Alt attribute for banner ads
by
jesser
·
· Score: 2
That page was full of ...>, as are many other sites heavy on banner ads. What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images? If you want IE users to know they can learn more about the product by clicking on the ad, use the TITLE attribute so it's just a tooltip and not a replacement text, and give an empty ALT. If you want Lynx users or people who have disabled cross-site images to click on the ad, give meaningful alt text. But don't fill their pages with useless "click here"s!
-- The shareholder is always right.
Re:Alt attribute for banner ads
by
iso
·
· Score: 2
What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images?
well, because only a fraction of 1% of the general surfing population surfs without images (or with text-only browsers). additionally, those that do surf without images are probably the type that don't click-through to too many advertisments anyhow. that "ALT" attribute is much better spent teaching those who use, say, IE (the majority of the surfing population), how to "follow" the advertisement (hence "Click to learn more...").
I need to add the two that got throught to my Junkbuster blockfile.:) Only one really they where both from the same spot.
--
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics.
Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Something is up at /. ......
by
Emugamer
·
· Score: 2
This is the 4th article about ads and they already had one poll IN THE LAST WEEK.
Perhaps they are decideing to remove all ads from Slashdot since we know they read our comments and see how much we love ads. yeah.... thats got to be it....
Here's a radical idea. Why don't web sites try to develop a profile of who their target visitors are and then sell advertising space to compatible products for small name-recognition ads? It's worked for over a century in real world publishing, why not web publishing? Why is advertising success determined by click-thru rates? Budweiser is quite happy that an ad in Playboy might be seen by a million people, a billboard by perhaps 250,000, a placard at a rodeo several thousand. Why don't we ever see something similar on the web - just a nonclickable, nonobtrusive "Hi - remember us when you get back to the real world" jpeg/gif? The only advertising going on at web sites now is for other web sites - break out of the circle jerk and a site could be profitable.
Actually, right after the page loaded, I was like 'where _is_ the article??', and it was right in front of me. But because of all the ads, it was invisible. It took me like 6 seconds to disable the 'filter' on my head and start reading.
The filter is back on now.
--
--
-- Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
OK, go to your favorite search engine, or shareware search engine. Pick a game style, say.... puzzle games. Now then, how many hits do you get back? As a consumer, how long will you spend looking? While it's cheesy (and I DON'T do this) quite a few people just keep re-submitting thier game so that in a dated list, it shows up first. Or they do things like put '++' at the beginning of the name to try and make it show up first (that was the case back in the BBS days, but, no longer really works that well.) So, if you are looking for a game, how long do you expect to spend clicking 'next' to find a game that you like? Not very damned long on the Internet anymore.
The problem isn't just getting your name out there - I don't do any 'brand recognition' advertising. It's trying to compete with the miriad of other programs of the same genre to capture the prospective customer's attention. I advertise in places where people look for games (two game search engines, a game fansite, and a game news portal.) So, the idea that someone just pops into a game search engine and finds something interesting is a bit of a problem - have you done that lately? This helps those who really want to push thier product stand out just a little. That's why I advertise instead of just putting it in the search engines and shareware game engines. Other people's reasons may vary. And if you don't like ads - well, I'm sure you know the address for Junkbuster!;-)
--
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I've heard that no news is good news. But puh-lease. This is sad.
Joseph Elwell.
But seriously folks ...
by
nachoworld
·
· Score: 2
banner ads are easily skipable - the blinking ones are instantly ignored by my eyes, like most regular internet users. After a few months on the web, most people have come to ignore the approximately 460x60 size ads that are everywhere. However the most annoying feature of a webpage is the onclose(? I'm not a coder) tags that automatically open the SAME website in another window as soon as you close the first one. If only I were fast in my window closing abilities I wouldn't have a permanent window to Alex Chiu's eternal life device open on my desktop.
---
--
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Re:But seriously folks ...
by
localroger
·
· Score: 2
Seems to me (and I Am Not A Browser Design Expert) that since Java code is sent as source and clearly marked (so it can be run) that it should be possible to design some kind of plug-in or filter that would massage it before giving it to the browser.
I write code for an embedded device that requires source in the EPROMs after a download -- you can extract the program. No problemo, I wrote a filter that removes all comments and whitespace, uppercases everything, and while leaving known language keywords intact replaces all the variable, subroutine, and function names with random 4-digit hexadecimal numbers in the range A000-FFFF.
Seems like it would be child's play (for one who knows the right hooks) to insert such a beast into any Java to turn ONCLOSE into ONHELLFREEZESOVER.
-- Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
If you use Konqueror, set the "disable window.open()" in the configuration. It's the only browser that currently does this. For those of you that think it's unstable, you haven't been using it lately. The final bugs that annoyed me during the beta2 are gone. I no longer need to open Netscape or Mozilla anymore for anything.
Of course, you could always hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc (basically xkill) and click the app to make it disappear without having a popup.
Re:Why is this on Slashdot?
by
levendis
·
· Score: 2
/. gets several hundred story submissions a day, most of them probably trolls or duplicates (think about how many they got when the 2.4 kernel came out). They don't have the time, or incentive, to specificy why they reject a story, although I agree it would be nice
----
-- ----
I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Re:Why is *your* post on Slashdot?
by
gargle
·
· Score: 2
Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
At least banner ads are better than a PBS style pledge drive. Think of the fun, every half hour or every 50th hit the sites content gets replaced by a plea for money (this story made possible by viewers like you, please donate so we can continue to bring you banner free news and entertainment)
-- If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
I see banner ads as an assault on my psyche, trying to extract from me things ($$$) which I want to keep.
IF banner ads work, then I am paying to look at free sites one way or another (TANSTAAFL, and all that). I would rather be subjected to an earnest plea to support the site than I would subject myself to the creations of people whose very job is to subtly manipulate my psyche in the favor of their company.
A number of the onlinecomics I frequently read have shifted in the direction of a PBS model - if you like it, send us a few bucks. If we get enough bucks we'll run some kind of special feature (not too unlike the Street Performer Protocol). It is not anywhere near as obtrusive as your example - one of the reasons at least Penny-Arcade shifted to this model is that ad banners were too obtrusive and disruped their site. (their network kept sneaking popups in, plus just vibrating windows and stuff)
--
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Why do we get a bad name?
by
Midnight+Ryder
·
· Score: 4
OK, all kidding aside - while the SatireWire link did it to the extreme, there are some websites that are really starting to look like that, and I've seen a couple of news articles that looked much more like advertisements based on the way they were linked (see my sarcasam above.) Yeah, I pay for advertising - not much, mainly cause I can't afford it. But, you know, I don't think I *EVER* want to see my product stuck in the middle of an article on CNN.com or News.COm, etc., where it ends up smack-dab in the middle of an article - I figure if that starts being the case, people will start to associate my name and my games with BAD, ANNOYING THINGS! What I can't understand is - why don't other advertisers start seeing it this way? I understand the concept of 'brand recognition', but, if it starts to become negative, what the hell good is it doing?
--
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Re:Why is this on Slashdot?
by
istartedi
·
· Score: 2
The page that you linked too was already featured in an older Slashdot article. Maybe that's why it was rejected when you submitted it.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Re:Seriously, though...
by
Cryptonium
·
· Score: 2
This makes perfect sense. But, unfortunately, with the huge number of sites that are featuring banners, advertisers are demanding much more than simply their banner being seen.
The banner company I dealt with for my site asked me to pull off all their banners because the people who're clicking through my site are not making purchases at the target sites.
Now I'm not supposed to only make a site that's good enough that people visit on a daily basis and want to click on banners featured in it, but they must buy something for me to be good enough!
Ok, it REALLY hates fake HTML tags, no matter HOW you put them... it should have been (SARCASAM) and (/SARCASAM), with the appropriate >'s in the right places!
--
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this Friday evening; it's not like anyone will actually read it now, but...
I see others have already posted about how to escape special characters, but my take on the logic behind the "Plain Old Text" formatting option might still be of interest. Anyway:
<EXPLANATION>
You'll find it likes them better if you escape the '<' and '>' characters with "<" and ">" (and '&' is "&"), assuming you're using the "Plain Old Text" mode, which, except for inserting a <BR> for each newline and filtering for forbidden stuff, inserts the text that you type directly into the generated page. Thinking about it that way makes it clear (in my opinion) what to expect it to do, though a lot of people seem to feel that it is exactly backwards because they expect the name "Plain Old Text" to refer to the results that they will get (i.e., tags not evaluated) rather than the mechanics of the page generation. Just keep thinking about it in terms of the HTML source -- special characters like angle brackets and ampersands will have the same meaning as if you were just to type everything into a text file "mycomment.html" (inside of the "<HTML><BODY>... </BODY></HTML>" tags, of course) and drop that on your browser -- and you should have fewer surprises. Oh, and Preview, too.
</EXPLANATION>
David Gould
-- David Gould main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
What do you use to make the ampersand less than show up as typed instead of getting "translated" into a "birdmouth"?
--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Why is *your* post on Slashdot?
by
Gorimek
·
· Score: 4
Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
(*) Or is it rule 4? Nevermind.
What's the alternative to banners?
by
Cryptonium
·
· Score: 2
It's easy to bash banners because they're:
- Annoying
- Take time to load
- Distract from the content
But what's the alternative?
If you're a guy with a website that you want to see grow by having more bandwidth and disk space without having a corporate sponsor who's willing to pay for it, the only way is banner ads.
Are there any other alternatives to pay the expenses for maintaining a site today?
Re:What's the alternative to banners?
by
pjrc
·
· Score: 2
If you're a guy with a website that you want to see grow by having more bandwidth and disk space without having a corporate sponsor who's willing to pay for it, the only way is banner ads.
I have a little web site, which was started about 6 years ago, that's mostly free resources for electronics projects, programming firmware, and similar technical subjects. For almost 4 years, it was hosted at a university web site, which cost me nothing, but 2 years ago they were no longer willing to host it, and I had to start paying. The site runs on it's own local-to-us server (not virtual hosted), so it's not exactly cheap to run, but I really need that local access to expend the creative energy to author reasonable web pages.
Well, over the years people have sent emails from time to time, asking where to get some of the parts and materials shown on the pages. A couple years ago, shortly before moving the site, a friend-of-a-friend agreed to offer a couple of parts from his site, which had other e-commerce going on. Their price was much too high and their service wasn't so good. They eventually sold the boards they had paid to get made, and I decided to set up shop myself.
Robin (girlfriend, partner, accountant) tells me that we've actually made a tiny profit, after having paid for the site hosting and all the other expenses. Of course, that tiny profit is based on working for free, but hey, I did that before.
Now I'll agree that this model can't work for a lot of sites, like news sites, but it is sort-of working for us. The point is that banner adds are not the only way. My site has never carried a banner ad, and probably never will. Maybe someday we'll even make enough money that I can work on producing new material full time instead of just doing it on-the-side. As it is, I'm pretty damn excited that it's managing to cover the expenses, which I had been paying out-of-pocket !!
March 2000: Correlation Found Between Adding Banner Ads to a Web Site and Incrased Traffic
Researchers have detected a correlation between adding more banner ads to a news web site and subsequent incrases in traffic.
"I did a least-squares fit for traffic changes versus banner ad density changes over the last month, and even though the points I could see to be slowly going down with increased banner ads, the line had a distincly positive slope", said high school student William Peterson. "Clearly, adding banner ads to an existing news website increases traffic."
Advertisers welcomed this news. "We expect to see an increase in <strike>percent of web tracked</strike> banner ad sales this quarter", said Paul Brooks of DoubleClick, Inc.(www.doubleclick.com).
Some content providers who recieve most of their revenue through advertising other sites were less ecstatic, however.
"This incrase in traffic seems to be mostly due to the Slashdot effect, which is notorious for sending low-quality traffic to our sites," said Eliza Gregson of SatireWire (www.satirewire.com).
Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) is a fun and useful news-and-discussion site frequented by computer nerds. SatireWire is a "humor" site that usually isn'tfunny.
Gregson continued, "Sure, those users are curious and click on ads, but they never buy anything because they think advertising is 'evil' and out to 'trick' them into buying products. Our advertisers use this spike of anti-corporatist users in calculating our CPM [revenue per thousand banner impressions], and so over the next few months we end up getting less banner ad revenue."
Popular slashdot community members "Signal 11" and "Bruce Perens" were not available for comment.
I've seen this bug from time to time using Netscape in linux. I had created a web page a few years ago that produced this effect, but I fixed it after a few people complained.
It's likely the Netscape, well know for shoddy 4.x browsers, is at fault and not BSD.
I wonder how much money they are going to make because their "ultimate banner page" was slashdotted. You've gotta figure there's a sucker born every minute, and some of those suckers are going to click through the ads:-)
Couln't read the article...
by
Overt+Coward
·
· Score: 3
Too many damn ads in the way...
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Re:Couln't read the article...
by
DrEldarion
·
· Score: 2
I know. It's brilliant. Think about all the money they're going to make from displaying all of those... especially after it's been slashdotted. Not sure if that was their intention, but it sure seems like it'll work.
What I find even more annoying than multiple banners scattered around the page, are sites, like TomsHardware that only have one or two ads per page, but trim the content down to one or two paragraphs per page, and have a 30 page article. I'd much rather deal with multiple banners on a static page than have to click through 10-30 pages to read a single story.
--
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I agree completely. And the funny thing is, they do that because all the usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen say you should never make your user scroll - break up that text into several pages.
Makes you wonder how they figured that was more usable, because its not.
--
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'm pretty sure that most sites break up their articles into multiple pages to boost ad impressions and add more opportunities for banner placement, not usability.
Sometimes I wish/. would consider breaking up huge pages, for those of us with antiquated computers and connections...
Anyone interested in the topic may also want to read the thread over at K5. Considering how much connection there is between the/. and k5 communities, avoiding redundancy between the two would be greatly appreciated.
Once you've read the article and come back to the slashdot page, try to remember what ads you saw on that page. Pretty impressive isn't it, how we've all learnt to ignore the noise and just read the article. So long as the advertisers don't get savvy to this...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Net Ads Still Better Than Radio,TV and Print Ads
by
bahtama
·
· Score: 3
When you think about it, ads on the net are less invasive visually than ads in print. Most magazines, especially those rags from Ziff Davis, with names like EWeek and Interactive Week come with 1/2 page of ads with 1/2 of text and the opposing page is one solid ad. Banners on the net are annoying, but we should be thankful they haven't gotten huge. Oh wait, what am I talking about, here's a huge one!!
On television and radio you have no choice but to watch ads, banners can be easily filtered or ignored.
A small 450x60 banner isn't that big of deal, as long as it doesn't spawn endless windows. We should be thankful that is all they are and try to keep them that size.
how else am I supposed to tell people about the games I produce
Submit your site to the appropriate search
engines and directories, so that when someone
is looking for games, they find you.
Yep, it's true: The Internet is interactive,
and people have started using it to search for
things. There's no longer any reason to "push"
in a media when people are able to "pull"
whenever they need to. Couldn't do that with
newspaper, magazines, TV, or radio. Can with
Internet.
---
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Aren't articles at a site called SatireWire supposed to be funny? Can anyone tell me what the joke was?
As for ad banners, I just meditated for 30 days at the W3C temple of semantic purity, and succeeded in training my optic nerves to block them before reaching my conscious mind. You could put a dozen banners on a page, and I wouldn't even notice!
--
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
While the article was amusing, we need to keep in mind why banner ads are getting so annoying.
For better or worse, most websites are unwilling to operate permenantly at a loss, and thus seek to earn money. Unless the site is a retailer or requires paid registration, the most practical way to accomplish this is banner ads. Unfortunately, no one clicks these ads, forcing sites to deploy ever larger and more intrusive banners.
The simple solution is for the community to organize an effort to click banner ads, particularly the more bland ones. Once sites notice this trend, they will realize that they can earn revenue by deploying small ads, and we will no longer have to put up with blinking neon monstrosities.
--
"The night is long that never finds the day." -- William Shakespeare
What I find really interesting is that in netscape 4.76 under FreeBSD the banners actually cover up part of the text from the article. I wonder if this was intentional or not...
Mountain View, CA - A number of low-traffic commercial sites that had been attempting to draw users to their sites were suddenly awash in unexpected hits this Friday, bringing them to a grinding halt. The apparent source of this traffic surge was a reference to a banner-laden page on Slashdot, known for bringing down sites simply by posting links to them.
A member of the Slashdot staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "Banners are annoying, it's a good thing those advertisers went down!" This may also be the first time a second-order Slashdot effect has brought down a web server. The advertisers could not be reached for comment, since no e-mail addresses could be obtained from the crushed Web servers.
-- ...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
How many of you remember them /now/?
by
TheDullBlade
·
· Score: 3
You can confirm most of the items on the above list pretty easily, can't you?
The difference between conscious and unconscious memory is essential to the advertiser's trade.
They don't want to you to think about the ad after you've left it, they want you to recognize the brand, and associate certain qualities with it.
How many things do you associate with Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Ford trucks? You don't remember every ad, but they all affected your gut feeling toward these brands. Advertising is mind pollution. You are dumber for having seen it. ---
Slashdot Mirror
That page was full of...>, as are many other sites heavy on banner ads. What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images? If you want IE users to know they can learn more about the product by clicking on the ad, use the TITLE attribute so it's just a tooltip and not a replacement text, and give an empty ALT. If you want Lynx users or people who have disabled cross-site images to click on the ad, give meaningful alt text. But don't fill their pages with useless "click here"s!
The shareholder is always right.
I need to add the two that got throught to my Junkbuster blockfile. :) Only one really they where both from the same spot.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This is the 4th article about ads and they already had one poll IN THE LAST WEEK.
Perhaps they are decideing to remove all ads from Slashdot since we know they read our comments and see how much we love ads. yeah.... thats got to be it....
Here's a radical idea. Why don't web sites try to develop a profile of who their target visitors are and then sell advertising space to compatible products for small name-recognition ads? It's worked for over a century in real world publishing, why not web publishing? Why is advertising success determined by click-thru rates? Budweiser is quite happy that an ad in Playboy might be seen by a million people, a billboard by perhaps 250,000, a placard at a rodeo several thousand. Why don't we ever see something similar on the web - just a nonclickable, nonobtrusive "Hi - remember us when you get back to the real world" jpeg/gif? The only advertising going on at web sites now is for other web sites - break out of the circle jerk and a site could be profitable.
The filter is back on now.
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I totally disagree with that. Why?
OK, go to your favorite search engine, or shareware search engine. Pick a game style, say.... puzzle games. Now then, how many hits do you get back? As a consumer, how long will you spend looking? While it's cheesy (and I DON'T do this) quite a few people just keep re-submitting thier game so that in a dated list, it shows up first. Or they do things like put '++' at the beginning of the name to try and make it show up first (that was the case back in the BBS days, but, no longer really works that well.) So, if you are looking for a game, how long do you expect to spend clicking 'next' to find a game that you like? Not very damned long on the Internet anymore.
The problem isn't just getting your name out there - I don't do any 'brand recognition' advertising. It's trying to compete with the miriad of other programs of the same genre to capture the prospective customer's attention. I advertise in places where people look for games (two game search engines, a game fansite, and a game news portal.) So, the idea that someone just pops into a game search engine and finds something interesting is a bit of a problem - have you done that lately? This helps those who really want to push thier product stand out just a little. That's why I advertise instead of just putting it in the search engines and shareware game engines. Other people's reasons may vary. And if you don't like ads - well, I'm sure you know the address for Junkbuster! ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I've heard that no news is good news. But puh-lease. This is sad.
Joseph Elwell.
banner ads are easily skipable - the blinking ones are instantly ignored by my eyes, like most regular internet users. After a few months on the web, most people have come to ignore the approximately 460x60 size ads that are everywhere. However the most annoying feature of a webpage is the onclose(? I'm not a coder) tags that automatically open the SAME website in another window as soon as you close the first one. If only I were fast in my window closing abilities I wouldn't have a permanent window to Alex Chiu's eternal life device open on my desktop.
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
/. gets several hundred story submissions a day, most of them probably trolls or duplicates (think about how many they got when the 2.4 kernel came out). They don't have the time, or incentive, to specificy why they reject a story, although I agree it would be nice
----
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
I really don't understand why advertisers like myself (MidnightRyder.Com) get such a bad name. I mean, how else am I supposed to tell people about the games I produce without advertising it somewhere? Heck, sometimes it's not even a matter of trying to sell a game, but, instead trying to generate site traffic. So what is we throw money at websites that will link to us for a fee?
OK, all kidding aside - while the SatireWire link did it to the extreme, there are some websites that are really starting to look like that, and I've seen a couple of news articles that looked much more like advertisements based on the way they were linked (see my sarcasam above.) Yeah, I pay for advertising - not much, mainly cause I can't afford it. But, you know, I don't think I *EVER* want to see my product stuck in the middle of an article on CNN.com or News.COm, etc., where it ends up smack-dab in the middle of an article - I figure if that starts being the case, people will start to associate my name and my games with BAD, ANNOYING THINGS! What I can't understand is - why don't other advertisers start seeing it this way? I understand the concept of 'brand recognition', but, if it starts to become negative, what the hell good is it doing?
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The page that you linked too was already featured in an older Slashdot article. Maybe that's why it was rejected when you submitted it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This makes perfect sense. But, unfortunately, with the huge number of sites that are featuring banners, advertisers are demanding much more than simply their banner being seen.
The banner company I dealt with for my site asked me to pull off all their banners because the people who're clicking through my site are not making purchases at the target sites.
Now I'm not supposed to only make a site that's good enough that people visit on a daily basis and want to click on banners featured in it, but they must buy something for me to be good enough!
Ok, it REALLY hates fake HTML tags, no matter HOW you put them... it should have been (SARCASAM) and (/SARCASAM), with the appropriate >'s in the right places!
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:
Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.
So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
(*) Or is it rule 4? Nevermind.
It's easy to bash banners because they're:
- Annoying
- Take time to load
- Distract from the content
But what's the alternative?
If you're a guy with a website that you want to see grow by having more bandwidth and disk space without having a corporate sponsor who's willing to pay for it, the only way is banner ads.
Are there any other alternatives to pay the expenses for maintaining a site today?
March 2000: Correlation Found Between Adding Banner Ads to a Web Site and Incrased Traffic
Researchers have detected a correlation between adding more banner ads to a news web site and subsequent incrases in traffic.
"I did a least-squares fit for traffic changes versus banner ad density changes over the last month, and even though the points I could see to be slowly going down with increased banner ads, the line had a distincly positive slope", said high school student William Peterson. "Clearly, adding banner ads to an existing news website increases traffic."
Advertisers welcomed this news. "We expect to see an increase in <strike>percent of web tracked</strike> banner ad sales this quarter", said Paul Brooks of DoubleClick, Inc.(www.doubleclick.com).
Some content providers who recieve most of their revenue through advertising other sites were less ecstatic, however.
"This incrase in traffic seems to be mostly due to the Slashdot effect, which is notorious for sending low-quality traffic to our sites," said Eliza Gregson of SatireWire (www.satirewire.com).
Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) is a fun and useful news-and-discussion site frequented by computer nerds. SatireWire is a "humor" site that usually isn't funny.
Gregson continued, "Sure, those users are curious and click on ads, but they never buy anything because they think advertising is 'evil' and out to 'trick' them into buying products. Our advertisers use this spike of anti-corporatist users in calculating our CPM [revenue per thousand banner impressions], and so over the next few months we end up getting less banner ad revenue."
Popular slashdot community members "Signal 11" and "Bruce Perens" were not available for comment.
The shareholder is always right.
I've seen this bug from time to time using Netscape in linux. I had created a web page a few years ago that produced this effect, but I fixed it after a few people complained.
It's likely the Netscape, well know for shoddy 4.x browsers, is at fault and not BSD.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
if only we could add graphics to our responses...
sulli
RTFJ.
I couldn't read the damn article because of the sheer number of *cookies* it requested! Those are real banner ads!
:)
But once I killed them all, it was damn funny.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
I wonder how much money they are going to make because their "ultimate banner page" was slashdotted. You've gotta figure there's a sucker born every minute, and some of those suckers are going to click through the ads :-)
Too many damn ads in the way...
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What I find even more annoying than multiple banners scattered around the page, are sites, like TomsHardware that only have one or two ads per page, but trim the content down to one or two paragraphs per page, and have a 30 page article. I'd much rather deal with multiple banners on a static page than have to click through 10-30 pages to read a single story.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Anyone interested in the topic may also want to read the thread over at K5. Considering how much connection there is between the /. and k5 communities, avoiding redundancy between the two would be greatly appreciated.
Once you've read the article and come back to the slashdot page, try to remember what ads you saw on that page. Pretty impressive isn't it, how we've all learnt to ignore the noise and just read the article. So long as the advertisers don't get savvy to this...
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
On television and radio you have no choice but to watch ads, banners can be easily filtered or ignored.
A small 450x60 banner isn't that big of deal, as long as it doesn't spawn endless windows. We should be thankful that is all they are and try to keep them that size.
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Oh bother.
Submit your site to the appropriate search engines and directories, so that when someone is looking for games, they find you.
Yep, it's true: The Internet is interactive, and people have started using it to search for things. There's no longer any reason to "push" in a media when people are able to "pull" whenever they need to. Couldn't do that with newspaper, magazines, TV, or radio. Can with Internet.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As for ad banners, I just meditated for 30 days at the W3C temple of semantic purity, and succeeded in training my optic nerves to block them before reaching my conscious mind. You could put a dozen banners on a page, and I wouldn't even notice!
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
While the article was amusing, we need to keep in mind why banner ads are getting so annoying.
For better or worse, most websites are unwilling to operate permenantly at a loss, and thus seek to earn money. Unless the site is a retailer or requires paid registration, the most practical way to accomplish this is banner ads. Unfortunately, no one clicks these ads, forcing sites to deploy ever larger and more intrusive banners.
The simple solution is for the community to organize an effort to click banner ads, particularly the more bland ones. Once sites notice this trend, they will realize that they can earn revenue by deploying small ads, and we will no longer have to put up with blinking neon monstrosities.
"The night is long that never finds the day." -- William Shakespeare
Now I'm ROFL
AC comments get piped to
What I find really interesting is that in netscape 4.76 under FreeBSD the banners actually cover up part of the text from the article. I wonder if this was intentional or not...
Mountain View, CA - A number of low-traffic commercial sites that had been attempting to draw users to their sites were suddenly awash in unexpected hits this Friday, bringing them to a grinding halt. The apparent source of this traffic surge was a reference to a banner-laden page on Slashdot, known for bringing down sites simply by posting links to them.
A member of the Slashdot staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "Banners are annoying, it's a good thing those advertisers went down!" This may also be the first time a second-order Slashdot effect has brought down a web server. The advertisers could not be reached for comment, since no e-mail addresses could be obtained from the crushed Web servers.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
You can confirm most of the items on the above list pretty easily, can't you?
The difference between conscious and unconscious memory is essential to the advertiser's trade.
They don't want to you to think about the ad after you've left it, they want you to recognize the brand, and associate certain qualities with it.
How many things do you associate with Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Ford trucks? You don't remember every ad, but they all affected your gut feeling toward these brands. Advertising is mind pollution. You are dumber for having seen it.
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Banner Ads Now Themselves Have Banner Ads
http://segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=3aa0088a -087aad20