with ads is the same as the problem of slashdot without a moderation system. You don't know what you are really going to get until you look into it. Ads are sold to the highest bidder and there isn't somebody that is much like me reviewing them saying, "this is something you should look into."
Do you know how many people visit my website because I put links in my signature that I think people will find useful? Its a lot. Something like that is the best way to get make advertising on slashdot work.
I would visit something if it is given a testimonial by people that I respect on slashdot. If people were given the option of testimonials to slashdot advertised products in their sigs and could somehow receive some benefit from doing so, I would be much more likely to visit.
If you could work out some way to rate sigs that is separate from comment moderation and have some threshold that somebody's sig has to cross to be visible.... And of course and easy interface for people to see what products are available for their testimonial.
Nobody wants to give up their journalistic integrity by caving in to advertisers, but I don't think that its any better to advertise things that you wouldn't yourself recommend.
Besides, there's only 3 results that can come from this: a) assuming Slashdot, et al. put in some sort of "approval-disapproval" system for free, ad agencies get for free what they'd normally pay viewers for, as well as pay a company to do the analysis for. b) assuming Slashdot puts in a system and charges for it, they get the cash, the ad agency gets the standard info, and we may/may not get better ads because people will randomly click on stuff like this without motivation. c) assuming Slashdot pays individuals somehow, whether through cash or karma or whatever, the customer probably won't get paid the standard rate for being a "guinea pig" - around $50 an hour, so they're giving their info/opinion up for cheap.
Don't help the advertisers; they get plenty of money for doing little or nothing anyway, so charge 'em plenty for the privlage of easy jobs.
Whatever you do... don't read this.
I think the single most important item in Kurt's suggestions is the feedback loop from viewer to advertiser. Too damn many advertisers are running open loop - the flashing banner ads on the 'Net, the stupid "7 up yours!" ads on TV, the blasted "CARGANZA" commercials on radio turn people off, but the advertisers don't know because there is no way to provide negative feedback. If I could (for example, since it's sitting right in front of me) tell ThinkGeek to lose the animated GIFS and just show me the damn product, I'd do it. And I like Thinkgeek!
/., k5 et. al. start doing this, we can start a new trend.
I'd LOVE to be able to tell advertisers "I blocked your ad, because your damn server is overloaded and the ad took too long to load", or "I don't like javascript in ads, goodbye", or "Cookies? I don' need no steenkeen cookies", because they might actually LEARN from this and improve the ads (before you say advertisers cannot learn: even flatworms can learn.)
Perhaps if
www.eFax.com are spammers
Even better than letting users specify preferences (which I wouldn't expect more than 10% of users to do) would be to set up a collaborative-filtering system. Record if the user says he/she likes or dislikes the ad (or clicks on it), record how other logged-in users respond to various ads, and use that to guess which ads this user is most likely to respond positively to. Allow users to opt out of this system, of course.
I think the open-source world needs a good collaboritive filtering tool anyway, and this would be a great reason for someone to create one. It's too bad that firefly sold its technology when it wasn't doing well (?) rather than releasing it under an oss license.
The shareholder is always right.
Let's make non-animated gif or png ads a little cheaper than animated gif or mng ads. An an-rating system (or even a comment forum about each ad) should take care of the problem of some animated ads being excessively annoying.
The shareholder is always right.
The idea of ad feedback is a good one. There are several times where i have stopped reading an ad or even a site because it was continually displaying some incredibly annoying ad. As for the karma stuff, I figure I would ignore that, much like I do the message posting karma, I just don't care that much.
As for pop-ups, the day slashdot shows a pop-up ad is the day I stop reading it.
-chris (gandalf@darkcorner.net)
Ideas I like: Comment forums, turn off annoying ads, choice of ad topics.
Ideas I don't like: pop-up ads, flash ads.
I'm a little creeped out by the idea of ad-karma, but if you could come up with some better rewards I could see myself going for the idea. Perhaps you should consider additional rewards, such as:
Don't bother trying to make us earn the right to turn off ads, though, we're smart enough to do it ourselves already without having to jump through hoops. You have to offer something we don't already have.
--
314-15-9265
At least he didn't say "First Post!!" ;-)
I agree entirely with Shoeboy on this one.
The mod points are worth it.
Olympic Sponsor, I've seen your posts. I've never enjoyed one. Bring me something with grit, and when you troll bring me something with grits. You sir, are quite boring.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
I think that I personally would get a kick (and a lot of experience) from critiqueing the ads that I see and hearing others opinions of my critiques as well as other opinions.
/. or K5 aren't the best places to do such a thing but I think that there is a place for such critiqueing and people that would enjoy doing it.
Surely the easiest way of improving the ads that we see would be to open them up to criticism and set a certain standard. I'm not proposing that we only allow Open Source ads and geek ads, but finely constructed ads. Ads that make us laugh, ads that make us smile, ads that make us think, are far more valuable than just the ad from the company that had the money to put it up.
Perhaps
If you want to compete for my mindshare........take my opinion into account.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
As a VAR, and someone the clients call when they screw something up, the ads I hate most are the ones that look like a Windows popup box. I've had 10 calls in the last week from people who clicked on the "Your connection is not optimized" ad somewhere... most of the time they were trying to click the little X in the corner to close it. The monkey I can live with... but the phone calls about those are driving me to the brink of insanity.
> These web sites have grown way beyond the realm > of affordable to operate by volunteers and > donors.
I'm getting tired of seeing this line repeated around town these days. Many people will remember that we had and still have, a functioning message forum system for the same tens of thousands of people who read slashdot. It's called usenet. If slashdot and sites like it go into the toilet, rest assured that usenet, moderated usenet & listserv's will be waiting for us. In fact, maybe someone will come up with a way to structure a newsgroup like slashdot.
Click on an ad - that's been the only method of communication.
....
But I'd much prefer being able to do more then click or not - being able to request more info
There are interactive ads that do essentially what you suggest (the mega ads on CNET and some IBM ads).
When I'm making a large purchase, of course I research it before buying it. But, if I see an ad for a t-shirt from ThinkGeek or something that looks appealing, I may very well just buy it without researching it. Are there other places that sell t-shirts? Of course. But, for some things it's a matter of convinience.
-
Not so (Score:5, Funny) now eh?
Rich
Absolutely, and if you offer tangible benefits to having karma, it worsens things by far. Offering an option to turn off all banners for x points of karma - good idea; I'm sure that nobody will be a whore (fill out a few forms perhaps?) in order to reach that.
It *might* work better if you don't let people know how much karma they've got. That way, they can't boast about it even to themselves and they don't know how far they have to go to reach the next "goal", although if this was implemented I imagine we'd get a slashdot story one day: "OSDN Ad Banner Scoring System Found! (from the some-people-have-too-much-time dept.)"
oojah
Do you have any better hostages?
I believe a big part of the problem with banner ads is the content. Ads are not being designed in a way that makes the user feel inclined to look at them or click them. Reasons include:
There are ways to design ads that are less offensive and may get better user interest. So some extent, my beliefs in this regard run counter to conventional banner-ad-wisdom (if there is such a thing), so I understand that these should be tested before widespread use, but:
What about opt-in advertising? If advertising is designed to let you learn about new products that might interest you, why not let the user specify what catagories they are interested in?
I would gladly see ads from thinkGeek, particularly if they listed the latest items they have added to their store. I am sure there are people who would enjoy tracking the prices of certain commodity items as well (RAM, HD, CPUs).
This is already available to some extent, but I am not sure if SlashDot is getting any revenue from having a ThinkGeek Slashbox. Perhaps Slashdot could have a whole section of advertisers slashboxen that we could choose from, and in trade for selecting sufficient numbers of them, we could turn off banner ads completely. Heck, if this model worked, the default should be to set people up with advertising slashboxen, and only have a banner ad if users choose to turn off too many advertising slashboxen.
Download your mp3s any way you want, and support the artist via FairTunes
If you're going to have user prefs, consider having a choice for:
- Send me normal animation
- Send me loop once and stop animation
- Send me only 1 frame, never animate anything
Of course, everyone will want the third option, but perhaps you can offer it as a reward for having taken a moment to specify a few categories of products they'd be more interested in seeing. Having the ability to shut off animation, which is less distracting and would load faster, if it were very easy and didn't require providing any personal info, might really attract people's interest in your prefs page.The most important problem you'll have is trust. You have very little being an advertiser. I'm sure your clients will want you to collect email addresses and other info. If you ask for any info at all, I'd be suprised if anyone would use it. Even assigning a username/password won't work... you'll have to store a cookie and log their IP number on every access to see if they have a static IP (and if anyone else shares that same IP). Even then, cookies aren't so reliable for a long term storage, as so many sites assign them for such a long time, and I'd expect a user's reaction to having their settings lost would be somewhere between "their site is flakey" to "those bastards intentionally wiped away my no-animation setting, gawd damnit!"
In any case, it certainly is an interesting idea and I hope you give it a try and resist the temptation to ask for any personal info such as email addresses.
One last idea would be to give optional micropayments a try. Perhaps you could have a page where the user pays some dollar figure of their choice, perhaps from a short list like $5, $10, $25, and they get a credit towards completely banner free surfing (at least on the sites you control), with a tiny fraction of a cent deducted from their account for each non-impression. Personally, I think micropayments don't have much chance, but if they're ever going to work, at least on top of the existing transaction services (credit cards), the model will probably end up being "pre-pay several dollars, and have tiny portions of a cent deducted automatically", of course with an e-mail generated automatically when the accound gets low and needs a "recharge".
Wow, did I just sound like I think micropayments might be a good idea? Interesting, yes, but I'll be amazed if anyone can really make it work.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
in the end, the CPM for web ads is probably something which can be easily adjusted to compete with other media based upon results. Coming out with pay-per-view websites, or complicated ad schemes nobody wants to learn just doesn't seem like it has much of a future.
Of course advertisers want the most bang for their buck, but as soon as it starts to inconvenience the target audience, they have just lost the game.
________
Clickthroughs are bullshit. Everyone is making up this bull about "pathetic clickthroughs", "low effectiveness", etc, etc. How the hell can you measure clickthroughs for any other type of media? How many clickthroughs do TV companies have? ZERO. Yet they still manage to earn SHITLOADS of cash AND run the show (which is far more expensive than the whole OSDN network). Nobody except morons with an IQ nearing zero buys stuff directly after seeing a banner. And these morons never read slashdot - they watch the stupid TV infomercials, as in "buy this deluxe footrest for only $200 and we'll throw in a free toilet seat" or whatever. I always do some research on stuff I buy. Sure, banner ads as well as any other medium CAN influence my decision. However, the stuff that influences me the most are USER EXPERIENCES. Sure, advertising can influence a minor decision. That's not the point, though. The point is to build brand recognition, when you associate a name with something good. Banner ads work perfectly for that purpose. The only reason they are "failing" now is because everyone has realized that the internet does not change basic economic rules and that you cannot have so much competition and still have a piece of the market. Another reason is that there is a general downturn in the economy. Therefore, businesses that could not make money are being hit harder and are going out of business. But banners are alive and kicking.
- Users are not at a web site to view ads. Ads are visual clutter.
- The ads are very often deceptive or unclear. When I click on the bikini-clad babe, I'll end up at a hardware manufacturer instead of a flesh site. @#$%^&*!
;-)
- Clicking the ad interrupts what you were doing, sends you to a slow-loading unfocused page that you can't back out of because of a page forwarding sequence the advertiser created. (Or so it seems most of the time.)
The Solution?- Have ads identify the advertiser and its product immediately.
- On the linked page, explain the product and pricing in simple terms without marketing-speak. If I don't understand your product in 7 seconds, forget you!
- On the linked page, do not use extensive graphics. Have the damn thing load within 10 seconds on a 28.8 connection.
- On the linked page, have a very clear link at the top and bottom of the page that takes the user back to where they were before they clicked the banner.
Advertisers have caused this mess by their trickster ways. They dug their own grave. All banner advertising has to change in order for users to change their expectations and give advertising credibility. If we must see ads, we want to understand and digest them quickly as we do all other web content.If people got used to seeing the same OSDN "frame" or "edge", they'd begin to associate (and differentiate) your ads from other ads. If they liked the "love/sucks" icons, they'd like your ads in general. You'd also be able to provide the useful feedback to your advertisers, as well.
ATTENTION ALL BUDDING PATENT ATTORNEYS: YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST! :-)
Just my 2 clickthroughs worth.
John
John
Indeed. Honour is like the hawk; sometimes it must go hooded. But on the other hand, sometimes a man has to stand up and be counted. Not only are you a jackass, Fascdot, I am also very afraid to have to inform you that you're also a cunt. I'm sure Shoeboy is with me on this one, though I believe he has religious and/or aesthetic objections to my precise choice of epithet.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I accept that OSDN needs to support itself, and that ads are a decent way to do that. 1 banner ad per page is certainly better than a lot of the things that could be done, i.e. paid editorial content (which would ruin the site).
/. and K5. I'm willing to let them (because it's my choice) have some information on my preferences (more tux smashing redmond please). In this scheme we are being given the opportunity to opt-in. Many sites don't even give you the choice to opt-out.
but lets do some math. It takes X dollars to support the sites and make a reasonable profit. Lets pretend that ads are the only revenue source for the time being.
If the price that OSDN can charge for the ads is greater then they have to show us less ads. They can afford to keep it to 1 (or 2) a page. We (hopefully) won't need pop-ups, half-pagers, exit consoles, blah blah blah.
Advertisers will pay more for an ad delivered to a targeted community. If OSDN can segment their community without including my SSN in the process then they can charge more.
So why not, I'm willing to help support
If OSDN can increase its ad prices without selling my genetic code then I'm all for it.
Upload your own ads
The trolls will love this feature. Can you picture a goatse.cx banner.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The other moral being: Add an archive of the banner ads. I seem to recall wanting to find an old Slashdot banner ad for some reason or another. I clicked on the "advertising" link in the topic glob only to be presented with some entirely useless information on how to place a Slashdot ad.
Upload your own ads
Would they have to be ads? Could we just upload art?
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
That said, I offer some refutations of some of his points.
Mr. Gray claims that ad banners are the only thing that works; I challenge that assertion. The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing quite fine with their subscription model, and, last I heard, pr0n was the only non-ecommerce money-making 'Net industry. They're all subscription-based, no?
Mr. Gray dismissed all alternatives to banners out of hand. I have a challenge: run a few systems all at the same time; call it an experiment. Keep the banners (with your modifications if you're so enamoured of them), but add a tip jar and offer a subscription which eliminates all advertisements and the tip jar. See which one gets you the most money. Chances are, you'll get non-trivial funds from each.
One alternative not mentioned is the public broadcasting model. A couple times a year, have a fund drive. Saturate the site with pleas for money and threats that the service will be discontinued if enough of us don't open our wallets. You'll only get a small percentage of readers paying, but those will likely give you large figures. I bet there're at least a few dot.commies out there who'd give a kilobuck, and many who'd give twenty or thirty dollars. If there's a significant shortfall, get coporate underwriting and have Google-style non-obtrusive text links acknowledging those sponsors.
Most of the rest of Mr. Gray's points are asking us to, frankly, do his job for him. I have no interest in advertisers. I couldn't care if corporation X lives or dies as a result of a successful marketing campaign, and I'm certainly not going to help them do something I consider extremely distasteful.
What I am interested in is Slashdot. If the only way for me to give Slashdot financial support is through banner ads, then Slashdot won't get my financial support: Junkbuster has kept me from seeing a Slashdot ad for quite some time. If there was a tip jar, I'd throw some money at them from time to time. If there was a subscription and it wasn't too expensive, I'd even buy one. But I hate banner ads and will do nothing to contribute to those who belive in them. If an advertisement made it through Junkbuster and managed to crash my browser, I'd spend my time updating the Junkbuster rules or (if it got too bad) I'd leave Slashdot. I wouldn't help you debug something you were incapable of debugging yourself.
And, as for ad system karma...it looks like Mr. Gray spent waaaaay too much time trying to catch the monkey in the money tree. Why am I going to give you a critique on an ad just so I can turn other ads off for a day? Those who contribute will be those who actually want to see the ads. It's much easier to install Junkbuster than it is to critique a couple dozen ads...it just makes no sense.
All I can say is...good luck.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
That said, I offer some refutations of some of his points.
Mr. Gray claims that ad banners are the only thing that works; I challenge that assertion. The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing quite fine with their subscription model, and, last I heard, pr0n was the only non-ecommerce money-making 'Net industry. They're all subscription-based, no?
Mr. Gray dismissed all alternatives to banners out of hand. I have a challenge: run a few systems all at the same time; call it an experiment. Keep the banners (with your modifications if you're so enamoured of them), but add a tip jar and offer a subscription which eliminates all advertisements and the tip jar. See which one gets you the most money. Chances are, you'll get non-trivial funds from each.
One alternative not mentioned is the public broadcasting model. A couple times a year, have a fund drive. Saturate the site with pleas for money and threats that the service will be discontinued if enough of us don't open our wallets. You'll only get a small percentage of readers paying, but those will likely give you large figures. I bet there're at least a few dot.commies out there who'd give a kilobuck, and many who'd give twenty or thirty dollars. If there's a significant shortfall, get coporate underwriting and have Google-style non-obtrusive text links acknowledging those sponsors.
Most of the rest of Mr. Gray's points are asking us to, frankly, do his job for him. I have no interest in advertisers. I couldn't care if corporation X lives or dies as a result of a successful marketing campaign, and I'm certainly not going to help them do something I consider extremely distasteful.
What I am interested in is Slashdot. If the only way for me to give Slashdot financial support is through banner ads, then Slashdot won't get my financial support: Junkbuster has kept me from seeing a Slashdot ad for quite some time. If there was a tip jar, I'd throw some money at them from time to time. If there was a subscription and it wasn't too expensive, I'd even buy one. But I hate banner ads and will do nothing to contribute to those who belive in them. If an advertisement made it through Junkbuster and managed to crash my browser, I'd spend my time updating the Junkbuster rules or (if it got too bad) I'd leave Slashdot. I wouldn't help you debug something you were incapable of debugging yourself.
And, as for ad system karma...it looks like Mr. Gray spent waaaaay too much time trying to catch the monkey in the money tree. Why am I going to give you a critique on an ad just so I can turn other ads off for a day? Those who contribute will be those who actually want to see the ads. It's much easier to install Junkbuster than it is to critique a couple dozen ads...it just makes no sense.
In short, if you want my money, don't try to get it from banner ads. You can have my money, but not in exchange for anything related to banner ads.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Maybe I could go to a special page on your site, and indicate, "I'm in the market for a hard drive.". Then over the next week, I would get ads from advertisers who think they might have something of interest to sell me. While some of your other ideas (the gradient version of 'never show me this again') are quite good, this one is particularly good. I'd like to have it set with a time out function so I don't have to return to turn off my interest. But I go through phases of being interested in new things. If I'm building a new system, I'm keen at looking at hardware. If I'm in the mood for a new game, that is what I want to see. Talk about effective advertisement. I'd also like to see a gradient version of what interests me. I like to travel, but not a lot. If those 'Hobbies and Interests' measured level of interest (none-mild-very-intense) then the ads could be more tightly targeted.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
If you need to you can put a limit on the number (e.g. 25) so people always see something, even if it's the Slashdot Cruiser...
In fact, you might even be able to [shudder] patent it!
sulli
RTFJ.
InfoWorld used to have something called InfoQuote that let you ask for quotes on PC equipment and so on. I couldn't find it today - their website gets more user-hostile every time I visit.
sulli
RTFJ.
Every single add I saw on both sites was FLASHING COLOURS IN MY FACE.
It reminds me exacly why I started running junkbuster.
My advice to you is to dissallow adds like this so as not to annoy people enough to go look for filtering software.
If adds flashed less it would be a good start.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
Exactly! They generally have no idea what is effective advertising. Which is why I'm intrigued by this new concept of user-driven advertising.
I use an ad filter, not because I disagree with advertising on a fundamental level, but because there are so many abusive (ie: large, pop-up, animated, etc) ads out there, and most ads are for things I have no interest in. But now I'm missing out on some things I might be genuinely interested in (ex: deals on hardware, games, etc). And some company, which I may come to know and love has just lost a potential customer.
Now, let me tell the ad clearinghouse company what ads I want see (computer related, no animation, nothing larger than X by Y pixels, etc), and I'll turn off my filtering. If someone comes up with a good ad or offers a good deal, I'll click through and let them know that they're on the right track.
Of course, occasionally I'll be fed an ad that doesn't conform to my preferences. This is not a bad thing, since I might want to expand my horizons once something new comes out. If I don't like the ad, I can send feedback to the ad serving company and the company that's doing the promotion... then they can stop serving me their ad (since I'm having a negative reaction to it) and go on their merry way.
I think that this such a good idea... it could really turn Internet advertising around...
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. The agreement is that I get to read Slashdot for free, while allowing myself to be exposed to banner ads. Spending my time doing field research for the ad agencies does not work into the agreement.
In regard to contact info, what I had in mind is that a "proxy" form of contact info could be shared through a trusted intermediary, such as slashdot.
/dev/null, but I wouldn't fear the retribution (i.e. spam) of talking to the advertiser.
The ad company could contact me through OSDN They could spam my e-mail through OSDN -- as long as I allow it.
This would give the vendor a way to contact me -- which they seem to want. But it would give me a way to un-subscribe from their spam list if I choose.
As long as I never received any UN-solicited e-mail, the intermediary, OSDN, would keep my trust. I could dialog with an advertiser, rather than feedback that goes to
This better describes what I had in mind. Having had a few hours to think about it, I'm still not sure I want ad's through e-mail. Ever. I'd much rather see them on a web site I frequent. Especially if I can turn the obnoxious ones off, and give useful feedback to the non-obnoxious ones, or even attract the non obnoxious banners to my eyeballs.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, use Windows.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I would suggest two changes to the Karma points:
10 points for loading small ad banner.
1 point for clicking through on an ad.
The 1 point for click through does not encourage excessive click through. An ad karma whore can do lots of other things to accumulate points way faster than clicking through ads.
I don't mean to be critical, but most of your reward ideas for ad karma don't seem practical. Maybe even none of them. No way you could give away ads. Okay, well, maybe in exchange for your karma going over a zillion. Maybe you can let people turn off ads, but this means that they interact with advertisers, and view ads, for the privilege of not viewing ads.
I still think you sh/could keep track of ad karma. But I don't know of any suitable or practical reward for accumulating it. (Maybe a prize, even a token, funded by a contribution from advertisers for their gratitude in the large amount of feedback you've given them to accumulate so much ad karma? Just imagine, because of your vast participation in Slashdot, you get a free licensed, paid for copy of MSDOS 3.1 !)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, get their MCSE.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Kurt's comment about magazines not surviving solely alone on subscription fees is true as well. So the thought is, "Why not take in both sources of revenue?"
I'd love better targetting of ads. I also like /. enough to pay a small [say $1-2/mo] subscription fee. If my subscription fee combined with my UID gets me the ability to give them feedback on ads--giving me ads I might actually care about--I'll definitely pony up the money.
See, /. is free for all out there as a loss-leader. You can post anonymously. You can look it over before grabbing an account. It's like having your magazine at a library or a newsstand--you can browse before buying. That's one thing you have to have before people will subscribe to your stuff. The only people who can charge by-the-article or by-the-report are stock brokers and those with ungodly good reputations about things, like WSJ.
But subscriptions must also provide added value. A /. subscription could provide added value in targetting of ads and, I'm sure, other ways. [I'm actually thinking of a Web-mail system, because people who pay you money will be easier to beat with cluesticks, and having gmorris@slashdot.org has to evangelize for /. to non-ubergeeks.] The /. crew seems pretty smart.
In short: it's worth a shot. Hell, /. in its original incarnation was worth a shot. It's all still an experiment, as people often note with karma. =) If /. wants an ad-system/subscription-fee tester, I'll be happy to give it a try.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Click through on ads is so low because it is a major interrruption in the flow of surfing. I come to /. to read the articles. Every once in a while I see an ad at the top and no new articles to read and the ad is just interesting enough to click on (some Think Geek product or other...)
Since the print world allows browsing of ads, just like you can browse the features in a magazine, the e-world needs an ad browsing feature. Maybe a special ad-browser per site that allows you to quickly find the ad you were really interested in. Then, you wouldn't have to interrupt your surfing to click-through. Just continue surfing, mentally noting the ad. Go back later to the ad page and find the one that caught your eye earlier.
Ok while I think some idea are intersting, some points are contradictory for instance: why would you use karma points to disable adds while it is said higher in the text that it would be the first customisation.
On the whole such a system could work if and only if people trust the system. Here in switzerland you can put a sticker on your letter box that you don't want adds so you don't get adds that are not personally addressed to you. This information is stored in the telephone directory and is respected. I would gladly have such a cookie to signal I don't want to see adds.
If you want intelligent adds, which seems to be the point of this text, you need some way to profile people. This implies the following:
Any post that trolls a "more effective ads" story on /. is OK by me.
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I can't even make it all the way through that...
/. ads than I have in total online anywhere else. The first time Slashdot tells me to Punch the Monkey and win 30 dollars, I will cry.
You people are altogether far to upset over banner ads... LIVE WITH THEM. Yeah, popups are irritating, and link-trapping should be stopped, but plain old ads are no big deal... They are the reason we dont have to pay for some of the sites we rely on (slashdot, webmonkey, newsforge, need i say more?). Out of all the billions of ideas that have been pitched, I can gather the following as useful:
1 - All ads should be in some way related to the page they are being displayed on. Slashdot does this very well... I have clicked on more
2 - Popups should be easily closeable, not too big, and should not open new popups when they close
3 - NO LINK TRAPPING. My back button should always go back.
4 - No website should ever change the size of my browser window... it is carefully sized to allow me to watch TV at a decent window size, use ICQ and browse most sites without horizontal scrolling (i must admit, windows is my primary OS at the moment)... I don't need to re-precision size my window every time i mistype the address of a CJB site...
5 - Ads should not interfere with a site's design... if a sight is meant to fit in the window without scrolling, then dont put an ad at the top so you have to scroll... this is the one situation when popups (that conform to rule 2) are preferable
Oh well
Most of this will never happen
I just think there is way too much stink over banner ads, go bug TV commercials or Coming Attractions Reels why dont you?
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You can't fight in here! This is the war room!
I think alowing each use to chose custom adds, and comment on them is a wonderful idea. And "karma" should be based on that alone. Not clicking, or chosing the bigger banner
The problem with banner adds isn't that they don't work, its that people can tell when the banner gets a direct respons(click/sale). Also many banners are anoying and even offensive.
Many adds I see are trying to get someone to "click" on them. And nothing else. Think of how many TV comercials are there only to get people to call them?
As far as demographics content goes, I would go as deap as "state" and no more. Also let each user select more than one. There are many reasons for this, 1. On the East coast you can easliy live 40 min from 5 different states, 2. Many of us travel.
The peopel making banners need to do a little more home work. Showing pictures of women or tricking customers to click on an add makes things worse. I think the biggest reason why people hate banners, is that it takes to long to download compaird to the rest of the content. This is because of illeagle cookies, slow banner servers, large banners.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
... where I've bought from a banner ad. This is how I heard about thinkgeek. I bought some of their dispair posters and I want more of their stuff. I bought some stuffed Tux toys from penguinpower.com, which I also saw on a banner.
This is because they had tasteful, informative, and useful ads, not "ads with a gimmick" - I think it's the insulting gimmick that makes people hate the "punch the monkey" bit, like the retarded TV ad for the guy dancing around and it's some cellphone company. I swear to god I will NEVER purchase any of cingular's products.
On the other hand, what the HELL is up with companies that DON'T advertise the unique features of their product?!? Like Lexmark, where their Z52 printer has Linux drivers, but it's buried in small print on their website. If I was Lexmark, that would be a major bullet point in large type. And digital cameras... god forbid they tell you ANY technical specs beyond the resolution. It took major digging to discover Olympus cameras can now make short movies, and they write TIFFs if you want, both of which were killer features for me.
I don't mind advertising and I even don't mind people collecting my demographics if it means they do a better job of targeting ads to me.
Something has to pay for slashdot's anime DVD hunger, and I'd prefer it not be subscription because I'd miss out. If I have to see ads, I'd prefer them be ads that might be useful. I think the user feedback idea is great. This is one very important place the internet differs from print, radio, & TV, and we should take advantage of it!
Plus I've always wanted a "why the hell don't you mention..." button on certain ads, for the above reasons.
Kudos to Kurt Gray for a very orginal proposal.
I wonder, as an important person in charge of leveraging market position in the OSDN (or something like that) (and therefore with an important position in advertising, not just on /., but on other major OS sites like kuro5hin and sourceforge), what do *you* see as the way to get people to click ads.
/.'s survival for people to click on ads, so what do you see as the future for /.'s ads? As I understand it, the simple banner at the top of the page is not as successful as you will like, so will we see /. with ads in the middle of the page (or every few comments), at the bottom and so on?
I know it's important for
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Hi!
Well, perhaps I don't love the ads themselves, but I enjoy access to the free content that banner ads pay for.
A lot of Slashdot users are no doubt used not having to pay for software and perhaps not even music. The first can be acquired both easily and legally for free, the second perhaps only easily. It comes as no surprise then, that they would expect free content from over the Internet.
This is a wonderful model for the consumer, obviously, but it's important to realize that someone has to create that content. Further, it's going to take that person valuable time to do so. It is not at all unreasonable that someone should expect to get paid for their effort.
Banner ads round out this situation nicely. They allow content creators to receive payment for their work, and they allow consumers to enjoy free content. However, some people seem to want to spoil the fun.
Not content to tolerate a few tiny banner ads as an exchange for enjoying the content, they pursue various technological means to block them. This practice is damaging to the fundamental model that many free content providers are based on. In effect, people who block banner ads are biting the hand that feeds them in a most immature and selfish manner.
I don't doubt that users of such software as Junkbuster would be more than happy to steal the content just like they steal their music and software, but their behavior negatively affects those of us who do wish to play by the rules.
Remember, if you have any sense of ethics, blocking banner ads is stealing content.
- qpt
--
Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
There are a lot of different ways to generating website revenue. Different strokes for different folks... Why not combine a few different options and let users choose which one they want? Example: If Slashdot can generate $.10 ( wild guess ) per user per week running ads, why not allow registered users to make a micropayment of $.10 or more ( to cover overhead, maybe $.15 ) and choose not to be shown ads. That way, whether you want to see ads or not, slashdot doesn't go broke. It wouldn't even have to be a 'micro' payment, really.. You could stick $10 into your slashdot account and watch it tick down $.20 / week, not seeing ads for a year. You could make it really fun, and tie the amount taken out every week to the ad rate that slashdot is charging, users could sell futures options for karma... ok, thats too much :)
This would work best in conjunction with a link to show detailed ad information, in particular the "classifications" the ad company has supplied to reach their target market. (i.e. "perl", "hard drives", "CPUs", "php", "developers wanted", "snack foods", etc.)
Classifications are usually created not by technicians, but by some marketing drone who probably has a hard time spelling CPU. A discussion forum and the ability to moderate up well-classified, interesting ads would help good ads get a better clickthru.
The big problem with moderation like this is that each company pays for a certain number of impressions. If their ad sucks, and gets moderated down, the OSDN may not be able to meet their stated number of impressions before the end of the ad campaign.
There needs to be some way to provide positive motivation for companies to put up "good" ads. Rather than fiddling with the ad frequencies, perhaps OSDN could just create a "showcase" page which shows the ads in order of their moderation totals. "Good" ads could be recognized and "bad" ads would also be recognized. ;-) Another thought might be to give the highest-rated ads additional run time for no charge. Perhaps the best ads could go on the front page and all the others would only be shown deeper in?
Well, if you're willing to try out Mozilla, they've added hidden preferences in release 0.8 that will let you turn that off. They say that there will be a UI for it soon. The description can be found here.
Trust me. It works great. I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since 0.7 came out, and it's come a long way since the M## builds.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
#define troll
;) And, after all, cross posting is spam.
I saw it over on Kuro5hin already!
#endif
Best Slashdot Co
Ok, i was always curious about that "How tough is Linux" banner ad, the colors are nice, the animation is funny, but not too flashy, and it made me a little curious. But my general rule is: "clicking on an ad brings you somewhere you don't want to be, so don't do it".
... Ctrl-W.
Now, maybe just to have a say in this thread i clicked on the ad. Where it got me was a page where i could subscribe to a magazine. The page promises it'll take only 5 minutes and it's free anyway, so what have i got to loose? Well, the answer is simple: time. I don't want to wade through a tediuos subscription process before i can even have a look at the content. The whole experience is analogous to being invited somewhere i'm not too willing to go anyway, and then run into a locked door.
I don't know if the site is interesting or not, maybe later someone tells me it's interesting and i'll subscribe. But after they got my attention so far that i "clicked through" why don't the make every effort to use that very short attention span the everyday websurfer has for anything he's not actively searching and present something that might catch my interest and draw me in?
And mind you, i don't find Linux Benchmarks (the main argument for subscribing) uninteresting at all, i'd just have liked to look at some before subscribing. I even bothered to look at that frontpage for something that would lead me to some examples at least (better would have been the possibility to view it without subscribing).
Other click-through experiences so far have been:
- The site that pops up 3 windows all over the screen, and whenever i kill one it spawns two more. (no more javascipt then, ok)
- The site that requires me to download a plugin before i can even start entering it, let alone navigating.
- The site that requires my undivided attention in terms of bandwidth to even load the front page for some minutes. (Ctrl+W)
- The site which has it's code so botched up, it crashes my Browser
- The site that decided this is the place i want to be and made itself a oneway road (disabling the back button)
- The site that enlarges my Browser window across the whole screen (Ctrl-W even before the content loads)
- The site that opens up in a new window (if i want that i'll do it myself, thank you)
- The site that has so many banners on it's front page i can't even find the way to the sites' content.
- The site that first requires a subscription before i may enter (and i thought you wanted me here, apparently not)
- The site i just can't figure out what it is for, or what it tries to sell, but it's flashy and tells me i should bookmark it
- The site that can only navigated by opening a new window for each klick
- The "under construction" site
- The "server not found" site
- The "404, page not found" site
Admittedly, sometimes i get someplace useful (freshmeat), but that place i would probably have stumbled over anyway even without a banner to click, either because friends tell me, or i find it in a search query, or it's linked from somewhere.
So after all these experiences with ad-clicking i wonder that people still click on ads at all, since more often than not it will just take some time to load, and if the Browser survived
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I like the idea that I might be able to try out advertising for parts of my site without putting any money up front. That would allow me to get some idea of what parts of my sites people like and which parts they think are pointless. I don't make money off of my website, but if I got a lot of positive feedback (through e-mail or through a slashdot forum devoted to my ad), I might pay a reasonably low rate to keep running these ads, just because slashdot has turned me into a positive-feedback whore :) Or maybe I'd put ads on my own site or do something original like buying a .com or .org domain name for myself, who knows.
I can just see future conspiracy theories: the karma cap is part of a master plan to deprive karma whores of the positive feedback they love so much, and make them post ads for their own site (which previously got one hit a week), first for free, and later for money.
Some people might even put up humorous ads that don't link anywhere, just to burn off ad karma. This could be a good thing: it might get people to look at the ads instead of just scrolling past them, and it would be entertaining. But it might also mean that the exchange rate of points for ad views would have to be low. (As long as nobody tries to advertise the goatse site with what looks like a thinkgeek banner ad, I'll be happy.)
What do you think of letting slashdot users who don't have anything of their own to advertise give their ad points to someone who's advertising a "completely free" site (no ads, not selling anything)?
(Btw, does anyone know the minimum amount of money you have to put into a Google adwords account to try out an ad?)
P.S. I'm over the karma cap, so please accuse me of not-very-subtly plugging for my site rather than karma whoring.
The shareholder is always right.
Banner ads on Lynx are a waste.
Apparently, the only text available is limited to "Click Here!"
I somehow doubt that many using text browsers ever "Click Here!".
Now, I ask you, why not include a hint of what you're advertising? For all I know I might be missing something historic, perhaps the first Microsoft ad on slashdot. (I still like the C'T Mutant Penguins, that ad pegged Linux, if only by accident).
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
I think that the user-based ad system is one of the most interesting ideas I've heard in a long time. It completly changes the dynamic of the advertising relationship.
I am one of those weirdos who actually goes out of his way to experience certain forms of advertising, while avoiding others. I frequently spend decent amounts of my time howling with laughter and amazement at ads I view on adcritic.com, while at the same time most of the TV I watch is taped, so I can skip over the same annoying ad that gets shown 6 times during a one hour prime time show.
How does this relate to banner ads this article and comment by Hemos? well, I like choice, be it what sort of products I am exposed to, or what sort of advertising I like...what if there was a way to give a hint of some fancy high end flash type ad through a little banner? I might click on it, if I think the art looks really cool...if I saw ads that categorized accordning to some preferences I had specified, or were geographically targeted (upcoming conserts,movie times...whatever) I would surely be more likely to click-through.
All in all, I have to say I was very impressed, and quite amused with the honest and interesting ideas proposed here.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I don't mind seeing adds. There are some adds that I see and make me aware of something I've never seen or heard of before. But then there are other ads that just piss me off. Popup adds are especially bad, in my opinion, because I hate those extra windows just flying up without my permission. Some people hate banner ads because the sit there and flash their obnoxious message on the page you're trying to read.
So, what should a customizable, user-based ad system provide:
Location inline on the page,
In a new window,
All adds in one separate window,
Text based,
No animation
What else? Maybe we should have an opensource project to develop a better advertising system. Then there can be a nice little backdoor that will spam the advertsing company employees with thousands of ads every day.
I have to agree, interesting ads regularly obtain my attention. Without advertising I would never have heard of many sites which I visit regularly, or certain products that are innovative and that I wouldn't have looked for on my own (software/hardware/whatever). However there is at least one type of ads I truly hate, the misleading ones that are made to look like a clickable form or those damned scrollbar things. Although I'm not fooled by these mock ups, i'm sure many others can't tell the difference, the non-technical ones especially. That's pure deception and it's just shy of fraud.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I wish targetted ads work!
Do you know what I want to see?
I want to know about shows and performances in my area. If the Circus comes to town. If Cirque Du Soleil is playing. If Stomp! or whatever hot new show is there.
I want the link to connect to a ticket office, to schedules and fares, to a map service, and reviews of the performance.
I want to know about music performances as well, of Taiko drums and Chinese acrobats and martial arts tournaments in the area.
How do we get the banner ads to work like this?
For product or services, I rely on Google. I want a new video card? I do a Google search on the appropriate websites. I look for "video card reviews performance price"
But for topical, local, and timely information, Google isn't very good.
And I don't want to be always trawling various ticket sites for what's new. I just want to know if Disney's Lion King on Ice is in the area, or something.
I'm sure that's worthy of advertising as much as anything else!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Net savy shoppers who do shop online rarely take the first product offered. It's seldom the best deal. Excessive advertising usualy indicates cheap goods with high markup and low value. Common examples are the flashy bouncing credit cards and of course the punch the monkey, mouse etc.
The truth shall set you free!
People don't, I think, mind ad banners. In fact, they will click on them if they are interesting. For instance, I clicked on an ad for an interview with John Carmack the other day because it was interesting.
/., at least by the direct sales=success approach of the internet (cf. other media, where it's indirect growth that is measured), but an advert for a book about Perl might succeed.
/., advertising must be effective, and to do this, advertisers need to know about you. The number one priority for online advertisers is to get the right ad in front of the right person, and for this ad cookies are vital for the survival of advertising-supported websites.
If you give people interesting ads, they will click. It's different to the real world. Since the success of ads is measured by clickthroughs (i.e. internet advertising is a direct sales route), then what you have to do is give people things they are directly interested in.
So things like those ads for $10 pearls, will fail on
As to successful indirect advertising (increasing sales, although not through clickthroughs), this is a different issue, and depends on a level of obtrusiveness that internet ads don't have. You can't make a catchy ad to sell rubbish on the internet, simply because that kind of full screen, 3-minute TV ads don't work, because you only have a few pixels on the screen.
Thus although traditional advertising is about selling people things they don't want, when selling online, you have to try and sell people things they do want - it's just a matter of finding the right people. And this, of course, is where profiles come in.
For the success of sites such as
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Hi!
>I think it was for HP, but that wasn't important The fact that you remembered that it was from HP was a sign the ad worked as intended. The "Invent" campaign you mention for HP was a pure branding campaign that supports HP's new tagline "Invent." HP didn't ask you to click on it, and if you ignored it or if you decided to mess around with it, that is your choice. This banner and some others that my company did for HP can be viewed at: http://www.freestyleinteractive.com/demos/hp/
Karim
I occasionally click ads on Slashdot or News.com; hardly ever on Yahoo, Salon, etc. Why? Because Slashdot is targeted to some of my interests.
Given the opportunity to specify interests for all OSDN banner ads, I'd do it. I think it would increase click-thru in addition to letting you shop around a targeted demographic. Seems like a win-win. Bring it on.
- Fill them with pornographic images
But, wouldn't this make them suck more?
I'm sorry. I just had to ask.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
It literally sent chills down my spine. But, I guess there are many people who do follow that belief. Personally, I'm not the kind of person who would be comfortable going into a shoe store and having the person there know every kind of shoe I had owned, or to have telemarketers quote to me which magazines I had ever held subscriptions to, or any one of dozens of other examples where my right to privacy was taken away.
________
(Slashdot Cruiser, anyone).
Perhaps this wouldn't be such an issue if I weren't stuck on a 33.3 dialup connection, but as it stands, even with the "Light" version of Slashdot selected in my user info, some of the articles can take several minutes to load.
Obviously if Slashdot is to remain a free website available to anyone, they need to keep banner ads on their site, so what can be done to alleviate some of the annoyance that current banner advertising can cause? I propose a targeted advertising system that tracks user's preferences based upon the stories they read most often. This would require placing another cookie on a users computer with a unique ID string that Slashdot would use to keep track of what Slashdot stories a particular user reads. Let's say for example you frequently enjoy Slashdot's Anime section. Your cookie would reflect this information and you would be delivered ads for new Anime releases at each page load. Of course you would have to read logged in, but I believe most if not all readers do this anyway.
A system of this type shouldn't be terribly hard to implement, considering Slashdot already organizes stories by category, and it should not be too taxing on Slashdot's servers. I know I would be more likely to click on, and lessly annoyed by banner ads, if they were advertising products I had a particular interest in.
Just a suggestion, does anyone else have any input on the subject?
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Anyway, the lesson is that you can't "just" introduce some scoring system without people getting crazy over it. If you decide to go with such a plan, get ready for ad karma whoring, trolling, bot and script hogging and all the rest of the headaches that are going to accompany it.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
How about giving me a compelling reason to look at banner ad's?
Maybe every 50th ad check my email account and use the banner ad space to tell me if I have new mail.
Occasionally stick the latest Slashdot topic or CNN News story in the banner ad space. Not as an ad for Slashdot or CNN but because I specifically requested periodic updates from those sites.
Soon I'll get in the habit of actually checking the ad banner for items of interest instead of ignoring it so throughly that I'm not even aware there is one.
Georgia summer camps
- Filter them out, or
- Enforce the "1 x 1 pixel" banner standard, or
- Pay me $1 for each banner viewed, or
- Fill them with pornographic images
I think those are the only real options here.
Why?
Because web advertising has been basically like TV or print - an ad is displayed and people can click or not. TV doesn't even have that option, but print can send back requests for more info. What can we do here? Click on an ad - that's been the only method of communication.
Me, I like to see *some* ads. I've found good companies and stuff I didn't know about through some of the ads. But I'd much prefer being able to do more then click or not - being able to request more info, or being able to to *turn off* a bad ad would rock. It's a system that I think would be worth implementing - not because I work on the web sites, but because it's something I'd like to have as user.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Maybe if you rely exclusively on subscription, it doesn't work. I suspect that relying on ads won't work either. But you're thinking to narrow -- why not have the best of both worlds?
Slashdot uses a login system, so that people can set their preferences. It already serves dynamic pages, based on who is reading it, anyway. It would be trivial to modify it so that it serves an ad-free page to people who paid a subscription, and an ad-cluttered page to everyone else.
People who hate ads but are willing to pay, win. People who hate paying, but don't mind (or would rather filter) ads, win. Slashdot gets revenue, and wins. Everybody wins.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:
Comment forums for each ad banner:
Great idea! The best part is that you've already tested it here on slashdot. Nearly ever article posted during the "Slashdot Cruiser" campaign contained at least 3 comments about what a horrible idea that was. Clearly you can leverage your existing expertise in this area.
Turning off annoying ads:
I've got a better idea, how about we see hot horny women and get fired? I think this could be a great experience for us to share together.
Choice of ad topics and categories:
Will hardware manufacturers that don't suck be an option? Cause while I'll probably never pay 10% more than the standard price for a "server" that has an asus desktop motherboard and a VA Linux case badge, I do like computer hardware ads. I just like them from real companies like Dell and Compaq that don't charge extra for printing "Linux Powered" on the outside of the box the computer ships in.
What about ad system karma?
Would that work like the slashdot karma system? Cause the idea of ad system bitchslapping is scary. I can handle a default posting score of -1, but I'd hate to have 20 popups on slashdot just because Taco got pissed at me.
1 point for every time you load a paid ad
0 points for clicking on an ad
50 points for loading bigger ads
100 points for loading a pop-up ad
500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
100 points for loading a Flash ad
300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live
The look on Larry Augustin's face when OSDN starts turning a profit: priceless.
There are some things that ad karma can't buy. For everything else there's mastercard.
I understand that you're brainstorming here, but your ideas are pretty silly.
--Shoeboy
Then they went to color. "Ok, just taking advantage of the medium," I thought. Some of them were informative, and I occasionally clicked through.
Then they started flashing at me, trying to get my attention. Hello! I'm Trying To Read, Here! It was worse than being in a room full of toddlers. I was quite disappointed that a
- newspaper publisher
of all possible outfits, was destroying the reading experience in this way. And I told them so. Naturally, they ignored me.And so I installed an ad filter and now I don't see a single one of their blessed ads, or any one elses.
The web ad industry is its own worst enemy.
Sorry, but I've gotta say the "ad karma" idea is exceptionally bad. The only way I'm going to spend my time rating your banner ads is if you:
How about a karma system for the advertisers!
People "moderate" their ads. They accumulate good karma for being good citizens.
Web site visitors can set their viewing threshold. Don't show me ads from advertisers unless their karma is over 20. Or maybe the ad score is over 3, etc.
Just imagine a moderation system for ads...
(Score -2, Obnoxious)
(Score -5, Company is a scumbag)
(Score -3, Tries to pretend the ad is interactive)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, get their MCSE.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Kurt, I like the ideas in your article.
/dev/null. And especially on an ad I felt strongly about. (And maybe the advertiser could accumulate clue-karma for sending me a personal reply to the message I personally wrote them.)
This would be a huge improvement over the way web advertising works now. It could even lead the way for others to follow.
I would dearly love the ability to click "Never show me this ad again". I would dearly love to be able to send feedback directly to the advertiser, especially if I knew it didn't go to
I can imagine myself commenting negatively on ads more than positively. But that might change as advertisers accumulate more clue-karma. I can mostly imagine commenting negatively on ads that look interactive, but aren't. Obnoxious blinking ads, etc.
Just because advertisers don't have something to sell that I want, isn't my fault. Really. It isn't.
But some advertisers seem to think that they can persuade me to buy if they can just be more obnoxious and in-my-face than the other guy. I have news for them.
When advertisers have something I'm actually intersted in, then I'm interested (sometimes) in their ads. And (gasp!) I sometimes click through!
I have a few more ideas to suggest:
How about a page I can go to that is just full of ads! I can then immediately pick out the obnoxious ones and immediately click "Never show me again". This should give the advertiser some feedback.
When I click never show me this again, maybe I could optionally enter some feedback as to why! I find this ad offensive. I'm not interested. I think the techniques used in the ad demonstrates that your company is scum, etc.
Maybe I could rate ads, with a simple drop down menu? The higher I rate an ad, the more frequently I see it. This is simply a more fine grained version of "Never show me this ad again".
I might be willing to let advertisers (who haven't yet offended me) contact me. The problem with the way this works now, is that advertisers get your contact info. They then violate the trust you put in them, and you can't retract your contact info. What if the contact info could go to a trusted intermediary? I'm willing to let Acme Co. contact me, as long as they don't offend me. When they do, I tell the intermediary to remove me from their mailing list. This works great until the intermediary violates my trust.
That's maybe the core of the problem. Advertisers have violated people's trust so much, so many times, and in so many ways, that nobody trusts them anymore. Maybe they could earn that trust back, and people might not think so lowly of them.
Maybe I could go to a special page on your site, and indicate, "I'm in the market for a hard drive.". Then over the next week, I would get ads from advertisers who think they might have something of interest to sell me.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, get their MCSE.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I find this entire article vaguely amusing. Sure, you can ask your users what they want. Just don't expect it to get you anywhere.
Remember, you run this site. You can do whatever you want with it. There is absolutely no need to ask the users' permission to do anything. The servers are your property, the code was written by you, and everyone is reading this website and posting here at your sufferance.
You can't depend on the readers to run this site for you. What do us readers want? A site that's never down, with all sorts of features, that's easy to use, with responsive management, and no banners. Is that realistic? No. Are users interested in sitting down and facing harsh, ugly reality and thinking hard about these issues to the degree that's necessary to formulate even halfway decent proposals? Of course not. And it's unrealistic and dangerous to expect essentially apathetic (and very self-interested) parties to give you good advice.
In the end, the success or failure of the banner system is up to you. You can't rely on the users, and you can't blame them if you fail. But there's a ray of hope here too - you also have the freedom to ignore them.
I hope this is in some way helpful to you.
When I read print articles I notice ads and return to them later. The problem with web ads is that I must act now or lose my chance. What I would like is a hybrid dynamic/static ad system. The ad itself can be random, but once I've seen it, it should remain each time I return to a specific page. Thus I can remember I saw the ad for FooCorp Widgets on the Slashdot article about Ginger and track it down days, weeks, or months later.
I saw a banner ad that was quite interesting - I think it was for HP, but that wasn't important. The ad itself was a paper plane simulator, with two controls to increase/decrease the length of the plane, and its wingspan. When you were happy with your 'design', you pressed 'go' and the paper plane was thrown, its tragectory plotted with a dotted red line... Altering the controls changed the way the plane flew logically. Unfortunetly, when I left the page, and came back, the ad had changed, and no amount of reloading the page would bring it back.... I think I did go to HP's web site to try and find it again.... but without luck. The morral - instead of trying to sell us somthing with a electronic 'poster' -give us somthing to play with. The computer medium is by its nature interactive - if the ad's arn't then we skip over them though pure bordom.