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Banner Ads: Biggest Advertising Mistake Ever
While I know that the issue has been beat to death several times over, Charlie Hall of LinuxGram sent me a story from Silicon Alley Daily that's currently running concerning banner ads, and some editorial musings. The proposition of the editorial is good, but man, does interruption based advertising irritate me.
When I clicked on the bad link for the story (the article appears in *yesterday's* issue), I skimmed the page for the article. Since I didn't see any articles about banner ads, I figured,
"Oh! How clever! They've riddled their own page with ads to prove a point! Sidebar ads! Text-only ads! Classifieds! Paid press releases posing as 'news'!
"What a profound statement -- the page layout not only demonstrates that people ignore ads, but that they actually drive readers away from a site! Ha-ha! Okay, let's look at the previous day's version to see what the real site layout looks like..."
*clicks*
*stares*
*closes window*
*posts site-design flame on slashdot*
this is not a sig.
Galeon has an "allow popups" option, as well as "open popups in tab". I have it set to the latter, so I can close the tabs whenever I feel it's overloading, and because you don't have to actually view the tab to close it, I deprive them of another set of eyeballs.
Try getting any information from shockwave.com if you are on linux. They not only filter you out via browser (mozilla/netscape6 and derivatives are denied) but they also filter by OS (they support any OS that has a name starting with "Windows"). The only way I could get in was by forging the user agent in konqeror (or is it opera?) to reflect an IE5/windows box. Funny thing is, the site worked just fine except for a couple of blank boxes where the shockwave plugin was.
It really pissed me off.... wrote a nasty latter to a bunch of @shockwave.com addresses (as I couldn't get to the 'contact us' page).
I wonder what would happen if companies started offering mild incentives to use the banners -- maybe I could get free shipping on my next DVD order at Reel.com if I clicked on the banner at Ebert's site or something.
Of course, since so many online retailers operate so close to the bottom line already, this may not be feasible.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Now, someone who justs collects the cookies and otherwise doesn't do anything is not a pain in the ass. My cookie filtering works in a different way, though. I accept ad related cookies at first, but then remove them later on by means of a cron script. This means that each time they give me one, they think they've got a new customer to track. I don't plan on changing that, since it's an essential part of being a pain in their ass. What would be new if the ads become too anoying, is that in addition I'd be pestering not the ad companies, but their clients.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I'm sorry but I will never allow ad related cookies on my accounts. They all straight go into the bitbucket today, and will do so in the future as well.
If I find that I need one of those browsing habit trackers just to suppress the damn ads on site X, site X has seen the last of me. Well, almost: I'd send them a polite but firm (template) mail explaining the problem in detail and then never return.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
It's called COUPONS, and magazine, newspaper and direct mailing advertisers have often used them to gauge the effectiveness of ads. You can have one ad pull TWENTY times the coupon responses as another, simply because the appeal was correctly aimed.
And this is the biggest thing idiot marketroids fail to comprehend: they do NOT HAVE A RIGHT to have people WANT to buy their product! People have to WANT to buy. Everywhere I look, there's some lunatic like this editorial author, or the head of the MPAA, or some RIAA maniac, or Microsoft, behaving as if they did not have to sell people on their product- as if it was a natural law that people must go out and get Product X, and therefore the only concern is how to stop them from copying it for their friends, or how to change banner ads to order the people more FORCEFULLY to go out and get Product X. It's goddamned arrogance, is all it is, and there's nothing particularly noble or clever about that.
I remember having a similar feeling of 'this is ridiculous!' over dot-com hebephrenia and 'The Long Boom', and sure enough, reality went *WHACK* "Hi! I'm reality! Suck it down!". I think the absurdity of this 'advertising' situation is comparable.
The fact of the matter is, advertising DOES NOT MAKE MONEY. What it does is tell people who you are and what you do: if THAT is appealing enough, then people might pay money for that. But the advertising itself is a supportive role- it's about maintaining a visibility before the endless procession of passing people (not 'consumers') who have a thousand other things to care about and don't owe you a DAMN thing. To me the most offensive part of the situation is the incredibly pervasive idea that consumers, websurfers etc. OWE the companies something, just for existing. Uh- no.
A web site itself can be advertising- in the sense of something _you_ pay for, to maintain visibility. I pay $45 a month for not-that-much space to keep airwindows.com out there, and I've reworked the site several times during its life. It is never going to go out of business unless private ownership of .com sites becomes against the law, because _I_ pay for it in order to have a mode of communication that I can extend to anywhere in the world. There is no requirement whatsoever that the site 'pay its own way'. That's not what it's for.
Now, if you look at sites like Yahoo- since they are not personal expressions or any one person's 'turf', and in addition do not offer any services besides internet stuff that people expect to get for free, does that mean that site is required to 'pay its own way'? That its users are obligated to pay for it? Of course not- it can just go out of business if it cannot find a way to keep operating without leeching off its users. What does it have to sell that's that much more deserving of payment than other sites that are free? And there will be free sites- if nothing else, for any such site you'll have one funded by Microsoft because they _do_ sell products and have the willingness to spend money for 'mindshare' without demanding an accounting. (At least, they used to be willing to do this, which is how they got where they are- possibly they will want to start demanding more returns, which will erode their position.)
But the whole attitude of "this is my ad, therefore I am entitled to have people OBEY it!" is despicable and extremely stupid and uninformed. And the attitude of "gee, look at all these nice sites and fancy banners, maybe we're _obligated_ to pay directly for all this" is... naive.
When you go to MSNBC or Yahoo or whatever, or see a banner ad- _they_ are the ones with hat in hand. Not you. They need to be respectful if they want your money- because the burden of sales is on them, not you. None of these people are selling oxygen on the Moon, or water in the Sahara...
I figure, if some corporation wants to get past my lack of interest in TV, past my lack of interest in radio, defeat my usual tendency to read books over magazines, and GET THEIR MESSAGE in front of my eyes, they can damned well pay for that themselves. I'm not paying them to do it. I don't care if it's the New York Times. They've got to prove to me they're _worth_ my attention. For the most part, sites on the web that think they deserve to be paid just for graciously deigning to allow my attention to rest on their splendiferousness... get a big *PHHBBBTTT!* and my undying contempt. They've _so_ got the wrong idea about the value of their 'content' versus the value of my attention. 30 seconds of sitting, stuck, in front of an interruption-based web ad is thirty seconds I won't have again. (this is why I hate spam too...)
I've got all the time in the world for good people, or interesting people, or even just random maniacs who are fun to watch. Impress me. Interest me. But _don't_ get the idea you are _entitled_ to my attention, Mr. Marketroid, because you're n...
What? Are we throwing a little snit because I'm not being a good consumer? So sorry please, so sorry >:)
"Clip out this coupon and send it in and we will send you ten cases of our new triple-caffienated cola drink for free, just to get you to try it!"
Hey presto, _lots_ of 'click through' from a plain paper ad. Hell, you'd get geeks photocopying the Times, or hunting down copies that are being employed wrapping fish ;) it's a question of, "How much do you WANT to respond?" It's easy to measure coupon pulls too, and many people have over the years. Scientific advertising draws heavily on such sources.
The effectiveness of any sort of ad depends heavily on how much you WANT to check out the product once you've seen the ad. If the ad convincingly offers you gifts like free samples just to try and get you to like the product, then it's going to be very effective. "FREE" is the single most effective word in an ad. Then, it's all down to whether the product sucks or not, and whether you're lying to the customer or not :)
You might be hosing yourselves :) still, it's your funeral.
--
The best things in this world are free. The most information-dense sites on the internet come from academic or hacker volunteers, for free. The New York Times is completely free if you install webwasher. The most flexible computer software is free. An engaging usenet discussion is free.
The fact that so many people believe that only expensive things can have value simply proves how effective advertising really is. "Buy more stuff and you'll be happy."
--
Well, if that's your definition of "free", then indeed nothing is ever free, trivially. If I gave you my Mercedes, you'd probably complain "It's not free: I have to go through the extra work of driving it from your place to mine, and while not 'hard', it's work."
--
I mean, think about it. The author states that banner ads have a .2% click-through rate. In contrast,
-TV has 0% click-through.
-Radio has 0% click-through.
-Newspaper ads have 0% click-through.
-Magazine ads have 0% click-through.
-Billboards have 0% click-through.
-Transit advertising has 0% click-through.
-Direct mail (not email) has 0% click-through.
There you have it--based on click-through, banner ads are the most superior form of advertising! (NOTE: No, I'm not being an idiot, just making a statement on evaluating banner-ad effectiveness solely on click-through.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
The New York Times has all of our demographic information already, and they are one of the only sites that could go to Ford and say, "Every single person who comes to our site will see your ad, and we will target the cars you want to promote by age, gender, or location."
Yeah...and if I could actually remember what BS I put in when setting up my nytimes account it would be amazing.
they don't have any banner ads on THEIR pages?!?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Well, you just have to be careful about it. I'm certainly not for censorship, but that doesn't mean that I run around giving out my credit card information either.
So perhaps advertising that exceeded certain guidelines could result in the permanent revocation of the trademarks and copyrights held by the advertiser and used in that instance?
After all, advertisers aren't entitled to either - they're given by the government and it can take them away or attach strings. Do you really think that Nike or Microsoft would put their name in jeopardy?
-- 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.
Unfortunately pollution rarely works out this way. Firstly, there can be compelling interests to dictate what people may do on their own property - zoning laws tend to operate in this fashion. Secondly, due to the interconnectedness of things, what one person does on his own property may have dramatic effects on others: Imagine that you have a field of flowers and harvest them; when your neighbor spreads chemicals on his land that kill the bees that pollinate your flowers he's not directly touching your property, but is having an effect.
In the case of incessant advertising, the government does have the power to control commercial interests and has used this power to effectively limit their freedom of speech in the past, and it's quite constitutional. It's not absolute, and I'm not advocating total silence, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which businesses depend on government largess. Through this, they can be controlled. Would I want the same for real people? No, not really. But I draw a distinction between businesses and people; the latter have inalienable rights, the former may merely be granted some at whim or not at all.
-- 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.
It is their option to do this, no argument there.
/. community wouldn't spring up elsewhere if Andover went bankrupt?)
I will say, however, that I'm disappointed that the people who are in a position to prevent the world from becoming saturated with advertising are unwilling to take a stand against it.
The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.' When we let businesses get away with pollution, they did it and defended their ability to do so as 'necessary. ' Even today this is claimed, when it doesn't have to be so.
It certainly wouldn't be impossible to enact legislation that barred some or many advertisements - it's been done before, and could simply be a prerequisite of having a business license.
Personally, I will continue my practice of not only using advertising-supported services, but of avoiding the advertisements themselves. I owe publishers nothing:
*I change channels on the tv and radio and kill the volume (mute buttons were hotly decried by advertisers when first introduced, I understand)
*I fast forward through commercials
*I flip straight past ads in magazines
*I ignore billboards (though I do like the efforts of legitmate taggers)
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription. I really don't care if they like it, and believe me, there's relatively little that could happen to impact me. (they really imagine that the
-- 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've bought stuff from ThinkGeek based on seeing a banner ad on Slashdot.
If that's too limited a scope (Yahoo couldn't do this, of course), having a given page be sponsored by someone as a method of advertising is reasonable to me. Just a basic text link of "This news story brought to you by Joe's Shoe Repair and Tattoo Shop - get your wingtips polished and some new ink while you wait!" - much less intrusive. I mean, really, I'm never going to click a banner. I might click a very basic, more-or-less informative link like that.
Just my two cents.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
... interstitial ads and post-mortem popups are even more bloody annoying than banners!!!
:) Maybe an affiliate system (NYT is electronics affiliate of J&R, automotive affiliate of Potamkin, etc) would help, but I absolutely know that interstitials are the worst possible option.
People will end up simply proxying them away in Junkbuster or whatever. If you need to prove you viewed the ad to access the gated content, you'll lose.
Believe it or not, I'm a little disappointed in the online NYTimes, since they don't have the J&R ads from the tuesday edition
How many people hit the back button on a flash thing that doesn't have a skip button?
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
how the heck is a site like this going to be indexed on search engines?
/. reader who clicked on the link to sit through a 20-second Flash ad, do you think this story would have been posted? . can you imagine the torrent of complaints that would rain down if such a link had been posted without a warning?
interstitial ads more or less destroy the one thing that makes the web valuable: the ability to link documents together. . the fundamental, underlying concept of the URL is "hey, here's some information.. come and get it." . not only does putting barriers between users and the information they want raise technical problems, but it *really* screws with your ability to make information globally visible.
the kind of interstitial system this author suggests just doesn't synch up with the basic technology of the web. . the web is stateless, so it doesn't know which pages you've already seen. . that means you have three basic options when it comes to the delivery system:
1 - you make the home page of the site an 'entry tunnel', and leave all your actual content on regular webpages, which leaves users free to circumvent your entry tunnel if they can find any other index that links to the content.
2 - you can hide every single page in the site behind some kind of cookie-based 'has this user viewed enough interstitial advertising?' system, and dump a 20-second Flash ad on any page request that doesn't qualify. . and that would turn into an endless loop for users who don't honor cookies.. the page request prompts a redirect to the Flash ad because there's no cookie, then the Flash ad fails to set a cookie and triggers another request for the original page.. which fails because there's no cookie, so you get another Flash ad, ad nauseam.
3 - you can do your whole site in Flash, which makes any content inside your site inaccessible to anyone who doesn't sit through their daily force-feeding of advertising.
search engines will ignore any site that uses option 2 or 3, and will bypass the entry tunnel of any site that uses option 1. . and since search engines are still the single largest source of new eyes for any website, screwing the search engines means screwing any hope of building or expanding a user base.
using a system like that would be actively hostile to linking from outside, because it amounts to the putting the message "click here for a royal waste of your time" on any site that *does* link to your content. . face it.. if it had been impossible to reach the article in question without forcing every
the whole article could be summed up as, "the web makes it *way* to easy for people to get information, and i can't compete with that using my current business model. . but i'm either too stupid or too cowardly to try searching for a new business model, so i want to make the web just as invonvenient and user-UNfriendly as the media i already understand."
feh.
pay $50 a year for membership or sit through a 20-second Flash-animated commercial
20 seconds?? That's barely time to hit the restroom and grab a snack - but then you won't have missed anything when you get back, unlike commercial tv/radio.
Another revenue model is to have free web pages, but twice a year remove most content and beg for donations for two weeks, complete with charts of progress toward goal and gifts.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
you can usually click your browser's stop button to stop the background music.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription.
And without at least one of these, the revenue that justifies a web (or physical) publication comes from where?
Advertising, regardless of what a few minimally-clueful, megalomaniacal marketroids may think, is not about "getting people to buy something", nor even about "getting people to like something", but rather "getting people familiar with something" (e.g. a brand name).
A successful advertising campaign should make its subject feel "familiar" to viewers, both in the sense of claimed values of the advertised product (e.g. "less filling and tastes great" [as compared to other brands] - obviously this aspect only applies until the consumer does the comparison themselves, but can at least help get the first sale...) and in terms of name recognition, because people tend to feel more "comfortable" with names they are "familiar" with.
This is why, as many other posts have pointed out, "click-through" is a really bad measure of ad success. Since almost nobody (statistically speaking) is going to see an ad for something and immediately decide that they need to go buy "Brand X Thingamajigs" right away, it might seem as though the ad isn't doing anything. What they can't measure well is how many people, weeks later, decide they could really use a "Thingamajig", and go to the store and buy "Brand X" because that's the one they subconsciously feel the most comfortable with. ("I've never owned a Thingamajig before, but I remember hearing about Brand X somewhere, whereas I've never heard or Y or Z, so I might as well get X...").
Of course, GOOD advertising should also avoid the "familiarity" including an association with feelings of annoyance. ("Brand X? Hey, that's those annoying jerks with those irritating ads! I think I'll try brand Y instead..."). For THAT reason, I would expect "pop-up" and other "interruption based" ads would be even more of a failure (especially full-page ones) on the whole, no matter whether the "click-through" rate goes up or not.
Personally, in the bizarre never-neverland of my twisted mind, I think this presents an opportunity to kill two metaphorical birds with one metaphorical stone: <OffTopic>With the problems of mass media producers tightening the screws on what few 'fair use' and related rights individuals have while buying up and absorbing (and/or putting out of business) smaller, more independent sources of "content", I'd like to see more "GPL-style" content (independent movies, animation, music, etc.)</OffTopic>, but obviously, somebody's got to pay for production and distribution of it. So...product placement. Here's what I keep thinking: (See, this long rant really does get to a point, eventually...)
Let's say Joe Schmoe decides to start up a daily web-based comic, initially for fun. It turns out to be pretty good and popular, and since Joe Schmoe doesn't sue people for setting up fansites, emailing copies of the comic to people, etc., word spreads quickly and soon Joe Schmoe needs to buy more bandwidth to handle the popularity. Now...one of Joe Schmoe's characters is, say, a cola junkie. Joe Schmoe might decide that this character seems like the sort who would like brand X, Y, or Z cola, so he emails the marketing departments of these real-world companies saying "Whoever offers the best sponsorship deal becomes this character's preferred brand of cola"...
Of course, this will only work if the marketing people "get it", but it would be perfect advertising - it's non-intrusive [and is, in fact, associated with a pleasant and popular web-comic], it gets spread widely anywhere copies of the webcomic go [because it's part of the actual CONTENT, not a separate intrusion that can be filtered out], and helps fund Joe Schmoe's hypothetical "open" content which is free of mainstream-media control.
End result - more "free" content, and less annoying ads. Could it work, at least on a small scale? Or am I just smoking crack?
---
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
"Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life." - Carl Lash 1978
People don't respond to normal advertising by mindlessly running out and buying things. Instead they become accustomed to the idea that buying things makes them happy. Why should online advertisers expect immediate returns (click-throughs) from advertising?
Yeah, but the problem with that is that it makes it so you can't click on links that open in a new window. They need to change it so that it only disables window popups that weren't immediately preceded by a click on the relevant link.
-lx
This reminds me of the great filtering system NetPositive 3+ for BeOS used to have. User-defined filtering rules that worked for almost anything, and it was actually built into the browser, so it would remove the offending html from the page before it hit the renderer.
-lx
http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar0418200 1.html#Headline8299
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
What is cable? I still wrap myself in foil and pray that I can get 4/5 local channels on the average day. (okay, so not quite, but really, I don't know many people that even have cable, availability is an issue, but still...)
ABC,NBC,CBS,FOX,PBS,UPN,and a few others that I don't know the names of, are all free services. All I have to do is buy a TV, but the service itself is free.
What?
The must-watch-20-second-animation idea will not work, because the server has no guarantee that the user watched (or even saw) the ad...
...unless they make it interactive (e.g. have a quiz afterwards).
I can think of nothing else that would jumpstart AI research so fast.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The problem isn't that people don't click through, it's that they are counting the click throughs. There are all these outragous statistics that say the internet doesn't work for this or that. Like 60% of web shoppers abandon items in their shopping cart and don't complete the sale. How many shoppers in the real world walk into a store and don't buy something after picking it up and looking at it? How many TV viewers go buy a Coke after the ad is on TV? The click through statistics have no perspective. They have no idea how well they build brand recognition or anything. How many click throughs is considered succesful? According to the guy who wrote the article, 1% wouldn't be good enough. I think 1% would be an incredible success. Banner ad execs put themselves out of business by selling statistics that don't look good even when they are good.
CoachS said:
r na l.open","noAccess");
The model that's even more maddening to me are sites that spawn additional browsers without asking me. I hate clicking to a site only to have 3 more browser windows pop up with surveys and videos and ads -- even worse when you're trying to leave the site to have multiple, persistent, ads flung at you without recourse. This kind of browser-jacking is a fast way to get on my list of sites I'll never come back to.
If you use mozilla (0.8+), including the following in your prefs.js will help:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinte
More on this in the mozilla 0.8 release notes.
As many folks have said, the real failure of banner ads isn't in the medium, it's in the message itself.
I click on lots of banner ads, when the ad looks interesting and I have a reasonable basis to believe that the ad won't take me to some popup happy fraud-site. Most banner ads, however, don't satisfy my criteria: If the advertisment itself is obviously trying to defraud the viewer (e.g. the "Your Internet Connection is not Optimized" ads that masquerade as an MS Windows dialog (I only use MacOS and Linux, so the stupidity of this approach is extra obvious)) what can you expect of the site that comissioned it?
As I said, I click on banner ads all the time, on Slashdot, on MacCentral and MacInTouch, on Salon and a number of other reputable pages. I have learned that I can trust the ads I see on these pages to take me to vendors I can trust who are hawking wares that I might be interested in. Any time I see a banner ad masquerading as a dialog box or an interactive game or poll, I simply steer clear of it (and, possibly, of the entire site, depending on my irritation level).
It's not banner ads that aren't working: it's the folks who think them up, and the folks who comission them.
Anyone know what's going on with Slashdot. I keep getting either time outs, or rather interesting rendering of pages.
Yes:
- li nux-i386.tar.gz
http://www.webwasher.com/download/webwasher-3.0
I don't know about that, look to the DMCA. It allegedly made circumvention software - and reverse engineering - illegal. I still see a lot of circumvention taking place, and reverse engineering hasn't stopped.
The corporate oligopolies could probably make ad circumvention illegal, but is the public going to agree to this part of the social contract? If they succeed in this, it will just be another uneforceable law on the books that will be ignored by most, prosecuted rarely and continue to degrade any possibility of respect for all laws. I would lump it in the same category as cohabitation, prostitution and gambling.
I don't remember who said it, but "Nothing breeds contempt for the law like passing laws which are unenforceable."
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Oh yeah... right. See, I filter those.
About the time that banner ads started using animated gifs I got annoyed with them. I looked around and pretty quickly found I wasn't alone. Other people had already developed solutions to eliminate ads. Since that time every computer I use has had something in place to remove banner ads before I ever see them. These days my filters are good enough that I very rarely ever see a banner, and once I do I won't see another one on that site again.
My approach was technical enough that a lot of people couldn't easily do the same thing. A lot of people I know have simply become desensitized to banner ads. They can read an article while ignoring the flashing, spinning, blinking, ads that surround it. The end result is that they don't notice the ads either.
Advertising on the internet can work, but the problem is that people have^H^H^Hhad too much confidence in places like doubleclick.
The creation of the "banner ad" was a double-edged sword. By making all the banners the same size they made it easy to rotate ads and not alter the look of a page. But they also made all ads look pretty much the same, and they made the ads less relevant to the page they were on.
By using cookies companies like doubleclick tried to make the ads target the user. But unless I'm wrong they don't relate to the page they're on at all.
Doubleclick's dominance in online advertising was another double edged sword. With most pages on the 'net showing doubleclick ads and serving doubleclick cookies they are able to profile a person pretty well. But at the same time they show this person the same ads on every site they go to. So the person quickly begins to tune them out.
Ads work best when they:
The perfect example of this is the link to a book on amazon at the end of a book review. It provides value to the person seeing it because if they want to buy the book it's easy to do. It also relates to the content (the book review).
There are drawbacks to this method, however. One is that the impartiality of the content (book review, news item, whatever) is now suspect, afterall there's a financial incentive to get more people to buy the book or whatever. The second is that it takes more work -- I think this is the one that matters. People are pretty lazy. It's much easier to drop a banner-generator into your web page than to figure out what kind of relevant ads you can drop in. But the easier it is for a web page author to put an ad into a web page, the easier it is for someone else to take it out.
The fundamentally important thing that advertisers need to learn is this. If you're showing me ads on my computer is that I'm not a captive audience anymore.
If you won't provide me with a value to seeing your ad, I'll make sure I won't see it.
TV ads you have to sit through as you don't want to miss what's coming up next. That will not be the case here, you can come back at any time and the ad will be done. (Unless they decide to really, really become a pain in the ass and give you like five seconds after the add to click through to the article or another ad starts up. In that case I'll simply leave and never come back again.)
"In fact, if my employees came to me and asked if they should pay the $50 fee or waste two minutes of their work day watching ads on The New York Times' website, I would tell them to watch the ads and save the cash (if we were 2,000 people, I would, of course, buy a site license)."
Well, if your employees work 200 days a year and watch 2 minutes worth of commercials a day, assuming that wages are half of total compensation, then unless your employess make less than US$3.75/hour, you are losing big bucks over paying the $50 yearly subscription fee. It would cost my employer upwards of US$500 for me to watch those commercials. Hell, they just paid me US$3 to write this reply.
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
that assumes my cookie travels with me
80% of statistics are made up.
-Vic Reeves
I apologise it was :
"88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot." - Vic Reeves
(With apologies to Sturgeon, who said 94% of everything was crap, and the .sig I saw that said he was an optimist)
And it seems even the remaining 6% should also be treated with caution.
At work My employer pays for the internet useage by volume used
/. i have not found any adds that are targeted at me either.
at home I pay for my phone line at downloading a flash anim over modem is SLOW
people seem to forget not everyone is on a Cable modem here.
If i get ADSL at home then I'll have to pay for volume used too
so bigger longer adds will cost me money
and apart from thinkgeek adds on
American Services are nice , but I'm not in america should banners be targeted by country ?
is the banner industry to small, once these banner companys have sales execs in every country will the click through rate increase ?
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
offtopic hits the nail right on the head.
thanks though!
Juln
Now, just recently, it seems like this phenomenon has caught on overnight with every web site and advertising company on the 'net. It's really freaking irritating. Just go to yahoo! or somewhere and search for something random, and go to a few of the relevant sites. Notice that no matter what it is, there's likely to be at least one site that has those bloody popups.
Time to write a nice little script to disable javascript and automatic popups.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So if I cared enough, I could read parts of their site by hitting Stop really quickly as the page rendered, or by looking through my cache.
Sadly, I don't even care enough to send them hate mail.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
People surfing are acting on an intention to do something, such as to discover information or to amuse themselves.
The problem with banner ads and interruption ads is that they displace this intention either voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is needed are new advertising schemes which co-exist with the user's intentionality, rather than thwarting it. Two suggestions come to mind.
The first is to allow a user to click on a banner ad, and rather than having it interrupt their train of thought, it instead adds it to an agenda that the user can visit latter. For example, I see an ad for a game that looks interesting, and I can put it "on the stack" for later.
The other idea is to let users create interest profiles for themselves, something like a "digital hanky code**" that says things like "I am interested in trains, motorcycles, fine wine, and cats". Advertiser's agents can then scan for these and send me messages (hopefully in an non-instrusive way) that I can get later, again when I am in the mood. There are plenty of technical issues with spam avoidance but they can be dealt with by the message receiver software that could use reputation servers and the like.
-- Jamie
** gays use hankerchiefs to advertise for partners, diferent colors mean diferent interests.
Thank you
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
The article proposes a X second full screen flash display between pages.
How hard would it be to leech the entire site and avoid being exposed to the flash applications? It would add X x Number of Pages to downloading it all, but you could get a coffee or something while its doing that.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
And the quality of the posts from those that run the mind-numbing brain-rotting ad gauntlet would surely degenerate.
Any way to include ad-reading moderation?
-2: I clicked on the ad and checked out the site. I have by now forgotten completely what is going on in the thread. I am ready to babble.
-1: I read the ad completely, I am likely to go offtopic.
0: I ignored the ad, and focused in on the music I have playing
+1: I ignored the ad, and pondered my reply carefully +2: I ignored the ad, and am ready to do an anti-ad rant.
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Somebody needs to get a megaphone and shout "THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE MONEY SELLING CONTENT ON THE WEB". I am so going to whine and cry if the big media mega-corps can't turn the web into TV...not. If I wanted to buy the New York Times, I'd go to a newspaper stand and just grab one, and NOT have to sit through 20 seconds of advertising. Independent and niche media organizations probably have a bit of a better time on the web because their dead-tree publications have a higher profit margin (or seem to live without such a high one) anyway. I would much rather have many independent new sites, subsidized by dead-tree versions, than just a handful of MegaCoNews.com with commercials.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What I would like to see would be whenever a website attempts to popup a window, the browser gives me an option window. ie, "Page hotnudepetrifiedgrits.com is attempting to open a popup. Allow?"
Below the yes/no buttons, there should also be checkboxes. Always allow originating from this server, and never allow. Is this too much to ask?
Has anyone ever thought how alien the idea of a library is to our culture? A place where anyone can go in, fill out a form, and read, copy, check out content for *FREE*. Although libraries are a pretty ancient idea, someone in some place or time, namely Alexandria and Andrew Carnegie, sat down and decided to provide this service without first thinking "i can make a buck off this."
If libraries were invented today, books would be no longer than 10 or 20 pages, with leaflets placed in between random pages offering you a free soda at the nearby convenience store. Categorization systems would be determined by advertisers, an in many cases, the books themselves would be written by the advertisers. Looking for a great sci-fi book? Well sort through these three piles of somewhat related materials and you'll find it, and hopefully find 3 more books you'll want to get.
Is this the internet we want? I personally, do most research on the web, and don't bother with the under funded and politically charged (i.e. child-safe) facilities. This makes it more important to have an equal to the concept of a library on the web. Not every site needs to provide things for free. It is a space which can accomodate multiple models, etc. Yet i'm bothered with the gall that most e-entreprenuers have to *demand* retribution for any casual service they provide. Advertisers demand that they control any media, and we are accustomed to relenting. No one ever questions or responds to the demand that we make other people rich. No one ever questions whether a company has the right to overstep the desires of a group of people (this may get me in trouble with some die hard capitalists out there. i'm simply saying that no one ever questionsa company's model or service, or terms for providing that service. i'm not demanding the end of corporations, etc.).
To tie the argument together, i see the recent debate and action over "making the web profitable" and making web advertisement more effective as extremely blind. No one steps out of the demand that the internet, before providing a place for peopel to place home pages, or conduct software development, etc, *must* create revenue or be a failure. I actually think the web *can* be made profitable, but it will take a cultural shift, over many years in which both corporations and people become innately familiar with the medium and don't relegate it to the same fate as radio*.
christian.
* radio languished as a "toy" for about 10 years before corporations stole the radio networks. people made radios, and radio transmitters in their garages and hosted radio shows out of their own living rooms. It was hailed as the tool to make democracy truly possible (sound familiar?). However, two things came together at the right time:
> -Vic Reeves
Vic was an optimist
- Tackhead
(With apologies to Sturgeon, who said 94% of everything was crap, and the .sig I saw that said he was an optimist)
Hmm. Guess too many beer-cans-and-chicken-bones spammers said "we're opt-in!" and too many non-DMA goons saw through the DMA's attempt last year to redefine "opt-in" as "opt-out".
So now whenever I see the term "dedicated e-mail", I'll think "spam".
Nice bit of newspeak, market00ns. Won't help you, though.
Amen. Betcha most of those people are either:
Trying to find out how much the site charges for shipping/handling/taxes which would require that the items be in the cart,
Figuring out if that coupon they heard about on some site like hotdealsclub.com applies to their purchase, or
For some particularly brain-dead sites that don't list prices until you've set up a shopping cart, well, just looking at the damn price tag.
>
> There is a third choice. Get your news from somewhere else.
Yup.
I realized last month that I haven't read a print magazine in two or three years.
When I want to find out what Wired thinks is happening, I go to wired.com. I get the news that day. (And I filter out the LAYER tag with the Doubleclick page for privacy purposes). But even if I didn't filter out the ad, the banner ads are a small portion of their actual content.
Have you seen the ad-saturation of the print version lately? Sheesh! It's like there are about 3 times as many pages devoted to ads as there are articles.
And I'd have to pay for the print version, no less! Double-sheesh! (Yeah, I know it'd cost $10 or more per issue if it didn't have the ads, but my point is that print magazines have lower S/N ratios than the most banner-laden web site, and cost more.)
And last, but not least - I'd get the print version of Wired, umm, lessee, about a month after everything in it happened. The web site is same-day info.
In the case of financial news and other time-sensitive stuff, I've found it to be almost the same deal - I watch the earnings get released after-hours, watch a message board that gets the analyst reports within an hour or so of publication, and by the time I go home at night to watch the same-day TV news, I know what the stories are gonna be that night.
If I read the morning paper at the office, it's mainly as a way of confirming that the headlines in the morning paper - that reflect yesterday's news - are the same ones I thought they'd be, 16 hours earlier.
when I see a copy of the NYTimes laying around, I pick it up and leaf through it.
In an airport, I'd sooner buy NYTimes than USAToday, because I have online experience with NYTimes. I know the Times' writing will satisfy me more than the pretty colors in the alternative.
I would _never_ have become interested in the rag if I hadn't started reading it online.
In addition, I read much less news in my local paper, because I like the non-local coverage in the NYTimes MUCH better. I also tell my friends about it.
There is a Linux version of WebWasher. I'm running it right now. I'd provide a link, but the website is not responding, for some reason.
www.poak.net
So how long do you think these interruption ads will last? I figure when they fail we'll soon have them with a test at the end. Before you can go to the content you'll have to answer things like "What delicious flavors does product X come in?". They'll think this is a great way to make sure they have your attention throughout the ad.
Don't go putting ideas in their heads!
*shiver*
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I mean, this is the time where people buy the TiVo specifically to avoid advertising. Annoying advertising that is. Now what would happen with this interruption based advertising is that people would look for solutions to avoid it. Other browsers, some modifications to the flash engine or whatever drives these ads. I would rather look at raw html code than to have those ads forced on me. It all becomes especially ridiculous when he starts to argue that the NY Times would be an ideal place for this. Hey, once the text is there i hit some equivalent of 'stop' and all the page can do is scroll. If they decide to cut up the articles into so many tiny parts, each headed with advertising i open two windows and read one, while the other loads/advertises in the background. So even with existing browsers noone would look at 20 seconds ads.
On the other hand advertising in journals still seems to work. There are no "click throughs" in journals, so they should stop all advertising there anyway. I think these people confuse advertising with annoying. I would really like to have that guy locked in a room with tv-screens in all directions (even floor/ceiling) with sound he can't turn off and constantly running adverts of 'foo', then after 2 hours of this i'd ask him if he now would like some 'foo'.
Sorry, annoying people until they buy the crap isn't working with todays technology. Because todays technology allows the people to avoid said annoyances. If they make the adverts louder i press the 'mute' button. So advertisers should better rethink their strategy and try to make people interested.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing.
/. story - is histrionics. I think what we're seeing is a glut of supply (more and more websites selling adspace) coupled with the dryup of funding, leading cash-strapped sites to sell adspace cheaper and cheaper. Everyone's desperate for revenue, everyone's competing to bring home some kinda bacon, so it becomes a buyers market for banner ads. Plus, advertisers get to complain about how they "don't work." Naturally the price is going to plummet and sites are going to be in trouble.
This post is dead-on.
I think the current handwringing over the death of the banner ad - including the essay linked to in his
Websites won't be able to survive by charging for content (or by donation boxes). The banner ad strategy is currently the most logical model for generating revenue. Hopefully the market will kill off the weak sites, and that combined with a more realistic set of expectations on the part of advertisers will allow banner ad revenues to creep back up to a sustainable level. I'm not an economist or an advertising guru, and I could be completely off-base about this, but that's what makes the most sense to me.
Those that can ride out the current banner ad depression but stick with it should do OK in the long run. Gimmicky irritating crap like popups and full-screen Flash ads will stay on the fringes, as these and others will continue to be widely despised experiments in form... but right now I'm betting the banner ad will mature into a responsible and productive advertising venue.
It's funny. Tivo is making the TV model of interupting advertising more and more irrelevant. I think the solution for TV will have to be putting ads on screen during programming, not too unlike a banner ad.
Meanwhile this guy says the exact opposite about online ads. Is it just that the grass is always greener or what?
I suppose in both cases people could work around the new ad modes using technology.
The totally flawed premise is that A) interruption-based advertising will somehow lead to higher click-throughs than banner ads-- why would that be true? And B) that Flash ads on a computer are like commercials on TV. Nope! Sorry, people like me who are impatient will just pop open another browser window and start loading/reading something else. Unlike TV, I don't even risk losing what I wanted to see when "changing channels" aka "popping new web pages".
Sigh. More dumb wishful thinking. What the Internet ad guys should really do is get better tracking stats of how much time users's eyes spend viewing paper-based magazine ads or newspaper ads. Then do a nice correlation concluding that Internet ads get you nearly as many eyeball-seconds/impressions for a much lower cost.
--LP
I agree completely. The people who do this should be handcuffed to Bob Sagat[1]. People in advertising often consider themselves creative. But exploiting surface area is NOT a creative endeavor.
I personally engage in unofficial boycotts of companies that have annoying ads. It would be great if people could get together and do some anti-marketing by identifying irritating advertisers and then encouraging people to use their competitors. Maybe a web site with some sort of nomination and voting mechanisms to identify offending advertisers. Eventually, the idiots would stop slapping ads on every conceivable surface.
[1] Yes, I realize this is a violation of the Geneva Convention....
Funadmental to the nature of this debate is the definition of a banner ad. Is a banner ad:
.. what about the advertiser that is neither branding, NOR has anything to offer at their website. This represents a sizeable portion of advertisers. Now, if you believe the web-centric model of current banner advertising IS indeed flawed (which I agree with), you have an option:
/do/ gain the ability to offer value and interactivity in a small space without the surfer leaving the page he or she is on, in addition to the web page not losing a surfer (which is a whole paradox in itself .. if a site has a great click thru rate, than its turn-over is also quite high, thus losing additional traffic and 'strickiness', which counts when bartering advertising inventory deals).
/requested/ (a la free product demo video, etc).
.coms that blew their budgets on nation-wide prime-time advertising. Answer: because there was no value in the advertising. The next generation of advertsing MUST introduce the ability to offer point-of-touch value, and I can garauntee that if companies can offer compelling stories to foster customer relationships and communication (whether its customer aquisition or retension), this as-yet identified medium (the interactive banner being my best guess) will present better ROI and value to both advertiser, consumer, and inventory-provider (ie, website) than any advertising medium ever has.
....
a) a gif/jpg at the top of a page
or
b) a gif/jpg at the top of a page that leads you to a URL
Well, the answer is both, depending on whether the advertiser is branding (which is usually paid for using cost-per-thousand views) or ROI (which is usually paid on a cost-per-click).
BUT
c) an interactive gif/jpg banner which expands (java, flash, whatever) to offer you point-of-surf value (a contest, a 2 for one offer, a branded service offer a-la sports scores to your cellphone thanks to ESPN or whatever)
Now, as an advertiser, are no longer worried about having to offer something on your website as a retailer which really can't offer any value in a web-centric medium. But you
So, as always, everyone takes the IT WORKS or IT SUCKS approach, when what is really needed is just a different way of looking and implenting the one thing we all know to be true. And that is that surfers will HATE supersitials and find ways around then; when offering content, interactivity and value add in exchange for consumer information and customer relationships by way of a direct, unobtrusive interactive banner touch point is within technological grasp. Indeed, my most memorable experiences with advertising have constituted advertising i have
The big thing I find ironic is that if the banner is dead, but superstitials rule (ie, TV-style commercials), why didn't it help all those
Again, the fundamental thing here is that people do not want to 'go' somewhere else when they wish to request advertising information; this is why a model like the interactive banner, ie a 'volountary' supersitial, if you will, is so crutial to the success of advertising online. Otherwise, people will just keep ignoring
Garret
"Old man yells at systemd"
From someone who works on the technology end for a major ad tech company, you are bang on. The ability to measure ROI is 'immediate' online, but also one big lie. Much like assuming that the guy who's slept with 50 girls is better looking than the one who's slept with 5. What did the girls look like? How many encounters did they all have, total? How good was the sex? When you ask a stupid question, you'll get a stupid answer; and if you're a stupid advertiser, you'll probably make a stupid judgement. Of course, the technology is still pretty new, so you cant expect a suit-industry like advertising to get it right away, but it /is/ pretty frustering to watch it from the sidelines, knowing what the average surfer is like and what truely constitutes a successful communicative session between a banner and a surfer.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Try this one : http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar0418200 1.html#Headline8299
What you are asking for is smaller, less intrusive ads. You also wish for the advertising to be informative, useful and entertaining.
Please forgive my lack of understanding here. It just seems that it'd be pretty had to have all of that at once.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
What if I'm not running on a system that supports Flash? Am I blocked from seeing your site? Or do I get to go straight on in, avoiding the ad?
What if I write a "Flash" plug-in that says "Yeah yeah yeah, I've show the ad, now let me in"?
Actually, I'd LOVE a subscription service that allowed me access to a fast server, no ads, and no intrusion into my personal life. Don't try to track me, just give me a way to get in (passwords e-mailed to my account that expire in a short period of time (with no spam as baggage?)) and let me go.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can live with banners because I can mentally ignore them, I'm fairly sure "interruption" style ads will go nowhere (or if they do make an appearance I'll be first in line for blocking software ^_^).
I guess I'm just sick of all the business analysts out there (at least the ones that work where I do) who bitch and complain about how fruitless web-advertising is. My only hope is that one day advertisers will realize that web-advertising is not unlike throwing money into lava; pointless and costly.
I for one would not cry a drop if web-advertising "just went away", sure it'll never happen, but I can dream can't I?
-----
crazy dynamite monkey
I really feel that someone needs to say:
"How much click through do you get out of an ad printed in the paper edition of the New York Times?"
No one has damn clue. It's almost impossible to measure. The effectiveness of a traditional ad (newspaper/tv/radio/billboard/whatever) and the effectiveness of a banner ad are probably about equal (which is something most people seem to forget). It's just really easy to measure "click-through".
-slackerboy
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
heh. And the only reason I click on banner ads is because it's the only way to get a "patriotic campaign" going on at Astronest.
Nuh uh! I don't know which "most" you're reading, but I know there are at least some who do indeed put ads in the middle of their columns. However, tons of major ones (like nytimes, latimes, cnn, and washingtonpost) put them in rows or columns at the top or side of the page. Of course you might also cut off a menu when you scroll this off the screen, you can view just the news column and no ads, generally. Or at least quite frequently.
People aren't used to interacting with advertisements. In fact, I'd go so far as to say people don't WANT to. It's always "yup, there's an ad, I'm going on with my day." When I get up to read the news, I don't WANT to go buy a car, I want to read the %$#@ news!
I wish they'd look at it more like print ads, where you could just buy space on a web page, and there was LOTS of space. I mean, the NYTims shouldn't try interstitials, but it SHOULD sell that 2/3 of the screen not filled by the column. That just makes sense. Then if you don't want to read the ads, shrink your browser; think of it as folding back half of the newsprint page :)
Oops, looks like they rolled out tomorrow's edition already. Er, today's. Whatever. Click "previous issue," or click here.
First comment is that you'd be best sticking to a standard essay format, such as the five paragraph essay (intro, 3 main ideas, conclusion), rather than writing more-or-less freeform as you are. I see a distinct introduction and conclusion, but neither exhibits a solid thematic direction. Try writing each middle paragraph with one thought in mind where the purpose of that paragraph is to convince your reader of that thought.
Second comment is that your arguments need cohesion and strong support. What is this essay about? Is it a short history of the Internet? Is it a rant on rant on corporations that track your every move? Or, is it an argument that the Internet is the next major selling medium? You need a core focus to which all of your core paragraphs provide support. Also, many of your arguments are weak. You say, "many companies have also found that selling ads can replace charging for their services." I've found the current impression to be that companies cannot survive on advertisement alone. Anyway, is this a bad thing? In many cases, including your first sentence, "the internet was supposed to be free, free from external control, free from corporate influence, free from your identity," you imply that advertising is bad, yet much of your essay merely talks about how Internet advertising has changed, not how it is destroying privacy or eliminating freedom.
Third comment is that you should use spelling and grammar sentences: wevsites is not a word and, "due to low bandwidth and a limited amount of online sales," is not a sentence.
Good luck with the rewrite. Even the best writers edit their work many, many times before they consider their work to be of publishable quality.
Jason
I support the ad model that will allow me to view all of this information, at any time of the day or night, from anywhere I can log in, COMPLETELY FOR FREE!
I don't understand what the problem is with banner ads. Even full page ones, even ones that make me click to continue. As long as it makes the access to the information free I think it's a decent tradeoff.
Let me get this straight. Companies all over the world are struggling to find a way to give you *free* information and you're whining that the ads are badly targeted or "inconvenient."
Spoiled spoiled spoiled.
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
What do you mean non-willing? No one is forcing you to look at this stuff. If you really think it's so bad then find some other source for information.
Personally I like using the Internet to get information. If I have a choice between 1) paying a subscription and not seeing ads, 2) seeing ads but paying nothing, or 3) just living without, I'll take option 2 any day. But everyone is free to take option 3. I just don't want to be *forced* to use option 1.
"First, companies are not trying to give you something for free. They are trying to make money."
Well duh. But if they can make money by advertising and still give me articles and news for free then great.
Here's my point - I prefer free.
There's a nifty independent newspaper here in San Diego that is free. You can pick it up all over town and not pay a cent. It has interesting articles and very handy listings for local events. IT'S FREE! But it also has *tons* of ads. No problem I just flip past. The paper seems to be doing just fine.
I would have no problem with an Internet site that worked that way. In fact it might even be better that way. People wouldn't put up with annoying ads unless the content of the site was worth the trouble.
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
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avoid them...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...
Here it is.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change, please.
I totally agree with you, but I think we must go further still. Why do we need or why shopuld we allow advertising at all? This is not a troll; hear me out.
I think advertising has gone way too far and many people are so sick of seeing commercials everywhere. Especially since everyone knows that commercials lie to you, treat you like an idiot and generally waste your time. I mean, what is really the purpose of advertising? It is to increase the sales of a certain product through:
Making you believe the product is better than it is and/or better than the competitors' offerings.
Making you believe the product will grant you something it will not (e.g. sex appeal from a certain soda).
Making you associate the product with things cool but unrelated (pop stars, windsurfing, snowboarding etc.).
IMO this is nothing but fraud - tho legal fraud to be sure, getting increased sales on false premises. In addition to that, advertising also has the following effects:
Making the product more expensive, since the advertising costs must be recouped.
Wasting valuable resources (time, paper, transport, bandwidth, storage space) and increasing waste production, for something almost no one wants to see.
And to boot, it is contagious. Since other companies use advertising, it creates an arms race where every company must do it, only to keep up. Like in Alice in Wonderland, you must run very fast only to be able to stay in the same place.
Good products need no commercials - they advertise themselves thru word of mouth, happy customers spreading the word. I would like a world where all advertising (in current form) is outlawed. That is, pushy advertising that steals my time when I have no interest whatsoever in the the product it tries to sell.
Of course companies must be allowed to present information about their products, but it should be done in a pully way. For instance, if I am interested in purchasing, say, a new car, then I go to a web site with links to all car manufacturers, and look there for something that might meet my needs. Then I might read car newsgroups and owner sites to see what impression others have got of the model in my mind, and then make an informed decision. This is BTW the way I purchase things right now.
Websites should need no ads either. What we really don't need is an Internet little more than glorified TV, packed with ads and eye-candy but almost no content. The very best websites are done by people who love whatever they are putting out info about, and therefore present the content for free. Once most people have fixed net connections server space and bandwidth should be no problem either, except in some very popular sites (e.g. /.), where a distributed solution is probably the best.
As for the people working in advertising, they will have to find something better and more worthwhile to do for a living. That is what I did (yes, I've worked in advertising).
/Dervak
I don't now, but if they were using the cookie to not show me ads I'd accept it.
One problem with clicking on an ad, though, is that it breaks your train of thought. Suppose I'm reading through a couple of articles on lamprey cyborgs, and I come across an ad for Whoop-Ass cola. I think to myself, "Yum tasty", but I don't want to click there because it would make me lose my train of thought. So, to get me to click there and incur the opportunity cost of diverting my thought processes, they'd have to give me a pretty big incentive.
HOWEVER, if they could set it up (maybe with a cookie?) such that I could click on the ad without losing my page, and get a coupon added to a coupon box (maybe in the sidebar) that I could look at later on when I'm feeling thirsty, that would probably work really well.
What do you think?
After making that last posting, I got the sudden urge to try to register something like clickcoupon.com and set up a centralized coupon clicking system. Then I realized, this doesn't even have to be centralized! You could make a trivially simple javascript program that, when clicked, pops up the name of your product, and puts a little cookie on your drive, (and, if you have the right mozilla plug-in, maybe adds an xml item to your "coupon box"). Then when you surf over, later, to get some soda or whatever, the site notices your coupon (cookie) and will give you the choice of taking up the special offer.
Hmm... So... We could write a GPL plugin and help people install it. It'd be way less intrusive than full screen ads, less disruptive than clicking over to a merchant site when you're in the middle of something else, and yet would succeed in establishing introducing compatible customers and merchants to each other.
If anyone is interested in this, send me an e-mail
I wouldn't mind doing a project like this. Maybe we can save the banner ad! (by turning it into a "click coupon")
Actually, if the criticism of banner ads is based on the low clickthru rate, there is no chance that interruption ads will do any better: Supposing you wanted to read the daily news and, in order to do so, forced yourself to sit through a 20 second commercial. After watching it, are you seriously going to click the "For More Information..." button? Not likely.
So, implicitly, adopting interruption ads means abandoning click-thrus as a measure of success. But if you weren't measuring success by click-thrus in the first place, then how do you know that banner ads don't work?
Personally, I think banner ads should base themselves on the metaphor of a coupon: they should be easy to clip (a single click), and cause as little interruption as possible. They should persist, i.e. remain in a "Coupon Box" until the customer decides to use it. There'd be a couple of benefits over real coupons: you won't lose them, you don't need scissors.
The problem with a lot of discussions over web advertising is that people look at it as a kind of warfare: Advertisers try to wage a brainwashing operation on Consumers, who, in turn, try to resist as much as possible while extracting a maximal amount of free services. I think that's a lose-lose paradigm. Instead, we should view advertisements as a means of matching buyers and sellers. This can be done through a series of pareto optimal transactions.
If I, as a consumer, come across a coupon for a product that I want, I'll feel the urge to clip it. The consumer will likely click if the discount offered by the coupon is greater than the cost (inconvenience) of clicking it.
And here's a really interesting consequence: If you then assign an estimated cost value to the inconvenience of clicking, you can compare that against the value of the coupon. Then you chart the value of the coupon against click-thrus. This would give you some pretty interesting consumer-preference information. Click-thru rates would finally provide some sort of meaningful economic data.
In addition to consumer preference data, the web-coupon would contain information of where it came from. Thus, you would be able to match the ad to the final sale. This, of course, would be very valuable to advertisers and merchants in terms of deciding how much and where to advertise.
So I think coupons, designed to be as little intrusive as possible, would work really well for merchants. And for consumers too, since it minimizes the extent of useless annoyance, while maximizing the number of Pareto optimal web-based transactions.
I don't read the NYT much anymore. Two years ago, the site had it right. When they started putting too much junk on it, I turned off the images and java. This sped things up for a while, and I was happy enough to read their articles and put up with the few logos that made it through. When they started sneaking in AP garbage articles, I was annoyed. I can get a beter AP filter at my local paper, and I don't. When they got so greedy as to break up the articles into many pages each with it's own set of adverts, I quit reading it. Yes, they screwed the pootch.
Publishers that do not get this will perish. No one NEEDS that.
Rackspace, they advertise on Slashdot, A LOT.
At my old job, we hired Rackspace to do our hosting based on a banner ad that I saw on Slashdot. Of course I did my research, but that's how I learned about them. Before the dot-com went under a few months later, they made maybe $10,000 off the account (we had two decked out servers).
Now, with my consulting firm, we are a Rackspace reseller. We are delivering them a contract for $14,000. Of course this was because of my good experience before, but it worked.
When looking for Linux servers, I know to look at VA Linux and Penguin Computing. The latter I only know about from Banner Ads and the occaisional mention on Slashdot, the former I know about from tech rags AND their constant presence on Slashdot.
Banner Ads work for creating brand awareness. On the Internet, where competition is fierce, you either need to own keywords on search engines, or use banner ads to generate awareness.
Alex
There's no way I'm going to sit through a 20-second commercial 5-6 times a day.
Hopefully they'll have the brains to not require this. It would be simple enough to tie advertising to a time-span of site viewing using a cookie. You view one complete ad and your good for the day.
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I think it's odd that they make no mention of affiliate programs. It's been my impression that this model still has some life in it and isn't nearly as annoying as banners. Typically the links are much smaller than banners and they pay more, but the payment is usually tied to more than just a click (like actually buying something.) Amazon probably has the most successful of the programs, but there are hundreds of others.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I think the failure of Banner Ads has more to do with large services like Doubleclick than it has to do with the nature of the medium itself.
Advertisers are moving away from banner ads because they're not getting results they were promised and they don't understand it well enough to make their own arrangements. Services like doubleclick promised to make it easy for both advertisers and the sites by taking care of everything. That was fine when advertisers simply wanted to advertise on this 'Internet' thing.
Now advertisers are questioning the results and the industry's answer is "We can make the ads bigger." Advertisers don't need bigger ads, they need ads that actually reach their target audience. Some advertisers, like the ones on Slashdot, are seeking out sites with a niche audience that matches their target. This works for some products, but not others. What advertisers need are demographics, and traffic, to target.
Perhaps something like 'Neilson ratings' will come along for the Internet. In exchange for a few dollars, you download a program that gets some census type info from you and watches your browsing habits for a couple of weeks. These statistics are then anonymously correlated and then advertisers know things like site popularity by demographic group and they can target their ads accordingly.
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
He is, in effect saying: "Small, tasteful ads don't work... and bigger, less tasteful ads won't work... so lets force people to sit through huge, massively annoying ads instead."
The real truth is that banner ads do work... they just don't work well enough to pay the salary of a whole giant staff of writers, managers, and execs with dotcom aspirations. Even more true is the fact that we are literally surrounded by advertising these days... far more than ever before. We have many more choices too... hundreds of channels, thousands of magazines, and a Google of websites. Still, the amount of viewers hasn't grown to keep up with the growth of all these advertising choices.
What would you call it if a government based a currency on gold, but then printed tons and tons of funny money to build all sorts of things they couldn't otherwise afford? What would be the effect? Inflation. That is the real problem with advertising everywhere... the cost is horribly inflated.
Those involved in advertising vehemently deny this, of course. Advertising is like a currency unto itself... usually it involves selling air. Sometimes paper... sometimes bits and bytes. It's a currency, in that it has little inherent value unless we believe it does.
Advertising today is more expensive than ever. Back in the '60s, you could produce and air a nationwide ad for a few thousand dollars, show it during Gunsmoke and get, say, 25% of the country to see it. Today, you can spend a million dollars and you're lucky if you get a fraction of the response.
In other words, inflation. The ads are the currency, and we are the gold that backs the currency up. The growth of the potential audience for advertising and of the standard of living for that audience hasn't kept up with the number of ads... by all rights, advertising should be less expensive than ever, and all the web statistics out there are pointing out this fact.
The real problem is that the emperor has no clothes, and that, through statistics, the advertising industry has intentionally overvalued the true value of advertising across the board. They've even built up a dogmatic school of thought which makes questioning the value of advertising a traitorous act. The point of fact is the value of advertising does not equate to the salary of overpaid ad execs, producers, designers, focus groups, etc... it equates to the return on investment. As a business, I want to spend $2 and get $3 back... but with advertising, and especially with online advertising, you're lucky sometimes if you spend $10 and get $1 back.
At the site I help run, we rely on memberships for funding. So far, it looks like we will make about 50 cents per user per year based on our business model. We also find that we get about 35% more growth by being banner ad free, which also translates into additional income. Being member supported doesn't prevent us from making additional revenue from potential business partners, either.
One last point... Take, for example, the excellent web-based cartoons at Spumco... If you had long, funny, animated ads created by some great talent, you'd expect a lot of success, right?! Well, that never really materialized... If John K., a person who has won numerous awards for both animation and advertising, can't make web-based advertising work, why should it work better for anyone else? If you must go begging for money, why not go straight to the source?
Banner ads are perfectly fine as an advertising medium. The problem is that most of the dot-Bombs buying them don't know how to advertise.
They:Advertise on sites whose user profile doesn't match their market audience.
Measure their ads using immediate "click through" measurements, instead of building brand equity.
Mismatch the pitches. Often the dullest banners hide the best deals, while the most eye-grabbing ones lead nowhere.
Think advertising can make up for a company that provides inferior customer-value.
If full-page advertisements become the norm, then junkbuster and other such advertising deletion programs will become the norm too.
If you want to see net based advertising work well, you need look no further than ThinkGeek, which targets its ads directly at.. well people like us.
Banner ad promoters don't get it because they don't understand Web users. They fail to understand that the Web medium makes it possible to ignore ads in ways not possible in traditional media. And people will work hard to ignore ads. Finally, if people ignore the ads, ad buyers won't buy the ads.
The author, however, doesn't get it because he does not understand ad buyers. Ad buyers really don't want to learn about the different demographics of different Web site users. While his approach might work for the New York Times, it almost certainly would not work for anything with a lesser name. Simply put, it is too much work for ad buyers to worry about all those details.
If the NY Times gave me a choice of either paying for access to their site or enduring more intrusive ads than they have now, I'd reach for my credit card.
The problem here is that it works for the Times, whose content is consistently useful to me. I'm less likely to pay for thestreet.com, because I can't be as sure that I'll get my money's worth (this I learned from their free 30-day trial). But thestreet.com might one day have that golden nugget that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
What really makes my blood boil is having to endure advertising on seemingly any printable surface. Now they're pasting ads on floors, gas station squeegee handles, and even baggage carousels (not above them, the actual segments your suitcase slides over--no way to look away).
You have one guess as to why I never want an internet-connected refrigerator!
I couldn't find the story where the link pointed (at Silicon Alley Daily), but did find what appeared to be it at Digital Coast Weekly
One should pause before making well-armed paranoids feel foolish, no matter how foolish they seem.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Interruption ads would work in streaming media, especially since most streaming media is played by closed-source players that could disable fast-forward. But streaming media has to be something people really want to watch before they bother. Most web sites are akin to print media. And interruption-based ads in print media will annoy more than they sell. (It's been tried; there was a period in the 1970s when most paperback books came with ads on stiff card stock bound in. People hated that so much the industry had to drop it.)
If this were going to work, it would have been tried in streaming porn by now. Has it?
Spamcop, of all things, has "interruption-based advertising" now. If you use Spamcop to report spam, and aren't a paying member, you get a 5-second JavaScript countdown before the requested action takes place. (Although that's not why you want to become a member; it's the incoming mail filtering service that's useful.)
I'm wondering how long it will take before they realize that any form of advertising won't work. The only reason I click on any ads is for pity reasons, such as when I feel bad that a site is going broke.
Actually, I don't see how traditional advertising works either. Coke is the king of sugar beverage ads. I rarely drink it.
Unless a product is new and unknown, I can't see any benefits of advertising.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
While I don't think that the average person is going to be switching to a virtual desktop or unloading their sound module it is a valid point. Advertisements in a "on demand" system doesn't really work so well. I end up watching some advertisements because I don't want to miss one second of the Simpsons or whatever. With interruption based advertising like that then it will be all to easy to avoid and with no consequence since, the webpage that you are trying to get to in the first place isn't going anywhere.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
What if I'm not running on a system that supports Flash? Am I blocked from seeing your site? Or do I get to go straight on in, avoiding the ad?
If you're not running on a system that supports the latest version of Macromedia Flash technology, NY Times Digital would be happy to sell you a new Duron-based PC for $1500, including a FREE LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION to ad-free NYTimes.com.
Will I retire or break 10K?
THIS WILL DESTROY THE FUCKING INTERNET
Maybe it won't turn it into the ghost town some of these other goddamn sillicon valley airheads would create, but it would turn it into "TV 2". There is a reason i do not watch TV (except public TV) or listen to the radio (except public radio): I have to be bombarded with ads every minute, even if i pay for the channel. Once i have to watch an ad to enter a hardware site, it defeats the purpose of having information there. No longer will i be able to "just go check this site quick" if i need to look at something- i have to watch a freaking ad which may take more time than getting the actual content itself.Lets clarify. A front-page ad that must be watched will not be any better than a banner ad- and not just from a consumer point of view. Those who do commonly use websites with this form of advertising will merely leave the site always open. If the site uses a cookie based system to make sure you can't leave it open for days at a time, some bright person will forge cookies from all the big sites and presto, no ads! Now this particular method might not be used, but expect interruption ads to last about as long as DVD encryption. And if you think DVD decryption is widespread, wait until joe-AOL-luser wants to get rid of those ads. Think of the virus potential of a "ad remover" that does nothing of the sort. While any of these won't necessarily destroy a site, they will contribute.
Why do i only watch public TV/listen to public radio? Simple: no ads. While both public tv and radio are slowly creeping toward more advertising, they are still not unacceptable at this point: the content doesn't get interrupted with the ads- hence, it fails to be "interruption based" advertising; or more accurately: it is not possible to advertise in that manner as it is on commercial stations. So what does this mean? Not just an ad before the front page, but before every page. Imagine those huge multi-part hardware reviews (aka, we want ad money) but with 3 second ads before each page. Ready to leave the site yet?
Maybe you aren't if you have a 1.5 mbit/s DSL connection, but if you're still stuck dialing then you lose. Lets do the math: even a 75k ad at 5k/sec constant would take 15 seconds to download. Considering that people rarely wait 5 seconds for a page to load, that's a pretty big incentive to NOT do interruption based ads.Still disagree with me? Well, lets look at two years down the road. "Ad buster" programs are so widespread that everyone uses them. There are ads on the front page (some on every page) but no one sees them- at least, no one with any sense of technology. And remember, five years ago barely anyone knew about the internet so don't think everyone will be completely unaware of the internet's capabilities in two years; i'm not saying it WILL happen, but i wouldn't be too surprised. The ad companies decide to do what companies do best: sue. Lets say they lose, then "interruption based" ads on the web are dead. Game over. Back to square one. Another damn stupid idea from the guys who brought you the dot-bomb economy. If they win, however, imagine the TV advertisers drooling over a settlement like that. Want to use TiVO to skip all the ads on your favorite TV shows? Can't do it unless you want to get beaten around by the corperate thugs. Want to use a VCR to record your favorite show? No can do: its an illegal ad-bypassing technology.
I could go on, but i've said enough.
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
I really dont understand why online advertising has to be different from normal print/radio/televison advertising. The big problem seems to be that ads are required to be targeted and revenues are usually based on click throughs. Television shows dont target specific products....and they dont pay for them based on the number of people that rush out and call the company. Why do banners need to be interactive at all? What happened to the idea of brandrecognition? Another thing I have never understood is why not look at a model of sponsorship similar to the way PBS does it, a general news site about racing for instance could be sponsored my Texaco etc....
It must be really interesting living in the world of total friggin' ignorance that advertisement agents live in.
Don't these people realize that there is a "mute" button on your TV set because consumers demanded one? Don't these people realize that the reason consumers demand such a thing is because advertising is FUCKING ANNOYING?!?!
Around christmas last year I stayed at a friend's place for a day on my way to my parent's place. It was the first time in about six months that I had actually watched TV. I was completely blown away by how much I was expected to be nothing more than a pair of eyeballs to advertise at, and the content was just an excuse for ad placement. What surprised me even more was the fact that I was surprised by it. I had grown up in a world where this was *normal*, and it had taken me months to unlearn my tolerance for such bullshit, and now they want to do the same thing for the web? Give it up! That's a better way to lose customers than to keep them coming back.
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"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
You forgot one: 6. Cowboy Neal
Greetings,
My company is considering more ways to include more ads per pageview. We serve a lot of streamed video coming from our cable TV shows.
One idea, before each video, show a streaming ad. At first the limit was 15 seconds, but we recently closed a deal for a 30(!) second ad, to be played before EVERY video.
A second idea is to have a page of ads when you click on a link. This page would refresh in 30 seconds and point you to your desired destination.
A third idea is to stick a screen-wide ad in the middle of our stories. As if the ones at the top and bottom weren't enough.
Am I the only one at my company that feels like we are prostituting ourselves?
I actually like the idea of having an option to pay or watch ads instead. It's flexible, and allows people to visit a site once in a while without having to register *cough*NYT*cough* but still have a way to bypass ads on those sites that they find the most valuable.
One little problem, though: the people with the most disposable income (ie. the best prospects) are people most likely to shell out for the subscription fee. This means that your demographic would quickly go down the toilet.
On another subject, I recently visited a site that had placed several flashing, moving ads *beside* the article. In addition to being annoying, they made it difficult to concentrate on the article, which was what I came for in the first place. I don't even remember what the ads were for, which is worse than with banner ads. Making ads more annoying is definitely not the answer.
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Maybe instant business is not the key, but arguably web pages create an environment where it's a lot easier to say, "Hey! I've been looking for one of those!" [click]. It'd be pretty difficult to stop and buy something advertised on the latest billboard if you're on your way to work, but web pages make that quite a bit more convenient--heck, you can do it while you're AT work.
Moreover, just as easy as it is to click on banner ads and buy something right away, they're also tons easier to ignore. So they fail to create the branding impression in their viewers that TV commercials and billboards are a little more effective at. Sure, you can change the channel, hit the mute button, look away, but if you ask me, banner ads are even more ignored than that. At least, I don't pay much attention to them.
So while you have a valid point, I don't think the comparision can be complete, as the Internet is a different beast than the traditional media of the past.
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
I actually think that the new ad sizes are better. The "old" size would just immediately get pushed off my screen as I scrolled away. That new Huge blob is ugly, but I think the ones with potential are the tall ones like on newsforge.com. They stick around for a bit.
SSL Certificate
As long as click-through is the measure of success, all online advertising will be a "failure." Full-page dancing and singing ads targeted based on location, sex and hair color aren't going to get people to visit Ford's site more than once out of a hundred times, if what the viewers are looking for is the sports scores, any more than a Coke ad is likely to make me immediately walk to the nearest soda machine.
It's long been my contention that the main reason Web banners are unpopular to potential advertisers is because they're one of the few media where you can tell immediately how poorly they work, at least in terms of immediate physical response. If magazines had this ability, think of how the conversations would go:
Exec for liquor company: Can you tell me what percentage of readers who saw our ad immediately got up and poured themselves a glass of Absolut?
Ad salesman for magazine: Um. One out of two thousand. Approximately.
Exec: What? That's ridiculous! Magazine advertising is worthless!
Salesman: Well, uh, at least you did better than Tanqueray!
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
You will probably get more feedback if you provide an email address, either on SlashDot or on your web page.
YOW! I just found a copy of advert.dll installed on my machine.
It was a cool design, folks choose their ads. Majorly different than DoubleClick, which has to guess all the time what folks want. The more info they have, in theory the better guesses they can make but more DB crunching they have to do. In our system, they told us what they wanted (well, picked form what was available). I wrote the server, and it was all C array lookup tables. We served off of a single Dell 700 or so MHz box.
I think one problem with Internet advertising is a flawed model. Other advertising is there for brand awareness. There's no 'clickthrough' on a magazine page. You look, you're reminded of it. It's worked, the really ugly gym shoes I'm wearing as I type I bought because of an ad. Did I rush out to buy the shoes when I saw the ad? No. I was reading my magazine (and bitching about too many ads too). Digital Convergence and the Evil CueCat wanted to get away from this and actually link reading to a direct action, but will fail because it doesn't realize that it's interrupting people, making them turn on their computer and load some stupid software for the advertisers benefit.
The "revenue by clickthrough" model has a serious flaw: it depends on counting people who were willing to be interrupted in their flow of work. If I'm on a site, I'm usually looing for something. I don't want to be distracted by shopping on eBay or whatever, so I'm not clicking on an eBay banner. Other times, I go specifically to eBay, because I'm there to buy stuff, partially because of seeing some ad earlier. Interuption based advertising (called interstitials) don't get around the basic problem of interrupting my initial task. Just distracts me more, and I'd be mad for it.
And the net will survive. Certain sites will still be around, for love or whatever. Other sites will try various pay models, but the net isn't going away.
The correct link is here.
And TV isn't free to begin with. We all pay for cable. It is amazing how many of us forget that.
It's easy to think that in this day and age but the simple truth is that while cable TV (And it's kissing cousin satellite TV.) require you to pay, TV still is a broadcast medium.
Check your local TV Guide and you'll find local ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS, UPN, WB, etc. affiliates that could be picked up with nothing more than a pair of rabbit ears.
Cable TV is just another way of transmitting a signal. When you pay for cable TV your really paying for the networks that do not want to set up broadcast towers: CNN, ESPN, A&E, DSC, etc. Also notice that these network do air commercials. You have to pay additional money to receive channels that do not support themselves w/o advertising: HBO, ShowTime, Starz.
I agree with you that, "It is this kind of old thinking (referring to the article) that shows how new and primitive the current web is. Not even the smartest guys have figured anything out." However the revenue modal for TV is a very different animal entirely so that last comparison is simply not true.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
That's what we are all looking for right? Deeper and wider content for free. Well, these full-page ads would do that. I would love to see the Times' website add staff instead of making cuts as they have done. If I have to sit through a 20-second ad for every 10 pages so they can keep the free content coming, bring it on.
I feel this is only partly correct. Sure it is true that I want to get Good Content (tm), and it is even more true that I am not willing to pay for that. This site is one of the finest examples of how the internet (and a popular website) can create a community that delivers far more interesting and far more to-the-point information than any marketing-droid could ever hope to feed trough any means of advertisement.
Let's face it, hardly any of us are right now e.g. looking for a car that even remotely matches what some marketing department has decided should be pushed out of the assembly halls in the next quarter. It immediately follows that any car-commercial will be completely lost on me. And even if I wanted to buy a car, I'd make sure that I get the right information, and I know I won't be getting that from any advertisement.
On the other hand, if 'they' would decide to start feeding me interrupt based ads while I'm visiting a website, then I'll just install whatever workaround needed to not be bugged by that. Hey, These are computers remember. Computers can do anything. Even blocking ads.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
In general, I find your post to be thoughtful, but there are a few things a must disagree with.
It's very easy to portray what the linux community does as theft of products, services, and a threat to the United States economy. As long as the community supporting linux has the reputation as thieves, it will also tend to give the product a bad name.
I do not see where open source is theft of services. The packages I have seen included with Linux distros (for example Sun Office) are there quite legally. I can name many Windows programs (including Windows itself) that have been put up on warez sites, but I cannot name any commercial Linuz packages off the top of my head. I'm sure there are true Linux Warez out there somewhere, but not like Windows apps. How does this give Linux users a bad name?
The DeCSS court case is the only major battle I can think of that involves Linux. Even then, the root of the case is the rights of 2600 to link to code that is "illegal" under the DMCA. The whole crux of DeCSS is that Linux users want to be able to watch purchased DVDs on their Linux system without having to boot to Windows. Yes, DeCSS can be used for illegal purposes, but then so can a hammer. I see no one wanting to ban hammers just because I can boink someone on the head with one.
Instead, the linux community acts like freeloaders. They want to have good products, yet they are unwilling to give any payment to those who bring the products to them. They fight the rights and liberties of those who control intellectual property, but they want their rights and liberties protected by the government.
Again I must disagree. The whole idea of open source is to put products and code out in the open where people can use and improve on them. Just becaause one uses open source software does not make them a freeloader.
We are in the midst of a revolution with intellectual property and how it will be distributed in the future.
Once upon a time, scribes created books. Books were rare, few people knew how to read, and life was good for those scribes. Along came Gutenburg and created the printing press. Suddenly reading material could be published in mass and made available to many people. Scribes no longer were in demand, but the printing press was not the end of Capitalism. New industries (publishers) were born. The scribes fought like made, but they were obsolete.
We are in a similar situation with IP today. Let's face it - intellectual property is no longer a limited quantity. Perfect copies can be made and passed around. The current model of the RIAA may be on it's way out (just like the scribes were) , but new models will take its place. The only reason the Capitalistic model looks to be in jeopardy is that the RIAA does not want to change with the times -- they want to stay with the old paradyme of their way or no way -- you will buy our product our way, or else. This break down of Capitalism (buyers and sellers coming together) has resulted in Napster et. al. The mass trading of MP3s has nothing to do with Linux -- it has everything to do with the cost of CDs being too high. Everyone I have personally talked to that uses Napster still buys CDs - its just they have a fixed amount of money that can be allocated to buy music. If the labels were smart, they would lower the price of CDs and make MP3's (no copy protected crap) available from their sites for a fair price. This is what consumers want! Once consumers and producers come together in the market place, music piracy will no longer be a major problem. Yes, some piracy will always exist, but it will not serious impact the marketplace.
The MP3 "movement" is far bigger than the Linux community. Many traders of MP3s have never owned a Linux box in their lives. Intellectual property issues are a hot topic in the Linux community, but that does not mean Linux users are pirates, freeloaders, or communists.
End of Sermon
Beware of Sleestak
Can you imagine sitting through a 20 second flash ad each time you reloaded /.
All the FP trolls would disappear.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
"Free marketeers" constantly remind us that as the supply goes up the cost comes down. Constantly confusing correlation with causality, the advertising marketeers don't seem to get the message that as the supply goes up the value comes down. When advertising increases in proportion to actual content, the value of each ad is reduced, both because it's competing for the reader's attention with other ads, but because the readers lose interest.
Solution? Raise the price for ad copy and reduce the supply of space available. When advertisers actually have to pay more for space, they might actually start trying to make an offer that's worth the reader's attention.
Posters in this topic have pointed out that they do not click through, but instead mentally catalog the site, and return later. I know that when I'm browsing a page, my attention is on that page. I see the ads, but I'm not going to suddenly change my focus by clicking on the ad banner. Just like in real life -- if I see an ad for Levi's on a billboard while I'm driving, I'm not going to get off at the next exit and rush to the store for new pants. But, the next time I need some pants, Levi's are going to stick in my mind. Same with TV ads, magazine and newspaper, etc. Same with the web.
Banner ad campaigns need to be evaluated in the same way as campaigns in other media. Clickthrough rate is simply not a good indicator of the effectiveness of the ad. Businesses using IRL advertisements gauge success by comparing statistics like visitors, sales, requests for information, etc. from before and after the campaign.
If they want to know how effective particular parts of the campaign were, they survey the customers (where did you hear about us? billboard, yellow pages, newspaper, tv?) Many sites ask this question during registration. This gives some indication of where exposure is coming from. What this fails to give is statistics on what sites generate interest, but not sales; how the campaigns affect repeat customers, etc. But, as shown above, clickthrough rate isn't an accurate indicator, either.
Online merchants just need some more experience.
that's what most of us seek - a factor of trust with the advertiser....or maybe that's what we sought between, umm...1997 to 2000 when there were more advertisers on the web than consumers. Maybe, with all these crappy dot bombs disappearing, we are going to be left with fewer choices (is that a bad thing or a good thing?), real product offerings, value etc, people actually wouldnt mind clicking on a banner - but they gotta do away with bad links, pop-ups, malicious spyware...
is to motivate people to take action - be it buying a can of soda or a car or clothes or a new operating system. This is usually achieved by invoking one or more of our basic instincts - fear, envy, lust, pride, insecurity...In addition to these emotional aspects, there is also the matter of delivering the ad in the right place at the right time (little point putting up a LINUX ad on a site meant for senior citizens...) IMHO, most banner advertising seems to be focused on the "eye-catching" aspect of advertisements - and hence the monkeys, the oh-so-precious psychedelic-flashing icons, the cute MS Windows dialog boxes....but *none* of these seem to invoke the basic emotions... Tell me, what does that "can of whoopass" banner ad do for you? Doesnt even make me want to remember the advertiser's name...I think the brilliant designers who conceived that banner ad just ought to suppress their humor a tad and work on understanding what makes the /. crowd tick and then design an ad around it.
Isnt this marketing communications 101? Isnt this the premise of ANY communication (including User interface design - first find out what your user does, then find out how he does what he does, then design your interface...)?
Banner ads, while they are painful, are not necessarily a failure. The incompetent marketing folks who control the ad budgets, designers and copywriters should take up the blame for failing to understand their target audience. There are good banner ads that make me click on 'em or at least, make me remember the URL (tryin' to remember which ones...:P)
Thanks! This is the answer I've been looking for for weeks...
sulli
RTFJ.
the biggest advertising mistake is Silicon Alley and by extension blowhard idiots like this! Quit spending all your VC on fancy launch parties and useless extensions to your core product, and then I'll listen to your complaints about ad banners. A basic, useful site can survive on banners - it's just these bloated, useless sites like Abuzz that can't.
sulli
RTFJ.
Google has something similar... their adwords program is a lot less intrusive than banners, and less likely to make me scroll past it. By targeting their ads to the specific search, it's often something relevant- I click through (and notice the ad, building brand awareness) there a lot more than I do on regular banners. Come to think of it, most banners are exactly the height of a turn of the scroll wheel, and I never even see them. Text ads have the added benefit of working in any browser- let's say, market share aside, that someone goes to nytimes.com using lynx. No intro-mercials?
A better measure of banner ads would be a (*gasp*) human factors study on their psychological influence. Kind of like how they measure television ads with a test audience. The only banners that really catch my attention are the ones that offer discounts for a product I was going to get anyway, or clever adds for movies.
Unfortunately, to be truly noticeable, they probably have to have sight and sound. I've always like the "sink the putt" applet banner. Don't remember what the ad was for, though....
----------------------
The advertising model for Banner Ads. is wrong. People dont stop watching TV because they saw a kewl ad, nor to they necessarily drop their magazine to dial a 1-800 number because of an ad.
Full page 20 second adds will only do 2 things.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I'm by no means saying the causes to fight far are wrong, but it's necessary to pick which battles to fight, and the community seems to have chosen too many to fight at once. The media can control and influence public opinion, and tends to be biased toward the rich, like it or not. In such an environment, linux is at a handicap already, and fighting the battles they do makes it that much worse.
Well there's the solution then... the first target must be the media!
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
I, like several people here, click on Thinkgeek banners. Why? Because they are one of the few banners that show me something I might actually want. Slashdot banners have given Thinkgeek actual sales cuz I saw something I wanted.
Ads to be effective on the net have to be targeted. You got a huge Linux crowd, don't go advertising for credit cards, advertise rack space, distributions, etc. Got some new car to sell? Advertise on an auto club's site!
Ads on the net are relying too much on volume and not enough on quality impressions.
I don't think advertising is evil, but I do think it's pretty silly to use it as a currency like we do. It's way overvalued and we are becoming surrounded by it. In my opinion, advertising gets to be too much when advertisers don't have to seek out companies (advertisees?). When (TV, radio, print, Internet) companies seek out advertising, rather than the reverse, it's too much.
I think advertising should be for a business, either:
- A small supplemental income
- A small supplemental expense
That is, it probably should only be used when a company really needs to make itself or its product known.Basically, look at the magazine model of advertising. For really popular mags, you get nearly 75% ad to content ratio (Byte, any "womens" mag, GQ, etc.) You have to skip over all of those ads to reach any content, but it is (relatively) easy to do the skipping. If, during your skipping, you see an interesting ad flash by, you can make a mental note and come back to it later for more info.
Why can't advertisers treat web advertising the same way? Just give us the ads but also give us a way to find the interesting ads again once we have digested the content and want to check out the interesting ad. The current "banner server" technology makes it difficult to find the same ad by reloading the page, since you never know which ad will present itself. Better to have a thumbnail index somewhere that you can browse for the ad and be able to click through to the company.
Another annoying thing is to be able to determine the ultimate destination of the click through before you actually click on it to avoid sites you really do not want to visit.
"Starting tomorrow, you would have two choices: pay $50 a year for membership or sit through a 20-second Flash-animated commercial (we'll keep it to 75k, which is just plenty to do a nice text-based Flash animation with an image or two)."
There is a third choice. Get your news from somewhere else. I hate companies (Microsoft) that believe "We can do whatever we want and the consumer will be stuck with it!" There will always be an alternative, and if there isnt an alternative, someone will come up with one.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Ads, ads, ads.... I don't think banner ads are all the obtrusive. For example the banner above is for thinkgeek.com and I like what I see so I'll click on it.
The article said: "Only one thing will solve our collective problem: full-screen ads"
If that's the solution... You can count me out!
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
If you don't like a site with ads, don't go to that site. If you don't like what is being advertised, don't buy it. Eventually, lack of profits will cause a change. If everyone realises this, the offenders will ultimately be screwed for advertising with no results. It's not rocket science, but if you do want something, you can't get it for nothing, you do have to 'pay' somehow, either through work, through putting up with something, or through money. Almost nothing comes free in this world.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Namely, advertising provides a convenient way to identify substandard or overly expensive products/services. Think about it--given all the viral communications and consumer organisations out there, you can find out about the better products by *looking* for them. If a product is being heavily advertised, then it probably is crap--the producers can't recoup their investment without promoting it heavily. At best, it's as good as something that isn't advertised, but it costs more because you (the consumer) have to subsidize the ad expense. As an aside, the real mistake with banner advertising was the advertising industry's getting involved with a medium that provides accountability: Guess what! Most advertising doesn't work! Yet the industry promotes the concept with vague media studies and viable-sounding jargon, and keeps this information pollution going. Maybe the advertising downturn will spread to TV and radio too? I can dream, can't I?
Remain calm! All is well!
To avoid the banner ads, I read this tip on slashdot a while ago. Just redirect the bannerads dns-names to localhost in your hosts file.
:)
Here's part of my hosts...
#filter
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ads.discovery.com
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 adserv.pi.be
127.0.0.1 ads.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ads.eu.msn.com
127.0.0.1 www.msn.be
127.0.0.1 www.valueclick.com
127.0.0.1 www.valueclick.net
127.0.0.1 oz.valueclick.com
127.0.0.1 oz.valueclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ad.eurosport.com
127.0.0.1 rd1.hitbox.com
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.com
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media1.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media2.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media3.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media4.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media5.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media6.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media7.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media8.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media9.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media0.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media10.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media11.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media12.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media13.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media14.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media15.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media16.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 media17.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 sponsorships.net
127.0.0.1 ads.admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 www.admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 www.netvertising.be
127.0.0.1 free.websitetracker.com
127.0.0.1 websitetracker.com
127.0.0.1 mojofarm.mediaplex.com
ciao,
pol
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
It is this kind of old thinking (refering to the article) that shows how new and primitive the current web is. Not even the smartest guys have figured anything out.
What I would suggest is making more effective use of the space. Do people realize that most banner ads take up twice the space of the banner itself? Like look at the banner at the top of Slashdot. Whoever came up with this stupid standard? banners could be at least 600 pixels wide. Or you coule make them a bit TALLER so that you can actually fit an ad in the damn thing. Ya, make them 300 by 100 and put two next to each other. At least that is better than the current standard.
Then you have news.com that has these huge flash ads. You would think they would have pictures of the new iPaq the story is about, or the new IBM laptop. But no. They're all ads. What a turn off. And of course, most of the articles are ads in themselves. The media is just a huge fad. The faster we get over it the better.
But if you are a smart company you realize that ads don't do much. It is awareness. Not direct sales. How do you get people to use your product? EASY. You don't give them a choice.
Free market? Competition? Any company that actually competes with others is already in trouble. The whole key to success is how not to compete, and how to get people to use your product without giving them a choice. One reason why it is so hard to do business on the web is that there is too much competition you can't get rid of. No matter what you do. Absolutely anybody can sell dog food online.
Anyway, ads never do much other than raise awareness at a huge price. They are also much of an ad to you as they are to potential investors. The more ads an investor sees, the more they are led to believe the company is doing well.
They should just make ads illegal. Civilization will probably move twice as fast, would be 100 times cleaner, and we wouldn't have to deal with so much disinformation. TV can just go away if ads are the only way to support it. In fact, that might be the true revolution that could turn this mess around. If it really is worth watching, we will pay for it.
And TV isn't free to begin with. We all pay for cable. It is amazing how many of us forget that.
Banners do pay for content and if they're not paying, the advertisers will come up with a new type of ad...full page was suggested in the story...or you will be paying to view pages. Someone has to pay for this stuff...hell, even checking out a book from the library...for those that don't remember or have never done this, just think of it as MP3 "text" files in hardcopy...isn't free!
/. free...click those banners. Geeks should support free content.
Keep
Ruger
Just because a TV ad has a 1-800 number included, does that mean people will immediately call that number? Of course not.
Until they realize that banner ads will only work just like TV/radio ads do, they're gonna keep failing at trying to making it what it can't be
AC comments get piped to
after reading about the TV license fee England has to fund TV stations, would you be willing to pay an extra tax on a monthly basis to get rid of banners ads? The tax would be added to your isp bill of course. I would be all for it, but of course it would be next to impossible to split up this money and dish it out to worthy sites..
Annoyed by the sound? No touble to make sure that the sound card modules "happen" not to load at that time...
In short, it'll not work.
% telnet www.siliconalleydaily.com 80
Trying 209.10.179.74...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
Now that's the Slashdot effect. Took their whole machine down...
Liberty in your lifetime
Taco is going to be pissed about this...:)
Proxomitron is also the cleanest Windoze program I have ever used. It does not use the registry, does not use or place any files outside of its install directory, and can be bypassed with a single click. Since it functions as a HTTP proxy it works with any browser.
The only problem is that, once you configure your browser to use the proxy, you can't surf the Web unless Proxomitron is running. You need to set it to autostart or to start along with your browser. Since I have always-on broadband I just put a shortcut in Startup. (And I was wondering if it would work under Wine; I thought it would and am glad to find I was right.)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
For Win9x boxes, WebWasher is free, and does just that. Anyone know of one for Linux?
It seems that people on /. want everything free and convenient. It's perfectly fine to want that. But the problem is that everyone seems to assume that they have a moral right for everybody to give them everything.
We want free content, but we don't want people to use ads that make any money. We are offended by intrusive advertising (with popups or sound) but ignore banner ads. We want targeted advertising but complain about the privacy violations of sites collecting information on us.
Whenever there's any discussion of advertising, there are always a ton of people raising the argument that nobody expects click through for TV, billboards, and print. That argument's fine and dandy, except for the fact that it's a big old steaming pile of crap. Click through's are a measure of how many people are noticing the ads. The fact that they've fallen dramatically are showing that less people are *seeing* the ads. We've all trained ourselves to ignore them.
If you're sitting there claiming that banner ads really do work, get over yourself. Who are you to claim you know more about the advertising industry than the people who really work in that industry. If some advertising wonk tried to tell you what coding structures you should use, I don't think you'd take too kindly to that.
Free content sites are dying, because they can't make money from banner ads. They need to pay for their staff, servers, and connectivity, and you can't pay people with eyeballs. If these sites are going to continue to exist, they need to either charge for access, use more intrusive, interruption based ads, or some combination thereof.
I've looked at The Washington Post's website multiple times a day, pretty much every day for the past 5 years. And in all the time, I can't recall a single ad I've ever noticed. I'd bet that most people can't. That's why the bottom has fallen out on the banner ad industry. On the other hand, I used to play online multiplayer jeopardy, which showed interruption ads between rounds. I still remember what the ads are, even though I haven't played in 3 and a half years. Because I was forced to notice them.
So I entirely agree with this article, and hope people do start charging or using more intrusive ads that actually make money. Because otherwise in a few years, there won't be any content left on the internet.
End Rant
I'd rather not have to support "Web turn-off week" as well as "TV turn-off week"
But there is another interesting point in what you say. People like to surf the net, and it doesn't make sense to have to pay to see something you haven't decided is worth a penny or two. Perhaps institute a policy that "the first one is free?". And if you don't feel you should have to pay for ANY content online? No problem, man, it could be set up so that when you're surfing, it was like that stuff never existed.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Someone has to pay for content, of course. You can visit my site for free, with no more advertising than a line of text on the bottom giving a prop to the friend who hosts me. Then again, the content on my site hasn't changed for 3 months and arguably contains nothing but the semicoherent ravings of a lunatic.
So, you want games and frolics and pretty pictures that move and pretend to love you. So let's talk banner ads:
1. The article is right. Banner ads suck and everybody knows it. I pay heed to about one in a hundred if that. And as soon as I click away from that add, it's content is forgotten.
2. But an unstated problem is that a large percentage of banner advertisers are ill-conceived, cash-hemorrhaging dotcom fuckups, and who could tell if they could succeed even if they could get the internet to strap me down in a chair with Clockwork Orange eye-restraints and make me watch flash ads for hours on end?
3. And no doubt there's still plenty of room for the well-placed, well targetted banner ad (porn site ads on teaser pages, ferinstance, or Linux gear on /.)
So banner ads are probably not a thing of the past but let's get real: they can't pay for all the groovy content on the internet.
Now, let's talk interruption-based flash ads or whatever of the same ilk: it's not gonna work. The internet isn't like teeveee, you don't plop down in front of it to go passive for three hours. It's active, and there are just too many ways to ignore an interruption based ad. Take the New York Times example. If I have the option, I'm going to shut the window. If I have to cycle through the ad to get to the content, I'm going to have another window open so I can do something else while it's running. Circumvention software will inevitably appear, and it is relatively hard to make ad circumvention illegal.
And even if it does work, I will be avoiding sites that have interruption based ads like the plague.
So. People are whining, "like, geez, so, what's the solution, Jath?"
Here's a thought: Make the payment structure content-independent. Meaning, your browser pays for the content, and then you pay the browser however you want. You want ads, you get ads - you have to sit through your twenty seconds before you load your content. You want to pay direct, you pay a monthly fee. The site determines the entry fee. If it exceeds your threshhold, your browser asks if you're willing to pay a premium price. You could have a monthly limit, a charge account, or a bank of funds to draw from. Niche-market content providers could put together package deals. This could solve my problem, which is that I might be willing to pay for the Times online but I don't want to have seventy different bills for my internet surfing. This way, I'd have one bill, the size of which would be essentially determined by me. I think most of us might be surprised at how little internet content might cost if we went directly to the content providers with the same deal as a banner ad company: a small per-page payment.
The browser might be enabled to block banner or interruption based ads for the paying customer. You could have a "tip jar" feature to toss a few coins to free sites you thought deserved a kudo or two. Of course, content providers could choose to advertise anyway - you could request a warning service to tell you who was going to enforce banners or interruptions regardless.
It wouldn't have to work with every site, for those choosing not to opt into the system, you would simply get a little message that you were outside the toll zone, so you get what you get. The service could double up as a micropayment system for any kind of limited license software. It's generally recognized that the problem of making small payments on the internet is interfering with the potential to unleash the power of digital duplication and transfer of data: this kills two birds with one stone.
Problems:
Paying for content that turns out to suck
Dealing with all the transitional content (already has ads, doesn't want to sign up)
Too many interruptions for service options?
Still, I think it's an interesting idea worth exploring. As the devices for viewing all kinds of content (Digital teevee recorders, computers, illegally hacked DVD players) make it easier and easier to avoid that "word from our sponsors," maybe we need to start seriously looking for alternatives to sponsorship, at least under the current model. Content providers will ultimately sell their product to anyone who pays. Either we address this issue directly or the taco and truck flacks of this world are going to force a solution down our throats. With teevee it could well mean that product placement becomes god - and programs become little more than glorified commercials (Survivor, anyone?). On the internet, who knows? in ten years there could be nothing but free but little and weird content and horrific corporate pablum.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
wow
<banner add 1>
it would
<banner add 2>
really suck
<banner add 3>
to have to view
<banner add 4>
pages that took that
<banner add 5>
approach to
<banner add 5>
advertising.
boobs and more boobs
360 degrees of Karma
After reading this well-balanced, peaceful, tolerant post (man, you sure are warmer of heart than I am) I had to go read the editorial; Well, I've read the evil thing and I just had to put my two cents in. Just how long are we going to put up with these advertising flacks telling us what we'll have to put up with? Their greed and their arrogance are unparalleled in the modern world. Twenty second ads between every ten page views??? Fifty bucks a year to view a website??? The editorial writer is out of his mind.
First of all, I'd like to point out that his major excuse for this madness -- the demise of the banner ad -- is a red herring. Banner ads are not completely worthless. Although a tiny percentage of them get clicked, banner ads that point to something worth looking at do get clicked. I've clicked several of the banner ads here at slashdot, and not just because I want to help support the site -- some of them are actually interesting. ThinkGeek sells some cool stuff, for instance.
What the advertising industry means when it says that banner ads are dead is, for the first time the industry can really track what an ad does, and it's finding that ads are mostly ignored -- thus the industry, which can't admit that it's really more of an annoyance than a necessary part of our world, says, "oh, no, it's banner ads that are bad, bad banner ads, bad!" and it smacks the banner ad with a newspaper, like a beagle that made a mess on the rug.
So, now, the advertising industry is always looking for some new way to "monetize" (I'm aware that "monetize" isn't really a word, but they use it constantly) the internet (translation: bleed us all dry selling us content we don't really need anyway), and they've come up with a scheme to overcharge for a website as though it were a service like a utility, and use a twenty second advertisement every ten pages as the bludgeon to make us pay up. God, I hate these people.
When I worked at a dot-com in Chelsea, I used to go to internet parties, and I'd run into advertising flacks who were dying to cram their business cards down my throat. As soon as they found out I was a programmer, they'd lose interest, and fill up their vodka tonics... I saw one guy drink about twenty four or five ounce vodka tonics (light on the tonic) in less than two hours, and he didn't seem to be even slightly impaired. He couldn't have weighed more than 170, ok? I mean, THINK ABOUT THAT. I weigh about 280, and I was only on my second beer at that point.
But I digress...
Anyway, what I'm getting at is, the ad people ruined TV, they ruined radio, they fill our magazines and cram our newspapers with ads, throw billboards up to ruin our beautiful country, and in general make a nuisance out of themselves... And, now, they want to act like we're getting a free ride and they're going to show us a thing or two.
Here's my ALTERNATIVE proposal:
First of all, consider that if I'm not willing to pay more than twenty bucks for a magazine subscription, there's no way in hell I'm going to pay fifty for a website. It's just not going to happen. Ok? So, let's just get beyond that entirely. Anyone who charges more than about thirty bucks a year for a website that doesn't have naked women all over the place is out of his mind (and will soon be out of business). So, principle numero uno is, if you want to make money off your website, 1)make it useful enough that it's desireable, and 2) charge under thirty bucks a year, because twenty or thirty bucks feels like coffee money. Any more than that and I'll find someone else providing the same service.
The second thing I'd like to suggest is, the advertising world should get the cockamamie idea of ad interruptions out of their pointy little heads because any site that tries that crap on me is going to have a hard time getting me to sign up, period. And, I have a feeling that about 99% of the country feels about the same way. We're annoyed enough that we have to put up with commercial interruptions on TV and radio -- remember, it was one of the major selling points of cable in the first place that such interruptions were eliminated -- we're not going to sit still for that crap on the internet, where we have much better freedom to choose.
Finally, if I was an advertiser, I'd lose the attitude fast. On the coolness scale, advertisers rate lower than lawyers and pimps, ok? People HATE them. They're the idiots who came up with the thirty second spot, they're the bastards who con our DJ's into selling us weight loss pills between songs, they're the evil force that causes some dry peanuts to come out of the can burned and inedible. They don't rate an attitude. They should start all introductions with "I'm dreadfully sorry to inflict myself on you, but I'm an advertiser and I'd like to speak to you for a moment". At least, we'd have enough time to hit them with a cue stick before they threw their business card, shuriken style, at us.
Gawd! Will it never end???
Phil...
crazyphilman@programmer.net
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
Bitterman! Dude!
You said, very eloquently I might add, a whole lot of things that I've been quietly fuming about for a long time. I'm so pissed off about the way things are going I could spit.
The problem is, all these dot-commers think about is money. Money, money, money -- none of them are in it because programming is fun, none of them are involved because they like playing with computers -- these people are soulless wannabes, and all they can do is cook up get-rich-quick schemes and bother the rest of us. God, I get more upset every year.
You know what we need? We need to bring back local BBS'es, and ban commercial sites entirely. MUD's, Freenets, things like that are going to be our only escape in years to come.
I wanna marry a female hacker, move to the sticks, and set up a cabin with satellite-based internet service, work via email, and vanish. Modern life is starting to suck.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
...which web-marketing company first proffered the meme that a banner view was worth dollars, rather than the mills it's actually worth?
That guy owes me and my friends a few trillion dollars.
--Blair
--
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Why do you have advertising in the first place?
In any economic system, there is an obvious need to connect buyers with the appropriate sellers (and vice versa); advertising is probably the most important vehicle we use (in the media) to accomplish this goal. It doesn't matter if the end goal is direct response (like direct marketing) or just to lay a "subminal" signal like w/ TV (or even print and radio). If advertising is connecting buyers with sellers in a relevant fashion, it is doing its job...
Next question:
How does advertising work?
Advertising works when various organizations (be they ad networks, ad distributors, direct marketers or the Nielsen companies) collect personal information (at some level of resolution) and use it to communicate a message that sellers have to buyers.
Last Question:
Is this model ever going to work on the Internet (or any other form of interactive, electronic media)?
Yes, its true that marketers can collect and correlate "lots" of personal information using Internet technology. But its also true that the Internet dramatically reduces transaction costs to the point where it may be cheaper for individual consumers to own and manage thier own personal information, rather than allowing organizations (like ad networks, direct marketers) own and make decision regarding the use of personal information
I've written a paper on this topic here:
http://www.paulsholtz.com/papers/transaction_costs /
The point is:
That does not mean that it is impossible to connect buyers and sellers using the Internet.. there are LOTS of ways this can happen, but it only works efficiently (in an economic sense) if individual consumers own their own personal information (and this can never happen in a world where advertising exists).
I wrote an essay about how advertising on the net is becoming a big deal, and how the average joe can advoid losing his privacy on the net. I wrote it up in class so it might not be 100% correct in grammer or facts. I would appricate some feed back, please only constructive comments.
advertising on the net I am such a goof.
The reason internet advertising has never been able to sustain the price levels as that of tv/magazines is that they're too small and too easy to ignore. Once we figure out how to serve captivating, rich, and un-ignorable ads (relatively speaking of course), internet ad spending will pick up and catch up to its offline siblings.
And to those who think we should have 0 ads and the that the net should be free from "evil" corporations, please... Just don't visit such sites. Stick to your newsgroups and napster.
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
I think the "interruption" model is flawed:
... but similar rules for choosing which ads to block for banners should also choose which flash anims to skip.
How hard would it be to link in the open source flash player to muffin/adzapper/squid/zope and get it to extract the final url the flash player will take you to... and give the browser a redirect to that instead of the flash animation?
Obviously you don't want that to happen to all flash animations
Given the technical capability to skip the ads, the advertisers are back where they are now with banner ads: you don't know if folk have seen the ad or paid attention.
I don't object to awareness raising ads, but ads that prevent me doing what I want with _my_ machine really annoy me. (to the advertisers: Eyeballs, yes, time No!)
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Sure:
I don't mind the surveys too much; they're usually easy to close. The ads are what end up being persistent.
Which kinds of sites were you thinking of? ;-)
I guess the real problem I see is that when I "surf" I want to go where I want to go and I don't appreciate sites that try to take me places I didn't ask to go. If I want to see the video, I'll click the link for it. Ditto for the survey. Please don't mess with my browser environment by popping additional browser windows onto my screen without asking me first.
While I'm complaining...I also don't care for sites that play music or sound effects and don't give you a way to turn it off. I usually listen to CNN or NPR via Internet radio while I work and it's annoying to hit a site that insists upon loudly playing the national anthem or the South Park theme soung over what I'm trying to listen to. The music is cute -- provide an easy to find link that lets us turn it off if we don't want to hear it.
[/complaining]
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
People buy things. Food, cars, clothes, etc. The question becomes which food, which clothes, which beer, are they going to buy. The answer to that is varied - Price, image, taste, paste experience, all affect the choice. Advertising is how the company tries to influence the way you view their product - which (they hope) gets you to choose their product when it's time to buy it.
It's all about image. It's far too big a subject to try and break down into a single /. post, but I assure you that advertising does work. Every ad doesn't work on every person, but it works.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Part of the problem with the 20-second commercial idea is that it assumes that web surfers come for a single prolonged reading session. Maybe some do, but I typically click to a news site, scan the headlines, read an article or two, then go elsewhere. I come back a few hours later to see what's new and I pop in and out a couple of times a day to look up some information or catch up on a story somebody told me about. There's no way I'm going to sit through a 20-second commercial 5-6 times a day.
The model that's even more maddening to me are sites that spawn additional browsers without asking me. I hate clicking to a site only to have 3 more browser windows pop up with surveys and videos and ads -- even worse when you're trying to leave the site to have multiple, persistent, ads flung at you without recourse. This kind of browser-jacking is a fast way to get on my list of sites I'll never come back to.
So what's the solution? I wouldn't mind a full-screen ad that I can click past (i.e. don't have to wait the 20 seconds). The main reason I don't click on banner ads isn't because they're annoying but rather because they almost never advertise anything there that interests me. Cheap long-distance and on-line casinos are most of what I see; no thanks.
Make the ads relevent, let the users click past them with a minimum of hassle/inconvenience and make the site behind the ad useful and efficient (for those who do click through). Then you'll find success.
Just my $.02. Keep the change.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Thanks for the material. I am writing a paper for my thesis at college and I need to steal your ideas for my paper. You are a rich source of ideas and I like you. A lot!! What is Linux?
So what's this story about again?
Free Iran
Hmm. I thought banner ads an astounding success. 0.3% clickthrough is AMAZING! It's the old fashion ads that are the abysmal failure, the fact is the advertisers don't know it because they can't count clickthrough. Of the maybe 50 magazines I read a year, with (being generous) 100 ads in them (Wired has that many before you get to the table of contents!) thats 5000 ads a year I utterly and totally ignore. If they were convient banner ads, I'd have clicked on a few of them!
TV? LOL! Hit the fastforward button, surf the net, talk, flip back to the videogame, stare off into space, clean a dish, anything but watch the moronic drivel they call commercials. I've counted, it takes me seeing a commercial at LEAST 10 times before I even know what the product is, and forget about brand name recognition. And you think a Coke commercial will make me drink more? Forget it. I mean, theres this commercial with "Who Let The Dogs Out." I'm not sure if they're selling CD's, Frisbees, Dogs or what, but I know I've 'seen' it dozens of times. The only time I pay any attention to a commercial is if it's on http://www.adcritic.com
Radio? Okay, captive audience, it's not really fair, like what else am I supposed to do? Pay attention to the ROAD? Bah! I have to pay attention to them because we don't have enough radio stations to switch to around here, but I honestly forget anything I hear in an ad in under 0.5 seconds, and it's never sold me anything or diverted my course.
Unlike outdated media, I've actually clicked on banner ads, and once or twice I even downloaded something. Thats a smashing success for an industry so stupid that it regularly portrays the users of the products they're pimping as idiots and expects you to buy the product. Lets endorse this product with someone that makes Jerry Lewis look normal!
i don't think open source stands for socialism - of course, it may be so, as do many other things in capitalistic societies... but think about software and knowledge as infrastructure - these are things that have to be free in order to improve the society and even the economy... first, the *state* had to build roads and universities, now it's the time for the *society* to continue to build the internet and software... p.s.: sorry for my bad english ;)
As a user of the operating system, I find it to be largely an excellent product. And the community has been hugely successful in waging a war against Microsoft and for the brief time it's been a serious competitor to the software giant, it has indeed made huge strides.
The product, beginning several years ago, has enjoyed excellent growth, especially in the past few years. While the pace may be slowing, it should not take away from the growth of the community in previous years.
The state of the community, itself, is a bit more disturbing. In general, the linux community supports open source, that software usually should be free, and that intellectual property should be very much limited.
In the battles for freedoms to distribute the DeCSS source and for MP3s, the community has gained the reputation as thieves. In this, they have taken on companies and organiations that are generally respected or at least accepted by the public. Not to say that the organizations, such as the MPAA or the RIAA, are right, but the public tends to believe them.
It's very easy to portray what the linux community does as theft of products, services, and a threat to the United States economy. As long as the community supporting linux has the reputation as thieves, it will also tend to give the product a bad name.
I'm by no means saying the causes to fight far are wrong, but it's necessary to pick which battles to fight, and the community seems to have chosen too many to fight at once. The media can control and influence public opinion, and tends to be biased toward the rich, like it or not. In such an environment, linux is at a handicap already, and fighting the battles they do makes it that much worse.
It tends to reveal a more disturbing, and to an extent hypocritical attitude about the linux community. The United States is based on capitalism, and what the linux community seems to support is far closer to socialism.
The attitude is to support big government against big business, but that same big government should not touch the people. I can't see how this is possible, and it's definitely asking far too much. You simply cannot treat a business different than a person in what rights they are entitled to and what liberties they are granted. What this is suggesting is that the government take up an ideology of what is good and what is evil, and this is simply not acceptable. This goes against anything the United States was founded on, and is a rather scary thought.
Capitalism has worked well for the United States and while it is not a perfect system, it tries to protect the rights of all when it is regulated to some extent. You cannot choose who to regulate and who to let alone, you must instead regulate all equally for a system to be anything close to fair.
Instead, the linux community acts like freeloaders. They want to have good products, yet they are unwilling to give any payment to those who bring the products to them. They fight the rights and liberties of those who control intellectual property, but they want their rights and liberties protected by the government.
This is a narrow view of the world and an immature one. The linux community can't even seem to get along, and it is populated by many immature individuals. Not to say that everyone in the community possesses these attitudes and undesirable qualities, but they certainly do prevail.
And one of the largest sites and a favorite among the linux community, Slashdot, is a hotbed for trolling and flames. A real troll is a masterpiece, it takes time to develop into what it targets to annoy. It attempts to appear as a legitimate post. A real troll is funny. Trolling is enjoyable, but what prevails on Slashdot is not real trolling but flooding with pointless comments. This reflects poorly on the immaturity when those with different views have resorted to tactics of flames and flooding to harass rather than to make the reader think.
The normal user within the community embodies what is frowned upon in our society. Yet the image of a long-haired linux zealot gains praise within the community. At best it's a misunderstood group with conflicting views, and at worst, it's an anti-social band that makes quite a threat to the rights and liberties we value in the great nation of the United States. The linux community, with growing support of its ideas, is a dangerous threat to the software indutry, the internet boom, and possibly leading a collapse of the economy in the United States and possibly around the world. It is dangerous when we start to support a double standard to eliminate the rich. This is the beginnings of communism, a threat which the western world spent nearly half a century fighting. Of all the scares in the history of this nation of communism and a breakdown of the values, rights, and freedoms which we in the United States cherish, quite possibly the worst one yet is the linux community with its dangerous views and goals that seem to be gaining acceptance throughout more than just its small band of followers.
Jason McCabe Calacanis writes in the linked article:
> You pay with your eyes
Webwasher. Junkbuster. Guidescope. Adsubtract. Or just your ad server's URL in my hosts file, folded back to 127.0.0.1. It may interest you to know that not only do I scrub ads, so does my grandmother (I showed her how) and all the members of her bridge club (she showed them how.)
> or you pay for a subscription.
Heh heh heh. You *are* joking, right?
> If not, we shut the doors.
Way cool. What you guys don't understand is that you have no power of coercion because option 3 is no threat.
Shut your site down and go away, fine, that's OK, there are trillions of other sites to visit and more new ones popping up every day than I could look at in three lifetimes. In ten years of web browsing I have never found material that interested me on a commercial site that wasn't also available in more concentrated, tightly-edited and faster-loading form on a free hobbyist or academic or government site. This was also true of the Internet proper before the www appeared, and true of dialup BBSs and FidoNet before that.
You can't force me to look ads *or* charge for content because you have nothing to withhold that can't be immediately replaced from an alternative free source. Get over it and get a real job. P.S. The NYT is soooooo middlebrow...