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Salon Goes For Annoying Jump-Through Ads
macsforever2001 writes: "It looks like Salon is going to try to ram ads down our throat in a very offensive manner according to this Yahoo article. Now they won't directly link to articles, but instead link to a Web Ad which then links to the article you want. I think Slashdot needs a new category just for Web Advertising." Not as if web ads weren't already becoming more annoying, but the companies that run Web ads are probably as interested in ads that people don't hate as you are in not seeing the awful ones. What can we tell them?
publicity will be interupted by information.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
As a web site owner, I love this. You get it for free so accept the ad.
How long before we start seening adds on our bios and windows boot-up screens..
its only a matter of time..
Cruise TT
adds are icky...
-Windchill2001 The One, The Only, The Cold...
Ya the ads are annoying, but jump throughs beat popups anyday! with these you can either wait for a breif pause or you can click a link to skip ahead to the article. Either way it's better than having to shuffle windows in order to close an ad that the page opens behind itself, like those X10 pop-ups. THOSE are annoying!
WURD!!
MSNBC does this to some of their sections. Not a big deal to me. If you don't want to see them subscribe to Salon.
Some way or another, content has to be paid for.
Just start using lynx as your default browser.
Steven V>
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
For example, I do not like the outdoors or games. Why show me camping information or video cards? I do like gambling in Vegas -- show me some banners for deals offered by casinos.
Click here or here.
This bothers me less than popups. They have to do something for revenue. I can live with it.
Salon is in financial trouble. They started a premium service to get more money, but still offer a lot of content for free. I guess if more people subscribed as premium members, this would not be an issue. If they need to do this to stay afloat, then that's their business. Salon is a great site, and I'm personally willing to put up with a few ads. I just hope they keep going.
``It's less intrusive than the pop-unders. It's not creating a new window and it gives the consumer a choice. They can click it and go to the story,'' said Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Marissa Gluck.
And the other choice, presumably, is to utter a hearty "fuck you" and never go back to salon.com again?
Look... here's what web ads come down to: if it's something like a pop-up ad that keeps moving when you try to close it, that's simply not ok. But if nothing sneaky is going on -- and it's not here, because you're just detoured through an extra page on Salon's site -- we may not like it but there's no reason to say that the company is doing something wrong. Salon started a subscription service as a way to allow people to pay for the otherwise-free content they were getting before. Obviously not enough people are contributing their fair share and more drastic measures had to be taken. If you don't like it, don't use Salon's bandwidth or read the stories that they pay people to write.
First "Premium Content". Now this. I think Salon is desperately trying to make some money, but at the expense of alienating their readership. Oh well, the content has been going downhill anyway. I'll find something else to read -- its not like Salon has a monopoly on insightful, left leaning commentary.
Salon has been trying to find new ways to make money, the jump-through ads are much less annoying than the pop-ups, IMHO. Not much different than commercials on TV. You have the option to subscribe to Salon if you want to avoid them, just as you have the option to subscribe to HBO if you'd like commercial-free programs (though HBO does not offer a commercial channel, so you either pay up or do without the Sopranos...)
Everything can't be free. I'd rather have the click-through ads than pop-ups. Actually, I like Salon enough that I bucked up the yearly subscription fee, though it really doesn't offer so much more than the regular Salon.
Deal with the ads, stop bitching or don't be surprised when Salon goes under like so many other Webzines.
It's worth it, gets you access to additional features, and you aren't annoyed by ads. As a side benefit, you support one of the best sources of online journalism.
If you only read the occasional article, then don't bother, but don't complain about the ads. If you read all the time, then why haven't you signed up yet?
Is that a porn site?
Naked Chicks!
Really though... I think this is just the first step towards full-scale Comercials popping up every 13 min. Yikes, hope M$ doesn't think of that...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
If content sites have obnoxious advertising, then people will stop reading. The Guardian UKs online version tried these interspatials, and now seemed to have stopped using them. I just plain refuse to read it, and I suspect a lot of people think the same way.
Salon could get particularly fscked with these Sprint ads -- they are fscking FLASH !!!! I could hardly find the link to the next article.
Winton
As evidenced by their 'Salon Premium' and in-page ads. It's a shame, too, because all the other good editorial sites are almost all virulently conservative.
While I hate to see it go, I think we're going to see Salon go the same way IGN did.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This isn't a new thing at all -- all of the IGN.com websites do this. (DVD.IGN, PS2.IGN, etc) However, the IGN method is closer to television advertising -- you have to look at the advertisement for something like 5 seconds before the "continue to the article" link becomes active.
They've had this on MSNBC for awhile. If you click on the news categories on the lefT nav bar instead of mousing over and choosing a story, you get a big ad blocking your screen, and you have t go up to the top nav to actually get to that category. There's no free lunch anywhere. I guess if I didn't want to be annoyed, I could just read a book.
I follow the like to the Yahoo! page talking about bad advertising tactics, what happens? One of them damn X-10 camera adds pops-up. Geesh...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Fortunately, because it's a random process, you can simply click "Back" on your browser, then click on the link again, usually bypassing the ad. It's not too tough to get around... From the article, though, Salon is not random, so that sucks. But this method is nothing new or ground-breaking...
try a product like JunkBuster, or GuideScope
both are easy to use, and should take care of those pesky ads. why whine, when you don't even have to see them?
but if you reject cookies (as I do from Mozilla) then you get stuck in a loop at the advert. The "continue on" link just spits the ad back up. Not nice at all.
The only time that I ever really look at articles on salon is when they are presented here. Maybe Taco look at the ad for us and then post the link to the actual story behind it. Let him do something useful for a change.
----------
If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
What will their inventory nead to get the /. Conservatory's interest and business?
For the Girls:
Undies(blaze orange)
Yabbos(blaze orange)
For the Guys:
CowboyNeal Hat
Warm Bawls and a CowboyNeal Cooler that stays warm
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
We're sorry! We promise to click on those banner ads! We were being bad little surfers. Just don't torture us anymore!
I'd prefer the new salon add to popup, at least this way my browser is not generating more windows, and attacting my attension when not needed. If that the way they can sell adds so be it. I'll pay for preminum when it becomes anoying.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
If it is annoying, then shell out the few bucks to support the site.
"Get them before they get....
Has anyone tried this yet?
RFC2119
Its not that complicated. There are other sites that offer the same stuff as saloon w. out all the ad crap.
The poster is incorrect and therefore his argument is vacuously true. You can link directly to articles.
Please to the logical thing and remove this story immediately.
I DO NOT GET EMOTIONAL ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There were ads.
Then there were filters.
Then there were pop up ads, pop-under ads, and ads that pop up when you close the browser.
Then new filters were devised for these as well.
Now we have jumpthrough ads.
What we have is a continuing battle, geek against geek, for control of the eyes of the content-hungry Netizen.
Of course, all arms races are a bad thing. Eventually, this one will lead to more and more intrusive advertising and more and more destructive anti-advertising.
The solution is to de-escalate the arms race.
How do you do that?
Well, stop filtering the ads. Read them and click the ones that you are interested in as compared to the other ads.
Even if you are not interested in any of them, click the least offensive.
This will, eventually, lower the overall offensiveness level of advertising while helping to provide ad revenue to some of your computer-industry brethren out there.
Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.
Goat sex free since 2001
Online is a different medium than TV or radio- the same rules don't necessarily apply. Especially when most of these ads seem to be for things like dry cleaning a cat, or other nonsense. I don't see Pepsi or Coke popping up all over, but even Yahoo pops up that damn X10 camera ad. I feeling is that eventually online content will split into 2 groups once a good micropayment system is worked out, the free and spam-filled side, and the pay but no ads side. Don't get me wrong, I love free content, but I can only see advertising get worse until large groups of people are willing to fork over some cash to _not_ see more ads.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
For me, the most effective ads are those that are entertaining/interesting regardless of the product and/or about something I want more info on... this applies to billboards, televison and the web.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I did see one add that actually got me to see it without being so intrusive that it just pissed me off too badly. It was on weather.com (the Weather Channel's web page), and it was an add for HBO's "Band of Brothers" series. Basically when I first went to the web page, it loaded as normal, then ran a little animation of a series of c47s dropping paratroops across the page, with accompanying sound, then some bit of text appeared saying something like, 'See Band of Brothers on HBO at some time or other.' which then retreated to a standard banner add and sat there. The whole thing lasted maybe 3-5 seconds.
:P
I was on a broadband connection, so I have no idea if it would make the page take longer to load, but their web page has so much graphics that it probably would take forever anyway.
The one thing they could have done to cut the annoying factor would be to put a cookie that tells the page not to run it everytime you go 'BACK' to the main page from a sub page.
And it didn't even crash Netscape
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
goatse.cx still has no ads. So guess we can't say they're :)
everywhere yet. But then, even if goatse.cx was to carry
ads, does that mean advertisers are desperate or the guy
running that site is?
Popups can be disallowed with some browsers, though I haven't yet seen anything which allows you to filter only window.open (as opposed to all JavaScript) on a site-by-site basis.
I suppose a proxy with rewriting support might be able to bypass the ad page, depending on how it's done. If the URL is in the request for the ad page, it's very simple, but otherwise you'd have to wait for the ad page to download, and then follow the redirect immediately, or find the link you have to click.
Whether you _should_ use filtering technologies on ad-funded sites is another matter, because in some sense you are committing theft.
What really puzzles me is that these intrustive ads clearly do anger readers, and don't seem to work very well...yet this arms race of distracting ads continues unabated. There is at least one example of really effective web advertising, however, and that's Google's. Heck, they're even considering an IPO. Here's why it works:
- Their ads are entirely textual and unobstrusive, so I don't have to hotwire my brain to tune them out. They're easy to ignore, so I can pay attention to them when I want.
- They are right next to the content I care about (search results), but don't interfere with it by creating a visual distraction or a longer download time for the page. So I don't mind them being there at all.
- Above all, the ads are sometimes for things I actually care about. Google matches ads with searches, and so I actually have some incentive to pay attention to them.
The lesson, I think, is that ads have to be inobstrusive and useful. Why aren't more companies picking up on this?I sympathize with their need to make ad revenue, but I find these ads the most annoying thing on the Internet. If this is the future of web advertising, I'll be getting my news elsewhere. It is incredibly annoying and distracting.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
I use Netscape and have disabled pop-ups and pop-unders. But how can I disable something like this? I think it's not possible.
I'll just have to keep surfing sites that don't do this kind of stuff. Ads are not for me anyway. I don't buy on impulse and the banner is more than enough to carry the message.
But I do have a question: are more annoying ads more effective? Did people really start buying more of that useless X10 stuff?
See http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sl&g=events/ ts/092001infjustice&e=1 for an example. Not too big a deal. Just remember to click next twice every 10n + 5 slide.
this is what porn sites do all the time - it's nothing new - it's just interesting to see a mainstream site do it. (but wil a mojority of web-traffic being porn i guess porn is the majority, isn't it? ).
either way - if you read salon that much you probably ought to caough in a few dollars as it is.
-shpoffo
ThinkGeek is still employing annoying "All Your Base" ads on Slashdot.
"Buy Pepsi"
How many of you went out and bought Pepsi?
One? None? Advertisements do not work. The reason is that we are saturated by the sheer amount of omnipresent advertising. We've grown numb to it.
This is no worse than reading a article in a magazine and having to flip past a page with a ad in it to get to the next part. I like this type of advertizing better than popups. Site has got to make $$$ to stay open.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
As a web site owner, I love this. You get it for free so accept the ad.
But will their readership tolerate it? Probably not, as most people are already feeling harassed by popups. I predict this will only hasten their demise.
Harassing customers != good business practice
Dumdeedum... downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4....
Added "user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);" to prefs.js.... restart...
Ooo. The web without any onload pop-ups or pop-under adverts. X-10? Who? Surfing actually seems pleasant again.
But my solution for click-thru advertising is simply to get my content elsewhere, and wait for this upsurge in irritating adverts to die down. And it will. Advertising drives money to content providers, but if the adverts drive the readership down, the money stops coming into the advert companies from their clients. There's a point of equilibrium that most print magazines have found, and it's just a matter of time before that balance settles down in the online-content world.
I think not...(*poof*)
Salon gives you the option of letting you subscribe to its content in return for the removal of ads.
This is in start contrast to most "free" sites which ram ads down your throat regardless of whether you're prepared to fund the site some other way or not.
Bravo Salon. Brickbats to those who insist that content should always be advertiser funded - such as one site that's condemning Salon for its advertising practices right now...
KMSMA (WWBD?)
(Copied shamelessly from here in the hopes that some of you might read it before forming an opinion. Emphasis, where used, is mine.)
About our new ads
A note to readers
Sept. 24, 2001 | Today Salon introduces a new kind of advertisement -- a full-screen message that will show up in your browser when you click on a link, and will play briefly before moving you on to the page you requested. (The ad should only show up once per day per user, unless you have turned "cookies" off in your browser.)
As most of you know, this has been a difficult year for advertising-supported publications, online and off. Like many other companies we've responded by trying to innovate for our advertisers -- so we can remain financially healthy and continue to serve you. As with any innovation, we expect to learn from our experience over time, to keep what works and drop what doesn't.
We know that some Web users find this sort of ad intrusive. But before you send in that irate e-mail, we ask you to consider that the content you come to Salon for -- independent-minded, thought-provoking, unavailable elsewhere -- does not come free.
Today we have two ways to support our writers, editors and the rest of the staff that keeps Salon coming to you every day -- through advertising and through subscriptions. If sitting through one five-second ad before you can read an article is simply too much of a delay for you, we offer a Salon Premium subscription as a different way to support Salon -- you get access to exclusive content and the option to turn off most ads on the site. (For more information, click here.)
Our intention, as always, is to bring you the most intelligent, provocative, fearless coverage of news and culture available anywhere.
Scott Rosenberg
Managing editor
How about you subscribe for premium content, thereby eliminating the ads altogether? Not only do you support the company buy paying for reading their content, but you also get more content/articles/etc. when you do. It's a win-win situation.
Support free speech and buy your own beer(or at least don't bitch about the quality/conditions of the free beer).
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
Together, we vill make ghood Musix. Aye!
I have to ask if these advertisers actually think that people buy stuff based on the nuisance they have to close the window on these obtrusive entities. I for one have NEVER clicked, much less bought, anything based on a Web Ad. So much useful bandwidth is wasted on this crap.
I also get tired of the Ads trying to claim "Well, it is a media medium". Guess what, it isn't TV. It isn't a magazine. It is the web. A totally different beast.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I much prefer the jump throughs to pop-ups any day. I also can see the need for them. It costs a lot of $$$ to run a web service, esp. a popular one. Bandwidth isn't free. Advertisers have pretty much realized that banner ads are worthless and a big waste of money so they are exploring more in-your-face alternatives and I believe the jump throughs are a good answer. At least they are giving you the opportunity to "skip" the ad and go directly to the stories, unlike TV advertising.
:-P
To those detractors -- I bet within a year or so you'll see the same thing on Slashdot.
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
seems to me /. is fishing to see what impact changing there ad 'style' from banner to something else. :)
I realy don't understand how a paper can make money by placing ads next to story, but can't make money doing the same thing on the web.
I have come to the conclusion that media companies are doing there web content wrong, so maybe thats it.
I wish I had the ear of a newspaper exec. because I see several ways to improve the overall revinue of a newspaper company, using the web.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is obviously part of a two-phase approach.
Salon has already made it clear that they intend to slowly move content behind the subscription only wall. This is one way to entice people to subscribe... the carrot if you will (though since it was once freely available content, it has a stick aspect as well).
Increasing the amount, variety, and annoyance level of the ads is the true stick in their strategy. If you're not sufficiently motivated by the subscription-only content (of which you get a tantalized 2 paragraph preview if you aren't subscribed), then perhaps you'll be sufficiently annoyed by the advertising that you'll buy the o|4/\/\N3o| subscription.
Given their financial situation and the relatively low revenue that advertising generates nowadays, they really don't even want non-paying viewers. So they slowly advance the border between free and paid content and increase the advertising until they have everyone they can get.
I really like Salon's coverage and there have been several times I'd really liked to have read one of their subscription-only articles, but I'm just not motivated enough to pay. Too short an attention span. I hope one of these days they snag me, because I'd love to see them survive.
-StaticLimit
on bandwidth-intensive stuff like news slideshows. it's no big deal to me.
sulli
RTFJ.
I actually like this method of advertising. If sites like slashdot dumped their banner adds for these (rather than using both Ug!), I think the web would be a lot cooler place. Pluses are:
Drawbacks:
The same money goes around. As the money goes through the system, the people in its path have gotten some objects or non-material goods but the money ends up in the bank or in the hands of the state. From there, it does another round. It is a catalytic process. Couldn't this be done without money?
where is the logic in this "annoy our potential customers" line of thought?
anarcho sufi urban taoist university and potluck carwash
I know of at least one site that already does this. Sony Station, an online gaming site, pops up ads when you start games. It's easy enough to close the window before they finish loading. I'm sure the advertisers don't like this, but oh well.
What is that brown spot behind her ear? Is that shit? OHHHHH I SMELL SHITTTTT! Interactive
I use Junkbuster to block ads. I had never bothered blocking slashdot ads because they're less annoying then most, and I wanted to support the site.
But, as I was reading this story, up came the annoyingly flashing PlanetHardDrive.com banner. So, images.slashdot.org/banner just went into sblock.ini.
This just isn't cool or fair.
Companies that offer content over the web need to make money somehow. You won't pay a subscription for their content... at least not enough of "you."
You see ads in magazines and newspapers and you accept them. Sometimes you paid for the paper/mag and sometimes just the ads float the costs.
First banner ads are annoying, then pop unders, now this. boo fricken hoo. Do you WANT these people to go out of business or what? Banner ads often don't generate enough money since people don't click them anymore. They needed to come up with something new to interest potential advertisers.
When you watch the Simpsons or StarTrek reruns you get ads forced right into your content. You get that content for FREE so you can't complain too much... if they didn't put in those ads you wouldn't get your TV shows.
Maybe when you visit a website it should display nothing but ads for every ~60 seconds out of 15 minutes... like TV only a lower commercial/program ratio.
Don't like that idea? Then visit www.quityourbitchen.com
http://salon.com/letters/editor/2001/09/24/new_ad
Together, we vill make ghood Musix. Aye!
Time to write mod_perl proxy to strip this crap.
=)
I also hate how TV shows are interrupted to show commercials too. Oh, that's right, TV networks are *profitable*.
It's about time these web people tried to actually make money. Annoying, yes--and necessary.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
- The ad can be more informative (and thus perhaps even a useful source of info if I'm interested) since it has more real-estate to work with.
- The Ad goes away.
- The ads Doesn't distract me, get in the way, or otherwise take up valuable interface real-estate while I'm reading the actual article.
- Similarly, the ad doesn't take up ink, paper, and printing time when I print a page out.
- If I don't want to waste time looking at it, I can switch to another window for a while. Ignoring that damn flashing dwarf in the ThinkGeek ad on slashdot is next to impossible.
Drawbacks:The next phase: the article's words are randomly hidden throughout advertisements. Piece together the words, and you get to read the article!
I can sympathize with advertisers desperately trying to reach their audience more effectively, but it is annoying. With more and more sites devoted to displaying advertising for the pleasure of you the viewer, it is getting out of hand. Some sites are so bad for popup ads that you get the feeling you stumbled into a porn site. Now i notice that Mozilla and Opera browsers both ad the ability to disable popups by removing the window.open() javascript method. My question is, how long before browsers support the ability to maintain a list of domains from which it will not request offsite content? I can see ads.aol.com among others going in that list, saving users the load time and ISPs the bandwidth. I would PAY for a browser that did that. Kinda makes you wonder what advertiser with expensive lawyers would do.
funded their winners, and i think theyre still going pretty strong.
just in case anyone was wondering, ive won 3 times (x3 numbers) thats £1.50! ($2-3?)
Here's a retelling of the subtext of those X10 ads, for your enjoyment. The ad is real, just a few words in the subtitles have been changed, for a rather more honest advertisement.
Modified X10 Advertisement link:
www.geocities.com/Athens/4585/joke.jpg
I think Salon is risking their reader base by using this sort of ad system. News and article meta-indexes, like World Net Daily and the Drudge Report and (yes) Slashdot will hesitate to put up links that are so annoying to their users. And that will ruin what revenue Salon was getting with their banner ads.
The whole premise of these intrusive ads is wrong.
Intrusive ads in TV is acceptable because we are just sitting there like bumps on a log and it give us a break to go do something. We know the commercials are going to last a couple minutes and we expect it. Digging deeper we all understand that those commericals paid for the content.
Web surfing is entirely different. We are interacting with the computer to find information. Basically we are in control and are most likely actively searching, or discussing and not just trying to be passively entertained. We want to find our information, or post our comment and be done with it.
Advertisers are having a tough time on coming up with a creative way to advertise on the net since their previous method (banners) had limited success, they are falling back on what they know. But what they know is a method designed for a passive medium and not an interactive one.
The one thing they have going for them, is that like TV, web advertising for the most part is targetted at groups and not so much individuals. Slashdot is going to run tech related ads. TechTV (the TV channel) is going to run tech related commericals. Generally, the specific group you are looking for will see your ad. They need to expand on that without taking it to the extreme.
One option: large ads that are not intrusive. I wouldn't mind if an ad takes the top portion of my screen. I do mind if though some fancy javascript, it follows me as I scroll, or randomly appears or is in a fixed frame. Just give me the ability to decide whether or not your products are right for me and let me continue on with the content. If you're watching TV and you don't want to see the commercial, you see what else is on or you go to the fridge or bathroom. Basically you can decide what's relevant. Advertisers are trying to take the position that they know what's relevant and you just need to spend as much time as possible looking at their ad and eventually you will buy.
With the economy the way it is, consumers are being smarter, and web-users are getting smarter about the products they purchase. I guess I'd say that the advertising isn't failing, it's the products being offered.
they're doing this because it's probably this or close up shop. It's pretty obvious they are desparate. The started charging for premium content. They've been begging people to sign up for premium content. The new web ads show up.
The best thing about this, IMO, is the ad is a Sprint ad. I'm actually happy Salon is getting money out of Sprint, who suck more than any company should be allowed to suck. More power to them. I hope they're getting a gang of cash.
Salon is an awesome site. People are going to have to get used to the idea that they can't get everything for free anymore.
Salon has been on the hairy edge of going under for a while. If you enjoy reading their articles, now is the time to sign up for salon premium. Then, two problems will be solved:
- no more annoying adds
- Salon won't dissappear
I'd rather deal with them then some other popular types of advertising. Several people already mentioned the flash animations that are becoming popular. I find those horrid, for it's like trying to read a book and having the words obscured. I want to know where the ads are and choose whether to look at them or not, not have them crammed down my throat. Any ad that obscures text automatically gets my negative attention.
Rant mode off for a second, I think jumpthroughs are actually good in that it gives a solid measurement of who's looking at an ad. You can use jumpthrough instead of click-thru metrics to set ad rates, much like in TV or radio or print. I would rather see online advertising go that route rather than getting more annoying in the hopes of a clickthru that won't happen (like those darn flash anims).
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
I propose an area of the Internet which is 100 percent advertising free. I've been looking for such a spot for quite a while, and haven't found it. Try and search for 'advertising' and 'free' and you'll only find more advertising.
The question is, anyone want to help me build an advertising-free zone of the Internet? It would consist of web material built by people who have no advertising, and would be recognizable by a specific tag in the URL, something that anyone who saw the URL would immediately know that it was an ad-free version of the information.
jared@dctkc.com is where i'm at...
information is immaterial
The problem with web based advertising is that no one is going to go to the trouble of jumping online just to click banner ads. For that matter, no one actually watches TV to see commercials either.
The difference is that with the internet, the user gets to choose what content he is looking at. When watching TV, they can show a commercial, and you cannot choose to skip it.
The Ad companies have to figure out that no one wants to clik on banner ads, and no one will visit a site where the ads become intrusive.
A better form of advertising would be to try to make the ads more like games. Put in game textures of logo's on Quake maps. If the level is fun to play in, no one will really care too much that there is a giant bloody pepsi logo in the center of the court yard. If the ad was actually fun to interact with, then it would get attention.
END COMMUNICATION
(I still think the original banners are the best. I don't always click thru them, but I generally do see/read them. I actually boycott sites now that have overly intrusive ads, such as ZDNet.)
Apparently, if you take any of their story links and tack on "?x" it takes you straight to the story, skipping the ad.
Perhaps someone could make an add-on like junkbuster that would modify any URL at a given domain via a rule (s/.*salon\.com/$1?x/) or somesuch?
The web needs to find a way to make money or even more sites are going to go under. Nobody wants to pay for content... I know, my company tried to sell content on the web, but retreated back to our profitable CDROM business when 3 products failed. If this method will bring real advertisers (coke, pepsi, GM, etc) to the web, then so be it! These are a WHOLE lot better than the pop-[up/under] ads that have been growing in popularity. This I can live with!
I don't accept cookies or javascript in my browser, and I just got to several stories on their site without seeing the ads. I presume the pop-ups are javascript based, yet I was still presented the stories.
Anyone else experience this yet? Is it only on some stories, or all of them. If it is just something as simple as disallowing cookies/javascript for that site, we should be ok ('we' being the technological literate...others with full browser features turned can sit through those ads).
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
Chris Beckenbach
while watching TV, there is about a 3:1
entertainment time to advertising time... and even the commercials are entertaining sometimes...
but for a web page you spend more time closing/avoiding ads than you do on actual content... I am at a HIGH volume destination (18 web servers, each producing around 1 gig worth of log files a day) average time spent here is 6-7 minutes...
I have yet to see many banner ads/pop up ads that were remotly interesting or entertaining..
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...another.com, who now require you to click a banner ad to complete logging out!
If companies had half a brain they'd figure out that ad banners don't work very well because nobody wants to see their stupid product and we're annoyed at their ads. I dunno about everyone else but I know how to find things when I want them and I don't have to keep hitting reload to find the right ad to get me there. If they must show ad banners then I think making them as tightly targeted as possible is the real key. I do click ad banners on Slashdot more than any other site just because they often lead places I know I like such as ThinkGeek and AnimeFu. The ThinkGeek banners that show off their new products are probably the most effective ads for me because that is exactly the sort of things I'm interested in buying. If a company like Amazon could target ad banners for book/music/movie types I usually like that'd be effective on me too. Ads for things I don't want to see and I don't buy annoy me and cost the company placing them money. Googles very targeted itty bitty side ads are probably among my favorite types of ads. They are non-offensive and they tell me things I want to know. However I think they need to charge per-click rather than per-view because a lot of people just don't click ads. I'd be willing to pay a lot more to place my ads per click than per view because I know that person is actually going to my site. That is what I want.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think there's a way through. Add ?x on to the end of any Salon URL, and you get through to the non-ad version. I've tried this on Mozilla(0.94) and IE(5.5) on my Windows machine, as well as lynx on two different Linux boxen. Cookie or no cookie.....
Now, if anyone's feeling annoyed at this, then all we need to do is work out how to use this workaround.
Personally, I don't like full-screen ads, and I kill pop-ups with Pow!. Banner ads I can live with, and anything like this needs more work at it. I can live with rising ad-warfare, just I'd like to see it better written, and harder to workaround. Just like my Student Union's messed up polling system. Session cookies were such a bad idea there!
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
It seems extremely fair to me to have to read a quick little Sprint ad to get through to the article I want to read; it beats having *me* pay for the content, and *someone*'s got to pay for it, or it won't keep coming.
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
Even for less well targeted readerships, look at newspaper ads for ideas of things that work. Announce a sale for your online store, mention a new product, or give people some other reason to follow the link! Make pretty, flashy ads, and people will tune them out. Make informative, intriguing ads, and people will follow.
Also, one more suggestion: make an advertiser index, like magazines do. Sometimes an ad will look appealing, but you don't have time to follow up on it just then. Later on, you can't find the ad again, so the site doesn't get the hit it deserves.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
This is the stupidest
Perhaps you should sue salon for your god-given right to free, uninterrupted quality articles?
This is sort of off-topic, but I thought people might find it useful.
= ht tp://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm
Everybody knows that you can visit X10s' site and wade through a few pages to find the link to set a cookie to prevent X10 ads from popping up for 30 days. Why, in god's name, they think that I would want to start seeing the ads again after I'd banished them, I don't know.
But after a few emails exchanged with their tech support, I was given this link:
http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=365&PAGE
It sets the cookie with an expiration date of 365 days (even though the confirmation page that pops up says 30 days, just check your cookie expiration date).
HTH!
Plus, you could acquire this set of self describing URLs (including a year's free web hosting) from us, to put your own jump-you ads on.
Have y'all even seen these guise? THEY, are the REAL .commIEs.
Interestingly enough, the Yahoo article cited is blockedby Junkbuster
for some reason!
At least it's not one of those NYT or MSNBC articles that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see. This time it's a Yahoo article that (lynx +
Junkbuster) users can't see.
i wouldn't mind this either, as long as the web designer made it clear that i was reading an ad page.. that way you can just click right through imediately. of course it's going to really suck when they realize they can use javascript to delay the display of the 'continue to the content' link by x amount of seconds..
_______
2B1ASK1
I just surfed over there... they seem to keep track of if you have clicked an ad or not. once you have clicked an ad, you don't get the jumpthrus anymore. if this is what it takes to keep the site alive then I'm all for it
Just don't follow the Salon article links, treat them like the nytimes and john katz articles and filter them out.
I can't understand the logic of businesses who practice such open hostility towards their (potential) customers. There's a vicious downward spiral - existing ad methods piss people off and therefore become less and less effective. And the response? Make the ads even more annoying! How does that make any sense? There's clearly still a lot more dotcom failures to come yet, because their business models are fundamentally flawed. I don't buy the BS line that "we wouldn't have a free internet" without this kind of crap. Maybe the web would be different (I'd say "better" actually, without all the vapid sites), but the internet itself would continue just fine without these scumbags. I for one will never be forced into the Faustian bargain these companies would have us believe is the only way forward. Maybe it's the only way they'll survive, but that's just tough shit. It's called the "open market", but don't get me started on that one. So what, if the only web sites left are small operations run by enthusiastic hobbyists? Fine with me, that's usually where all the best ideas come from anyway.
Message to these advertisers : sure, you can foist an annoying ad on me. Once. But you surely don't think I'll ever be coming back again, much less spending any money on you?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Stop reading salon.com.
Paying them to become a premium member to make the annoyances go away is rewarding them for bad behavior.
Don't get me wrong, I liked salon.com's reporting, it was quite good. But when they shifted to being essentially a pay service, that's when I stopped reading them.
There's a distinctive difference between "it's no longer free, but we'll let you sample some of the articles" and "we're going to irritate the heck out of you until you pay up and make us stop." Unlike most sites, they didn't distinguish between which articles required premium access and which didn't (although I just looked and sometime recently they started doing that). They had many irritating editorials basically accusing their readers of being deadbeats. And all along the attitude was increasing belligerent, "start subscribing or we'll make the ads more annoying."
There are other good news web sites, with better advertising/funding models, like economist.com. They'll get my money if they ask nicely. Salon.com started trying to extort it, so I left.
What happens when they collide?
I do a few things to thwart web ads, like disabling javascript (byebye pop-ups, pop-unders, and scrolling in the URL area) and disabling animation. I can turn these back on for the (very rare) occasions I need them.
But do I really dislike the ads themselves, or that they are intrusive and distracting? I think that they try too hard to be eye-catching rather than genuinely interesting. I don't want to be bothered. But a really entertaining ad isn't bad.
The web is not TV. That's been said and is true, but from the ads I have seen the advertisers miss the one lesson from TV they should apply to the web: Annoying ads may get noticed, but amusing ads get watched.
Do you hit the mute button when an especially loud and obnoxious commercial is on TV? Of course. It's annoying and gets Dealt With. But some commercials get watched.. one of the recent examples are those for a 'hard' lemonade. Why? It doesn't annoy the viewer and has some entertainment value. It FITS in what TV does. Web ads need to FIT into what people want or expect of the web.
If not, and these gotta-go-through-the-ad-to-see-anything ads become common, then I suspect the next generation of browsers will have a feature (perhaps a right-click menu choice?) that allows the user to take a link and the new page will have images, javascript, etc. disabled - but after taking the link to the content all that is changed back. Still an extra click or two, but the ad might be made less annoying.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
If a company doesn't value me as anything but a mindless consumer, I'm not going to buy anything from them. If I wanted to be forced to watch ads, I'd watch live television.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Put a few of the worst offenders behind bars (and not the ones that sell liquor, in case you're wondering), and advertising might suddenly develop a moral character, as if by magic!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sure, couldn't order pizza online then, but at least it was an escape from the ads on TV.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
Either put up with the ads, or skip the site. I don't read NYTimes articles more than once every month or two. I haven't seen anything worth reading from them that doesn't show up on another, less annoying site, sooner or later. The exceptions (for me at NYT) are the articles I really want to read now.
Pity; Salon did have some good stuff on occasion.
I recall in the late eighties the sheer outrage directed at someone who had the audacity to post a *gasp* commercial message in a newsgroup.
O Tempora! O Mores!
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Although I have been reading Salon fairly regularly lately, I was unaware of the new ads until I happened to read an notice about them on the Salon site. The reason being that I make heavy use of the "Open in background" feature in K-Meleon (also available in Opera - why can't all browsers have this very useful feature?). I tend to go through the main page and open all the articles I am interested in in the background then close out the main page. By the time I open the window with the article, the ad has already played itself out and loaded the article.
Trickster Coyote
Ideology is for ideots.
No, I don't want Salon to go away--*something* has to remeain to make slashdot look like serious journalism.
Then again, maybe I shouldn't be so harsh--I've never heard any other editor admit that they used a single source, knowing of a prior perjury conviction and an axe to grind against the target of the story, and explain it away on the basis "it's ok because republicans are evil." . . .
[yes, I really did see this in an interview on one of the cable news channels after they ran one of their lap-dog pieces trying to refocus attention during the impeachment.]
So they make you read advertising on the way--the content of an ad is less biased and more truthful, anyway . . .
hawk
f*** x10...
Funny Yahoo! would mention annoying ad techniques. They're one of the worst offenders of pop-under ads, next to wunderground.com.
As a web site owner, I love this. You get it for free so accept the ad.
As a typical netizen, I hate this. It does not matter if the content is free, if you annoy me too much, I simply will no longer go to your site.
This annoys me to no end. If advertising on the net was not so offensive, there would be no need for ad-blocking software.
The choice is simple though, Salon is free to implement this if they think it is a good idea, and I am perfectly free never to browse their site again...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Downtown Springfield is a scene of terrible carnage as the monsters
wreak havoc. "These monsters are destroying everything and everyone we
hold dear!" laments Marge. "And you kids should have jackets on." Lisa
notices a copyright stamp in Lard Lad's footprint, with the name of the
company that built him, and she rides her bike there.
Lisa: If your advertising agency created all those giant characters, you
must know how to stop them.
Man: Well sir, advertising is a funny thing. If people stop paying
attention to it, pretty soon, it goes away.
Lisa: Like that old woman who couldn't find the beef?
Man: Exactly. If you stop paying attention to the monsters, they'll
lose their powers.
Lisa: But people can't help looking at them. They're wrecking the town.
[out the window, the monsters wreck the town]
Man: You know, maybe a jingle would help.
[plays a piano arpeggio, sings] Don't watch the mon --
[plays another arpeggio] Don't watch the...monsters-s-s.
[chuckles] Well, it'll sound a lot better coming out of Paul
Anka.
Outside, a crowd of people watch the monsters. Lard Lad bashes Jebediah
Springfield with his donut. Lisa addresses them with a megaphone.
Lisa: Hey, Springfield! Are you suffering from the heartbreak
of...Monster-itis? Then take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka!
[Paul waves, begins playing a small synthesizer and singing]
To stop those monsters, one-two-three,
Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free.
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee...[winks]
Lisa: [singing] Guarantee void in Tennessee.
Together: [singing] Just don't look. Just don't look.
[people turn away; the monsters turn to look]
Just don't look. Just don't look.
[more people turn away]
Just don't look. Just don't look.
[the monsters try to destroy things faster, but start
collapsing]
Paul Bunyon falls on the Springfield General Hospital, his ox Babe
destroys the birthplace of Jebediah Springfield, and a flying magic
carpet destroys the birthplace of Norman Vincent Peale.
Lisa: [jubilant] It worked! They're all dead.
Bart: Well, except for chubsy-ubsy over there.
[everyone turns and gasps]
[Lard Lad tempts Homer with the giant donut]
Homer: Mmm...sprinkles.
Marge: Homer! Stop looking.
Lisa: Don't make us poke your eyes out, Dad.
[they drag him away]
Homer: [groaning] Oh!
[Lard Lad collapses]
-- The demise of the pudgy one, "Treehouse of Horror VI"
---
Krispy Cream is people
My father uses two pieces of adware. What he does is put the window with the less annoying ads over the window with the more annoying ads. Which advertiser wins?
Well, neither, actually. He may see the ads of one, but he doesn't follow them as he figures anything that has to be that annoying to get his attention isn't worth his time.
So why does he use the adware? Well, he's cheap is about it comes down to. He does follow the occasional banner ad, if it's interesting enough. He's often complained that they have a great snag with the ad, but a page so lousy he can't get the info he wants about whatever their product is. Thus each time he's just that much less inclined to follow an ad.
"Not as if web ads weren't already becoming more annoying, but the companies that run Web ads are probably as interested in ads that people don't hate as you are in not seeing the awful ones. What can we tell them?"
Why don't you stop whining like a little girl and thank them? These people are busting their butts trying make the business model of ad supported content work so you can read the stuff for free! If you don't like it, send them money!
Commercial internet sites cannot make money with nonintrusive advertising. This is why thousands of web sites are disappearing every month, and eventually there won't be any free content sites left that are not provided by the people trying to sell you more of the same content. It will hit everyone, even sites like Slashdot.
Don't go there. Then it won't bother you, and if enough people don't go there, they'll stop it. I do think that's pretty low of them, to change course in midstream like that. Seems like a lot of people enjoyed the site until this... well, stop going.
~ now you know
So if I am interested in the ad I'll never even reach the Salon article I originally clicked to get.
It will also make statisticians go nuts since you can't count click-throughs: you're already there.
m00.
(.)(.) Lameness filter very homosexual.
FilterProxy
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Nothing talks like $, or lack thereof.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Sorry to break this to you... but it costs a lot of freaking money to run a large website. Bandwidth ain't free. Servers ain't free. Rackspace ain't free. Content ain't free.
If you have a problem w/ a 5 second page view ad, or an "annoying" banner ad, then go elsewhere. Go visit those other Salon-esque sites that provide articles of the same quality... oh wait, those sites are going under to.
Fucking babies.
These people are busting their butts trying make the business model of ad supported content work so you can read the stuff for free! If you don't like it, send them money!
"Busting their butts"?!? More like shitting their pants that if they can't take some revenue, any revenue, they'll have to go out and get proper jobs like the rest of us. And you want me to reward them for being shysters? I thought the idea was that only success gets rewarded? You think failures should too? I don't make any money off my website either, could you send me some money as well please?
Commercial internet sites cannot make money with nonintrusive advertising.
So what?
This is why thousands of web sites are disappearing every month, and eventually there won't be any free content sites left that are not provided by the people trying to sell you more of the same content. It will hit everyone, even sites like Slashdot
Yea, ...and? I don't care. More than that, I'd actually be *glad* if at least some of the crap could be winnowed out. Good riddance. More bandwidth for stuff that matters.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Web advertising is a stupid idea and a bad business model. The entire advertising industry could be brought down over night if people started widely using ad-busting proxies for what ever reason. Developers could bundle anti-adware with their stuff, or someone could write a virus. Maybe if some creative PR people could use the terrorist attacks as an anti-web-ad's campaign: "Bin Laden used banner adverts to subliminally message people into hi-jacking!! install junk buster today." It would just be so funny to see an entire industry crash... imagine all the jumpers from the stock-exchanges lol :)
(don't forget to include slashdot and your fav. warez sites from the junk proxies (you can have the images covered up/replaced, but make sure they are downloaded so it registers as a page hit and the site still gets the money from the advertisers (even though its a fake hit and the advertisers are loosing money)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...that I prefer a pretty unobtrusive site like slashdot to there crappy ads. I use the net to get away from all the marketing bull. If I want to watch ads I'll watch TV, which is also why I usually don't read much stuff on big corporate news websites like Salon all the time while online. The net is not TV, and I'm sick of seeing people try to sell it like it is.
Television makes you watch interstitial ads. If you want to watch the show, you watch the ad. Or you channel flip, but one way or another, it's almost impossible to avoid seeing advertising at one time or another. How many of us were complaining about ads when we were watching Enterprise last night?
"Man, these ads suck! Why can't I watch the whole show without being pressured to buy a Compaq or Doritos or whatever? I remember when there were NO ads on TV! It was so much cooler back then...TV is so commercial now..."
Gimme a break. Webmasters need to make a buck to keep their sites running, sites that you and I pay not a dime to reap the benefits of. All other media that manages to stay in business does so because of advertising. Banner ads are easy to ignore, and it's terribly difficult to be creative with about 20K and 468x60 to work with. It's no wonder advertisers are giving up on internet advertising.
Hey, maybe having a full page to work with will give designers a chance to make Good ads for a change, ads that grab and engage us, the way that good TV ads do (I'm thinking SportsCenter ads, or the original 3D Doritos spot). Can you imagine never seeing another "click here, you have a message!" or "shock the monkey!" ever again?
Look, it's capitalism. If you don't like it, get out your checkbook and offer to pay the hosting fees for your favorite site. Otherwise, feel free to complain, but make sure you click on those ads.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
I'm not sure what the current situation is, but as of a few months ago Salon was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. If you enjoy reading the news and articles that they post, then you have two options:
1) Buy a subcription to their premium service. You won't have to click through the annoying ads.
2) Don't buy a subscription, but continue to feel that you have a right to read the news stories that they provide. Spend 0.5 seconds a day clicking through an ad which I'm sure they're able to charge more money for.
I guess there is a third option, and that is to do neither of the above, and then moan that quality internet journalism has disappeared once they and many other online magazines go bankrupt in a year or two. I really hate invasive pop-up ads, but they do need to make money. If you value the service they provide, quit whining and click through the bloody ad, or subcribe! If you DON'T value the service they provide, well then, don't visit the site anymore. If I sit down to watch the evening news on TV, I have to put up with 5 minutes of ads for every half hour of actual programming. I don't have a problem clicking through an ad for a second if it will allow me to read quality news stories online.
Saw it this morning, but I was just unable to reproduce it. Went to AdCritic and all of a sudden, everything on the page faded to a transparent state (javascript), and then an ad came up selling something (don't remember the product). To get back to AdCritic, I had to click on the "Close Ad" button. Pretty cool, but it'd get real annoying after the first couple. Has anyone else seen this type of ad?
- [grunby]
This isn't a new idea. IGN.com has been doing this for awhile, and that's why I stopped visiting them. If I didn't already avoid Salon like the plague because it's a piece of crap, I'd stop visiting Salon, too.
Ah, the vicious cycle...
I, and many others, visit Site A.
Site A's operation expenses go up. (hosting/bandwidth/servers ain't free ya know)
Site A floods me with ads to pay for added expenses.
I hate ads.
I, and others, go to Site B.
Site B's expenses go up.
Site B floods me with ads...
How about this, you cheap pricks, pay the premium subscription fee and be done with it. If you like a site, why would you not support them??
Many people here are irritated so much by web ads and others are saying "Hey, it's their only source of income to keep these sites running". So here is the challenge; make advertising vissible and effective... but not intrusive. To me, one of the major things that is annoying about web ads is the unpredictability of how they show up. You never know what's going to pop up in your face and what shape or size it's going to pop up in. With TV this isn't a problem because it's all linear. If there was something more standardized.... a standard size and method of display... as well as the ability to quickly remove the ad from your screen, I think that would be a good compramise. And maybe we can keep these larger sites running :)
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
I'm glad Imperial Tacohead got the point. We web site owners would LOVE to NOT HAVE TO USE THESE FORMS OF ADS! But the ad market is down and supply of web pages to place ads on is up. So we have to hit users with more ads to keep the sites free. If Salon was making a boatload of money off subscribers, they never would have thought of an idea like this. They would just stop the free version and live off the paying customers. We web masters have a saying "better to have 100 paying users than 100,000 non-paying users." Because when you get content without paying and don't accept the advertising, you end up costing us money. So we are more than happy if you wish to use another site instead of ours. Personally, I've been telling web masters for some time that this type of advertising was the next step. And like pop-ups/unders it will be used by more web sites and despite the complaints. Because most web site users are not willing to pay and so you have to take the ad or go elsewhere. And use Ad blocking software if you want. We will simply add code that uses a unique ID and checksum to see if you saw the ad first and if not "POW" you don't get the content. Some sites already do something like this and if ad blocking increases, more sites will do it. So don't think ad blocking will assist you in being a leech. And most of us webmasters are already talking about using this new form or web ads in conjunction with a timer. So if you found some way to block the ad, you would still have a delay before seeing any content. Just to frustrate leeches. Because if you want to be a leech we don't want you on our sites and are more than happy to see you go!! Yahoo uses pop-unders and is still the most used site on the web. Get used to it people. If you are not sending a check to the owners of the web sites you use, then stop crying and take the ad. We would love to give the stuff away, but can't afford to. We have to make money. And for our hard work, we deserve to make money if you care to use/view our stuff.
If advertisers would have just stuck to those. They didn't really annoy anyone. Well, there is always the "principle" guys. Those that invented the (unnecessary imo) filters.
Anyway, I am prepared to pay for services, at reasonable prices. One of the ways to pay is by viewing (and possibly clicking) on ads online. I say that is a fair price as long as the ads are not thrown in my face.
I have full understanding that it costs money to be online - and I am prepared to support good content online.
Furthermore, I think that if advertisers hadn't done what they have done, which is going to stupid extents to try and draw our attention, they would still be able to live on advertising.
I mean, if an ad interests me, I actually click on it. Such as those that appear here on slashdot for instance - they get my interest now and then. A popup ad however... it gets killed before it can show me anything. Not to mention those that popup 5 and try to set themselves as my start page and so on...
And no. I will not get any filters or similar. For the first thing, I should not need it. For the second, see above: I actually support online advertisments that are targetted, discreet and "good" (whatever that means).
If ads is a way to pay for, and encourage good online content, by all means bring them on. But keep to banners. Those that are interested WILL click on your ad!!! Those that are not will not because you give them 200 popups.
Thank you.
What's most important about this is only obvious if you're a regular Salon reader - it's overall the best news site on the Web. Especially for politics and consumer/corporate issues, Salon is simply indispensable. I paid for a "subscription" the day it was offered, and I'd pay again, and pay more, for the kind of kickass independent journalism only a site like Salon can provide.
Ads? I don't see them with the "premium" service, but who cares? I don't understand why
There's other places to get news - but they don't make money! There is no Internet-only news site that makes money - period. Salon is a very high-profile experiment that will, one way or the other, guide many decisions made by corporate managers about whether online is a viable market.
News organizations pay a LOT of attention to Salon and how it's doing, because they know it's a bellwether. Take it from a media professional - if Salon goes down you will feel the repercussions. Even the most insular geek sitting in the dark will feel the absence of useful journalism on the Web. And it will be because you, the Slashdot reader, didn't care enough to make it happen.
Pay! It's only thirty bucks, you know you can spare it. You'll be doing yourself more of a favor than you know. And if you can't be bothered to shell it out or deal with ONE ad a day for a few seconds, fuck you - no free lunch for you, asshole. Thanks for ruining it for everyone else.
On the bright side, content providers will need to upgrade the quality of their content as they increae the level of annoyance experienced by users in accessing it. This means less content will be subscrption only. Users will demand more and higher quality content from providers who insist on iritating their users with this garbage.
Sites who adopt this advertising strategy, who have previously been confident in their levels of content quality and associated user loyalty might be in for a shock as their viewership plummets through the floor - or at least I hope users will be able to voice their discontent this way.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
How? Can someone explain this to me?
If you are running Windows the solution is quite elegant. Go to http://www.flaaten.dk/prox/ and download PROXOMITRON. It's totally configurable proxy which already contains filters for many existing ad systems. If it doesn't contain the filter for this kind of ads, you can definitely create it yourself if you are familiar with regular expressions. Just create the filter that identifies the ad page and replaces it with simple page that immediately loads the article page (whose URL will be extracted from the ad page). It's really one of the simplest things that you can do with Proxomitron...
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Excite and Yahoo both have reasonable ads in their articles --- very similar to what we normally see in print magazines. Not too intrusive, but easily accessible. Popups, popunders and now these forced ads just annoy and thereby drive away the very readers they're trying to appeal to. Having a subscription option that eliminates the ads is a good idea if the ads aren't harassing because you need free access to attract new readers. I'm not going to pay money for something I'm unfamiliar with, especially when there's lots of free alternatives. But if, say, slashdot articles frequently link to salon and I find that whenever I go there to read the related article, there are other interesting things their also, such that I want to make it a regular habit, then I'll happily subscribe to support them. For that matter, that's true of slashdot itself. I subscribe to Consumer Reports online even though I rarely go there because when I do, they're very likely to have good, useful information, and I want them to be there when I need them. But if everytime I go there, they throw an annoying ad in my face and I have to work to get to the content, or it's delayed, then I'll run for the exits.
An interesting thing I noticed that was quoted of Marissa Gluck was that they were trying to "emulate television" by having a short spot before a news broadcast (or similar anaology).
/. and want to support it, but I'm not going to support /. by supporting something that I find offensive and 'rude'.
Had to break it to you, but this is the net, not television! Why are you trying to shoe-horn advertising methods invented 30+ years ago into the new technology of today? Why try to continue on with the same old shit of "barrage the customers with flashing graphics and maybe they'll buy something." Actually, the stupidity is multi-tiered. The Companies using the advertising agency are convinced that if enough people see their ads they'll get more sales (sadly the argument is that this is true) and the advertising company wants to do everything it can to stick the ad in front of your face so it can tell the companies that they are advertising for that they got X click throughs or Y impressions.
Last time I clicked on a banner ad it was an accident, even on sites that I like. Even the thinkgeek ad above offends me, and I will type 'thinkgeek.com' in the url bar instead of clicking on it. It's not that I don't like
If companies would come out of the fucking stone age they (like the RIAA) would realize that the technology is there to do some amazing things that, wow bring their services to the people who want them, and make peoples lives easier, instead of just annoying them.
It should be interesting to see how this makes search results change for webcrawling spiders and such. When I search for Frito Lay, is it going to list a (possibly defunct) web page advertisement on Salon?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
That's nice and all, but they've actually got a staff and people who are paid to produce content. Unlike software, reporting/commentary isn't exactly something around which one can build a service/support revenue model. The other web site you mention is just a part of a huge publishing conglameration -- Salon is independent, and the banner-ad thing wasn't working for them. You're certainly well within your rights to stop reading them, but don't complain later when MSNBCDisneyAOLTimeWarnerGE is the only source of news in the world.
*tsk* *tsk*
you 31337 d00ds need to have your heads examined
I just use wget to download the entire site, and perl to fix the links to avoid the jump-through ads and browse at my leisure.
OK, you caught me, I didn't actually do this but I do own the patent.
I'm saddened that Salon is trying to turn the Internet into TV (compulsory and intrusive ads). I would like a world in which a Salon would succeed, but not as much as I want a world in which compulsory and intrusive ads fail.
I think they are striving to become 60 Minutes III, and not an online journalism site.
Anyway, turning off JavaScript for the site salon.com will stop all pop up and interstiche ads from Salon. This is very easy to do in Internet Explorer (put Salon in the restricted sites zone.) It's probably easy to do in Mozilla 0.9.4 as well.
I have no problem with a 5 second page view ad.
And I know it's freaking expensive.
It's people like you who call me a freaking baby, when I'm agreeing with them. Why don't you target your post to the freaking babies, not to everyone in the conversation?
That's what sucks about advertising. Nobody knows who I am, and therefore I have to sit through advertisements which offend me.
I'm trying to get to CONTENT, and you're sitting there in front of me CURSING at me. Am I going to be nice to you? Am I going to pay attention to you? No. I wanna you ta shut up, and give me content. And make it NEWS, not something I already know.
information is immaterial
Notepad /winnt/system32/drivers/etc/hosts
;-)
127.0.0.1 www.salon.com
Now I no longer have to worry about seeing any of their ads ever again.
Oh gee, no more stories. Oops
For sites I hit daily, like that one and this one, I'd gladly fork over money to get rid of the annoying ads! I just hope people don't start abusing (sharing) their login ID/Passwords. I'm sure some simple scripting would ferret out those abusers for appropriate treatment.
Check this out if you think the ad on Salon.com is annoying.
... when someone Really annoys me with a (or five, mostly) stupid popup(s), I send them a mail explaining that whatever they are trying to sell me, they just lost any opportunity to do so.
Lots of the time I get replies saying "umm... what? our bureau handles that...", so maybe the advertising world is run by evil trolls without the companies knowledge?
Anyways, there is not much I Can do besides not buying stuff from annoying companies, but mailing them and telling them Why I am not buying is at least something.
And yes, I am pro moderate and well-behaving ads. I click on those when they interest me.
If you think any client-side methods can force someone to view an ad, think again.
What kind if checksum will you put in Javascript? Great! That means that webmasters who use Javascript responsibly will lose out, because everyone will surf with it off.
You can't force people to view ads. Instead, make ads that don't suck, so people aren't tempted to block them. Like Google - its ads get higher clickthroughs and suck less.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I'm not saying they are, but clearly if a site with as much traffic as Salon gets cannot bring in enough $ through normal ads -- and this appears to be the case all over the web, not just at Salon-- then maybe the question to ask is why is the marketplace failing to assign sufficient value to normal banners, etc. ?
If the answer of the marketplace is that I have to see popup ads cover my screen and view ads first in order to get to content, at Salon or anywhere else, then SORRY the marketplace has guessed wrong, and worse than being wrong, it just shit itself out of luck.
The real "fucking babies" are companies that won't pay decently for normal banners. As they spread their shit over more and more of the typical web "experience", trying to get noticed, people will spend less and less time around them, their ads, and the sites they deface. Products advertized in this way are almost guaranteed to drive people to the competition, just as sites that accept such ads are surely going to be dropped from my surfing list. Funny way to get my money, don't you think? A little shortsighted maybe?
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
I was reading a news site recently when the whole screen faded out and a mummy (Egyptian kind) came on the screen and wandered around a bit. I think the advert was for the film but I'm not sure. Then the whole of my browser unfaded and the page was back up. I've never seen anything like this - it was impossible to miss! Has anyone else seen this? I couldn't find out how they did it. Java? DHTML?
This is so typical. Salon is not tring to extort anything from you. The were offering a service (decent web journalism) for free, and (surprise surprise) not making any money. In fact, if you check right now, they are floating at about 25 cents a share. So imagine you run salon. What do you do? You launch a pay service for some of your content. You try to convince people to sign up for it. Well, like I said, they're still trading under a dollar. What now? Try to figure out a way to get advertisers to give you more money by running larger, more annoying ads. Maybe you alienate some readers (like in the above post) but its not like they were paying you anyway.
I personally would rather not see salon go under. There is still a void in my life left by the absence of my weekly dose of Filler from suck.com. I'm willing to put up with some ads to get good content, the same way I'm willing to put up with ads to get decent tv. People act like its some kind of right to get free content without ads. Are the ads on salon annoying? Yes. Could they have sone a better job with this? Sure. Is this a good enough reason to let them slide into the dotcom deadpool? I don't think so.
Sign up for salon premium. Or at least give their ads some page views.
spreer
I boycotted Salon a couple of years ago because their stories were anything BUT outstanding (unless you mean "Out standing by themselves, because they stink so bad nobody wants to be near them.")
/., and stated that everybody here is an obscene freak who gets his kicks by posting pictures of his anus on the internet, would you consider that to be "outstanding journalism"?
The articles were getting worse and worse, but what was the last straw for me was an article about an Amiga show, and instead of being completely objective about it, they decided to quote the looney fringe, and suggest that everybody at the show was like that.
In every large gathering of people, there are bound to be the rabid idiots, and to take their idiocy, and paint everyone with the same brush is hardly good journalism. If they did a story on
The Amiga article was the last straw for me - I've not gone to their site since, and I certainly wouldn't pay anyone for their tripe.
The key to advertising is to show you something you want to know. Among a focused audience, this is easy. Look in Computer Shopper and you see computers and computer parts. Why? People who want to sell computer parts know that people who are shopping for computers read Computer Shopper. A properly-focused ad should read like news. The thing is, what is properly-focused for general audience?
You can always pay up, mooch. Or you can just read the 95% drivel other places in the hopes that you will find the gem amongst the gravel.
I don't know about you, but I value my time enough to see that it is worth paying for some things.
I just feel it's important that they know where at least one person stands on these things. Put the ad in the contents, no problem, litter my desktop with these things, big problem. Yeah, I could just shut down Java, but then I have to enable it when I go somewhere else. Best just to sound off.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is my message to all you people sitting around, scratching your butt, wondering why online ads have sucked. It's really easy...
Advertise something I want and then I'll buy it. I'm sorry, but free hosting is neither something I want, nor need. Neither is lipstick, dead-tree magazines, another credit card, or any of the other tripe I see in banners.
As for the links to things I actually do like, USE A GOOD DEAL, PUT UP A GOOD PRICE, I ALWAYS VISIT LINKS LIKE THAT. At this moment, there is a Garmin GPS ad at the top of this page. I won't go there because they don't show me a price, don't say anything about the product, and in fact, it sounds like it's written by an advertising weasel who believes it's not what you say, it's how you say it. That crap don't fly on the net. What you say is far more important than how you say it in a text ad. I wonder how long these half baked ninnies are going to take before they get this. The Net is not T.V. You will fail if you treat it that way.
Open your eyes and the light of truth will fill them.
Yesterday most of their stories were subscriber only, "premium" content.
However, many of these stories are available for free at the author's main sites (which usually are not salon.com).
For example, there was an article by Arianna Huffinton which was marked "premium" , but it's freely available at her site.
http://www.ariannaonline.com/
Same goes for Horowitz articles.
http://www.frontpagemag.com
I think if salon is going to charge for premium content, they should at least bother to pay for some type of exclusivity. It doesn't make any sense to pay for something that is legally free elsewhere.
- sigs are for wimps.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I'd start getting worried if I found out my mom had never been screwed.
I, and many others, visit Site A.
Site A's operation expenses go up. (hosting/bandwidth/servers ain't free ya know)
Site A floods me with ads to pay for added expenses.
I hate ads.
I, and others, go to Site B.
Site B's expenses go up.
Site B floods me with ads...
Sounds like Californians moving around the country ruining nice little places.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
It's the same old problem:
We want free content!
We don't want ads!
As someone who produces content, I have to ask, "How else am I to be paid?" I HATE pop-unders, jump-throughs, etc, but I hate bad writing and low-quality design even more.
So whaddya thing? Does anyone have anything original to say about this problem? I love the idea of micropayments, but it's such an ugly logistical nightmare. I wonder if it'll ever work.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
What's so "outstanding" about Salon.com? They're just another liberal dot-com magazine wannabe. Sure, they have David Horowitz writing now, but that only came recently. Before that, it was just your average left-wing piece of toilet paper.
Don't fool yourself. Liberal journalism like what you find on Salon.com is a dime a dozen. But you obviously sound like a Salon.com cheerleader, so go ahead and spend your money. When they go under, I hope you aren't expecting a refund.
</flame>
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
I too subscribe to Salon Premium, mostly because I want to support such a high quality operation.
But another perk about slashdotter's should be aware is that as a Salon Premium member, you can download an entire day's worth of articles as one HTML or text file.
I download the text file, paste it into my IDE and voila, it looks like I'm working and I have hours worth of good reading.
Show me ads that I might actually be interested in, for fuck's sake!
I am tired of getting online casino ads everywhere I look. I'm tired of those fucking X10 ads. I am tired of all those domain registration ads ("Grab it now before it's gone!"...they've been saying for YEARS now). In short, I am tired of ads which are NOT TARGETTED TO ME.
No wonder the dot coms failed as badly as they did. With everyone so busy talking about targetted advertising, no one actually got round to DOING it.
Doubleclick can keep track of a huge portion of user's web browsing. They should be able to target ads fairly well...they should be able to get some idea of what sort of ads a web user would want to see.
Salon...well, salon probably has it tougher. Unless they can get information on their readers some other way, I think their best approach would be to try and make their ads as relevant to the story they are attached to as possible.
About.com is the ultimate example of fucked-upedness, though. They have SHITLOADS of text that I myself have written. They know a fair portion of my browsing habits. They should be serving up exactly what I want by now.
But I keep getting internet casino ads.
Of course, if no businesses are advertising things that customers actually want, I suppose there's little for a dotcom to do.
Oh, and I realize a lot of advertising is intended to make people want something; to create demand, but it is pretty clear that it hasn't been working that well.
First, I think Salon is pretty cool. I frequently surf to the front page. Less frequently to the articles. I like it, but not enough to contribute. Why? Because the portal I *do* contribute to is znet. I actually feel passionately about the material on there, and I want them to succeed. Even though they have never had any ads. But zmag is a niche market, with about a million hits a month. Big enough, but not in the Salon category. I think this is Salon's problem: they want to be both a mass media portal, as well as sufficiently "alternative" to convince their advocates to pay. But you can't be both. I think Salon has recruited about as many paying subscribers as they're gonna get, which is quite a lot for a niche player, but not enough for a major media franchise. They want to be both. They want to be the "New Yorker" of the net. But even the New Yorker has been bleeding red ink, and I don't the economics of the net can sustain this.
There are simply too many other destinations which offer poeple exactly what they want in the way of their own personal hot button issues. It's these issues that make people excited enough to fork out the dough. But by definition, all of those sites are small.
The shortage of choice and a more uniform culture which allowed publications like the Atlantic and The New Yorker to thrive in the past will not be repeated on the net.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Salon is far and away my favorite non-tech site. The quality of writing they've managed to maintain is exceptional. Salon would be a far bigger loss than any other site I can think of.
Err, you say "interested in ads that people don't hate" Wrong. Interested in anything with an emotional response, including hate. AD101 - don't care what it is as long as it sticks in the head. I'm continously amazed at how many people can't get this straight from the tone of advertising. The ads must be working.
...as usual. They could be paying attention to the *fact* that the only sites making any money via advertising are the ones with really unobtrusive, well-targed ads... like Google. This is well-trodden territory by now. It's been studied and dissected repeatedly by some of the best minds in the biz... any biz... but as usual, marketers choose to ignore the work of their betters, and waste their investors' money running things by the seats of their pants.
Salon is in my opinion one of the best sources for news on the web. They present a balanced view of the world unlike the corporate controlled interests of today. Just watching Fox news after the tragedies in New York made me want to vomit. They were reporting the number 20,000 dead as though it were a hard fact. They were running the images of the building blowing up as though it were the only loop of video they had. They were inviting commentators who had nothing but right wing nutty things to say. I pay for Salon's premium service, and I don't have to watch those ads. I would be glad to watch the ads if it meant that Salon sticks around for yet another day.
Many websites are so poorly designed that using Lynx is a nightmare. Sometimes it is impossible. Even slashdot is frustrating in Lynx.
These 'jump through' ads have been around for ages, only they used to be called 'interstitial' ads. Now we're just sensitized to dislike any new form of advertising.
Kevin Fox
You should just put it in with the spam. allong with any other type of online advertising that XXXXes us off.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Micropayments.
(I tried saying that fifteen times, but it got auto-filtered out. Bah.)
Just repeat after me. Micropayments, micropayments, micropayments...
mt
Of course, what happened was that the ad companies convinced the dot-coms that it was something about the ad itself that caused the click-throughs. And now that the click-throughs are drying up the ads companies are totally panicing, since they convinced themselves that they were responsible for them before, even though they actually had no idea what was going on. Now they're screwed, and they're pissing off everyone else as they go down the drain.
I use three techniques to nuke ads - a Filter, a hosts file that black-holes most ad servers and I've disabled animated gifs and flash. To me, the Internet is a quiet, subtle place with a lot of interesting content. Whenever I use someone else's computer it's like stock footage of Las Vegas, or that Futurama episode with the ads like the birds from Hitchcock's movie. I don't know how advertising executives sleep at night.
I will occasionally search for a product name on google, just to see who sells it! I do this because the ads on Google are not intrusive, annoying, etc. -- they are just informative!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
All these popups and diversions are making the old banner ad look attractive...
.vbs attachments with stupid names. There should be a test like a driving test for Net use.
What annoys me more than the popups and diversions, is that these ads prey on stupid people's gullibility! "You have won! Click here to collect your Prize", "You have been overcharged, click to gain refund" etc etc... I mean we're not all dumbass AOL users.
Stupid people should be banned from using the Net. The same kind of person opens unexpected
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
...I actually have *never* even noticed them, much less actively ignored them. Wow!
What really gets me is that advertisers are convinced that if they don't have click-throughs that they're not getting their money's worth....
BUNK! They don't get it from TV or newspaper ads - they get a general idea from some sample imbeciles who actually enjoy advertisements. But for some reason, they just have to get it from the web. Guess what - people don't like being tracked, so they'll go to the site directly, or hit it later, or buy the product in the store... but they won't click on that damn banner.
I for one can't stand intrusive advertising. One banner was OK... Two was annoying. 5 or 10 banners, interstitials, interspacials, interWhatevers, popups, popunders, float overs, flying layers, animations, javascript, useless music, Flash, Shockwave... SCREW IT ALL
I get on the web for information... Your advertising is all junk to me. I simply don't care about what you think is so marvelous. In fact, if you got in my face on the street like you're trying on the web, you'd risk a good healthy smack in the teeth...
I run WebWasher, junkbuster, and Squid... I don't see too many ads. Those that leak thru, get added to the filter lists. I filter all shockwave - I've never found a single thing I liked that was in Shockwave. Same with Flash. What's the point of that crap? Dancing things? Who cares. It's all slow to download even on my cable connection.
I don't go to Salon, so I don't care what they do. But if I went to a site that had this junk - I'd be doing everything I could to write some sort of filter or automatic redirector. And if they were pricks and randomized it somehow, I just wouldn't go to that site at all.
Web advertisers need to get their stats from pages served to users and learn to live with that as a metric. This click through crap says nothing about who saw the ad.
Some advocates for Open Source Software are always getting up in arms the second someone uses GPL covered software in some way that slightly contravenes the license agreement. "If you don't like the license, don't use the software" they say.
And yet these people appear to have no problem going to all sorts of lengths to circumvent the advertising that is effectively a condition of use of web sites that are advertising supported. How is this different?
IMNSHO, if you don't want the ads, don't use the website. It's really that simple.
I tried to read the Yahoo story, but a huge x10 ad popped up and took over my screen. How's that for irony.
Well if you think you can view content and block the ads try http://tale.com/ . They use a pretty simple method to keep those who don't view ads out. Basically, you can't read till the end of any story with ad blocking software turned on. Here's an old CNN.com article about it http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/12/fiction. idg/
They don't use a checksome or anything like that. But their method is pretty nice and will catch on if needed. I know how it's done, but no need to go into details.
When you make a Flash file, you get the option to remove the options like 'play' 'loop' from the users right-click menu. Leaving the user no way to stop the animation.
They shouldn't do this. They should always have those options there, as well as a option to fully stop the animation (ticking off 'play' doesn't stop the animation completely), and a mute option.
All the major browsers have a way to stop animated gifs, Macromedia must do the same for flash. They are partly to blame for making adds annoying.
I suggest that people go to their site, and complain about these things, 'cause that's the only way they will change it. They already know that botching up the users interface is a bad thing.
"The ad should only show up once per day per user, unless you have turned "cookies" off in your browser."
Let us track your internet browsing through cookies and we won't pester you (quite as much).
"Like many other companies we've responded by trying to innovate for our advertisers"
Because why should we try innovating for our readers when advertising is where the money is?
"so we can remain financially healthy and continue to serve you"
You = advertisers.
"we ask you to consider that the content you come to Salon for -- independent-minded,"
Four legs good, two legs bad!
"thought-provoking,"
Did NASA fake the moon landings?
"unavailable elsewhere"
Just like the goatse.cx site!
"Today we have two ways to support our writers, editors and the rest of the staff"
Well, two ways that we'll admit to.
"If sitting through one five-second ad before you can read an article is simply too much of a delay for you, we offer a Salon Premium subscription as a different way to support Salon."
Ceasing to visit Salon is not an option.
"Our intention, as always, is to bring you the most intelligent,"
From the same people who thought up jump-through advertising!
"provocative,"
Gratuitous use of the word "sex."
"fearless"
Unless somebody threatens with a lawsuit.
"coverage of news"
The kind of news where Bill Clinton's name appears twice on their main page nine months after the end of his presidency.
"and culture"
Insert the word "pop."
"available anywhere."
Anywhere = salon.com
When Salon first ran out of money, they fired almost everyone whose contribution made the site interesting and potentially worth paying for, "to reduce costs."
Then, they tried burying all their new articles in their respective "sections," to increase ad impressions by doubling/tripling the number of pageviews, and got flamed so badly by irate readers (because they'd made the site impossible to navigate efficiently) that they gave up on that.
Then, they went with the "Premium" b.s.--which would have been fine, except that all this time they'd been reducing the quantity and quality of new stories, so the site was no longer the earlier Salon that would have been worth paying for; unsurprisingly, not a lot of people were willing to pay for this new, cheap-ass "Premium" Salon.
So now this.
The piling-up-of-error and "bad faith" are the annoyances, not the ads per se. Although the fact that the new ad system is cookie-reliant makes it worse. The reason I don't enable cookies (except for specific sites) is because one day, about a year ago, I went to the Salon front page with "ask for each cookie" on, and it tried to set 31 of them. A bit much, I think. Not coincidentally, I'd guess, this was around the time the content there started its downhill plummet (cookie-setting attempts being a good metric of desperation ad-overload).
I'd pay for the "old" Salon, or at least twiddle my thumbs through these new ads for it. But the new, near-worthless version--no chance. Its value has so closely approached zero that I won't miss it.
If the freeing up of the 100k a day of bandwidth I, and each other like me, used to "steal" from them is worth the trade-off--for me, and each other like me, to run around saying "Salon's gone to hell; go to [fill-in-the-blank] instead"--then they've done the right thing.
But I doubt it. They never have before.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Damn straight. Its like the PBS guy from the other day. Don't donate if they have corporate sponsors too. If the public won't donate enough for 24/7 live 3d graphic instant replay of cheetah kills from around the world... then DONT HAVE THEM. Air the local journalism majors tapes, the ones who want to work for a paper, not just the ones that want to read off a teleprompter on the roof, so they get WTC or bahgdad missles in the background.
Works fine for me with JavaScript *on*, but with Junkbuster blocking their ads.
Thinking about this gives me an idea, tho: Browsers should have a special mode where you can just set form fields willy-nilly. This would be great for debugging CGIs, and especially great for fucking systems like this. Hm, bugzilla feature request form: here I come!
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
A large part which acts on why some things in society are the way they are is due to not standing up for what you believe in- just let things happen to you. There's a lot more to advertising than whats apparent on the surface. We are molded by it much more than most of us know I think. Though we ordinarily don't think so because it was what we were born into and therefore see it as "normal".
Yes, START A CATEGORY FOR THIS
There can be no compromise!
We must declare a War on Ads!
We will fight at the internet, we will fight at websites, we will fight at our browsers, but we will never give in!
The only good ad is a dead ad!
-> !Addkiller!
Why pay salaries to writers? Writers write because they want to, just like musicians do. The ones who can NOT write for a day aren't the good writers. Hire a decent copy-editors instead.
:)
Ir Britney Spears wont make music if she cant get rich, so what. She's pretty and will be on the new CNN as an anchor instead.
I think this poster is the only one who Gets It, as far as Salon's problems are concerned.
The marketplace for professional-level irony just ain't what it used to be. There are too many talented amateurs willing to work for free.
It's much more tasteful the pop-ups. And Salon is a very well respected netmag with great writers. But Salon is one of the few sites that I don't have a problem with if I have to go through popups and such
The full-page adds aren't for EVERY story, only a few of them. And I would rather click on one extra link than close a pop-up window.
I don't see what the big fuss is, MSNBC has been doing this for quite some time.
Why was this moderated down Offtopic? This is perfectly on topic. Time to screw somebody's karma when meta-mod time comes around.
let the karma roll in!
And the game continues ;o) .
I just wish people would simply not use a site if they did not wish to accept the ads. To block ads subverts the process. If you don't like the ads the best thing to do is not use the site. Not steal content/bandwidth when you know the ad would help pay for it.
Naw, fuck that. Bandwidth is so cheap these days that if you can't figure out a way to pay for it, then there are plenty of sites to go to when yours dies.
Or, mirror wildly, and you'll never die. Oh, you wanted to make a living running a web site? So, find someone who will pay you for it.
I fail to see where stealing comes into it. As the classic example goes, is taking a piss during adverts on TV stealing? Obviously, nobody would argue that. I'll bet you a buck there's not one TV ad exec who doesn't do that.
Finally, ads don't pay for sites anymore - the market is way too depressed. They just annoy users. That's why we see this move towards uglier, more hateful ads, which make more people block them.
And if you're worried about bandwidth expenditures, well, ads probably take up 90% of your bandwidth, if you run a normal text-based site.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
On the other hand, if Salon made their premium content available on AvantGo, I bet they'd get a few more subscribers. I've written 'em a letter to this effect too.
Hey, will their mobile edition have click-thru ads?
--Nik
Shit, dog, I gotta say that interstitials are TONS better than popups. Or popunders. If clicking through an ad to the article gets 'em some coin in exchange for the free content, that doesn't particularly bother me.
The things that piss me off in web advertising are thus:
#1: Noisy ads. If your ad makes sound, it makes me hate you.
#2: Screwing around with my browser window. Leave it the correct size, dammit.
#3: Pop-ups / pop-unders. Basically, along with rule #2, don't do anything that affects my desktop/screen layout--if I have to mouse around to clean up after you, I'm pissed off.
#4: Flash ads and the like that obscure the content they appear over. I want to read my article, dammit, I can still see your ad over on the side or wherever.
This gives us the following rule of thumb:
Minimal intrusion.
Personally, I find the interstitial (aka "jump-through") ad is a reasonable compromise--provided I can click through it quickly to the article if I'm not interested in the product. It doesn't screw with my desktop, it doesn't pop up any annoying windows, etc etc etc. It makes me click one extra thing, or wait until the ad finishes if I'm so inclined, and in exchange for that relatively mild inconvenience, provides some coin to the site provider.
One thing I've never figured out, is how magazines survive. There are all kinds of trade publications/small market magazines out there that can't have as many readers as Salon.. Do the web advertisers pay that much less for web advertising than they do for magazine ads? Did web content people shoot themselves in the foot by charging way too little?
Web delivery was supposed to be a whole lot cheaper than mailing out a bunch of dead trees every month, and putting up lots of copies at newsstands that never get sold. Is it?
Anyone know about the relative costs for a magazine versus a site like Salon?
I just went to Salon.com, and read several stories. Didn't see any of these ads. There was one popup which I clicked closed. Possibly because I have most banner sites blocked on my hosts file, and already had Salon's cookies blocked.
Salon's editor wrote that the new ads will be only shown once per user per day, and use cookies.
I rarely see the annoying ads (either in pop-up form or banner ad). I reroute them all to localhost. I have about 25-30 of the worst of the worst in my hosts file. This includes X10, doubleclick, and the rest of the ilk. Of course, you can always list them as restricted sites in your browser.
I would love to have a motherboard that would display ads for cisco routers when my computer boots up!
127.0.0.1 ad-adex3.flycast.com
127.0.0.1 ad-flow.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad2.peel.com
127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com
127.0.0.1 adbureau.net
127.0.0.1 admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 adcontroller.unicast.com
127.0.0.1 ads.1bn.org
127.0.0.1 ads.gamespy.com
127.0.0.1 ads20.focalink.com
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 clubchance.com
127.0.0.1 fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 focalink.com
127.0.0.1 friendfinder.com
127.0.0.1 hits2you.hypermart.net
127.0.0.1 ln.doublclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 msn.com
127.0.0.1 msnbc.com
127.0.0.1 popups.infostart.com
127.0.0.1 servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 x10.com
Mmmm... Time for some reverse-justice on metamod.
See you there thought suppressors!
I find it amazing that you say this
I guess if more people subscribed as premium members, this would not be an issue.
and then turn around and say this
Salon is a great site, and I'm personally willing to put up with a few ads. I just hope they keep going.
without seeing the connection.
If you think Salon is a great site, then drop the $30 for a year's subscription. Shit, quality content updated daily for $30 is an absolute steal. Don't just hope they keep going, help them to keep going.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
You make some great points, and have also used the words bitch, whine, moan, immature, and disgusting more often than in any other post in history.
Now, on to more important things. How can I defeat Salon's current ads?
However, I would like to pay sites like Salon with micropayments. Really, those ads do very little good. I mean, I would rather pay them directly what they get for each impression, than paying through the products I buy, since the marketing budgets really make the products more expensive. We really don't need marketing in the sense that we see now, what we need are databases with good information about different products.
Unfortunately, W3C closed their micropayments activity for now. There wasn't very much interested in it. However, we need this to fly, soon, or it may threaten the development of good, independent content on the web. If it can't be done within the W3C framework, someone else should get working on it.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Yes, Salon has a right to make money (although at this point, it's striving to survive more than flourish). And yes, you have a right to sell products.
...We immediately look for how to get rid of them! "Where do I click to get out of this? What can I do to make it stop?"
But, me buckos, I think you ought to know a little about what I and others do when we see your giant ads rear up.
Result: in "5 seconds," as Salon's managing editor claims your ad is displayed, I haven't looked at the name of your product. Or your company. Not even once.
And if I determine that there's no way out, no click through, well, I just look into mid-space, again, not giving you or your product even passing attention. It's like waiting for the air to clear around someone who's farted; you don't actually inhale, now, do you?
Next thing you know, all the articles will link to some Top50 voting site.
When will Salon advertise that they have "direct downloadz to articlez"?
While most of the banner ads are not annoying to me, even if animated, there is one that is. That one is the PlanetHardDrive.com ad. Maybe it's just me, but that sudden brief white flash prevents me from being able to read the page. Fortunately I can just reload or scroll it up off the edge. But I won't be going to that advertiser's web site under the assumption they are the ones who made the ad. If CmdrTaco or whoever wants to tell me different, please do.
I don't ban ads for the sake of eliminating banner ads. Normally they don't bother me and I know they support the web sites I view. But I do block a few ad sources due to things like extreme annoyances or web bugs. Don't make me have to do this to Slashdot, because I prefer to keep supporting it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...it's the ridiculously long Flash preload on the front end that will kill traffic to their site. It took 75 seconds this morning to load the Flash for the topmost banner ad over my miserly dialup. That's 75 seconds before the front page even begins to load. Loyal readers (like me) may be willing to tolerate that sort of delay, but most new visitors won't. When a site doesn't give you anything in 10 or 15 seconds, most people move on. That's Web 101, folks. Salon may manage to retain their existing readership, but it's gonna kill the growth of their reader base, and that, in the end, could well kill Salon.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
Frankly they can suck my ass, I will just stop going. Any means of revenue generation which is intrusive or just plain annoying, I will not put up with and that is that.
It has been said before in this post but the ad appears only ONCE in a day. I tried it and prefer it to cnet large animated ads in the content or the ugly design of msnbc. I also would favor micropayment.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Just like the porn site cascading popups. Until the sites you used to visit are unsuable. Maybe Microsoft is right by using Smart Links in IE soon.
To protect us from uncontrolled popup windows and ads we will be given a pre-digested set of links to approved vendors. And well all pass through government sponsored Verisign/Passport checkpoints.
I justed tested Salon from two different boxes.
Netscape 4.7 on Linux and I got no jump through add, but with IE 5 on NT I got the jump through
add.
Anybody else noticed this ?
Sites like this are basically providing a service in exchange for the opportunity to show you ads. Magazines are partly doing the same thing. IMHO, skipping over / ignoring ads is fair, but automatically hiding them is not.
With TV and radio you can just switch stations or leave the room or whatever, but you risk missing a bit of the programme. I think that's fair.
Equally, I consider popups and these "jump-through" tactics unfair. I think ads this "active" are an unfair attempt to force you to read them, OTOH more "passive" things like banners are ok: they have only until you scroll past them to attract your attention.
Banners in a separate frame (and anything else that keeps the ad in view) are _definitely_ not ok IMNSHO. Either I'm interested in a given ad or I'm not, and the fact that it's sitting there the whole time while I read through a page is not going to make me interested.
Obviously this is just my 0.02. Ultimately if you don't like it, don't use their site.
Thieves always try to justify their actions.
to stay alive for another 2 months.
/. it's illegal to
I forgot that around
attempt to make a profit.
Another example of the benifits of a California
liberal anti-business / anti-civics / anti-democracy education.
I've filled out at least 3 of them, and they all end up with questions about whether cost would be a major factor in paying for [related service].
Guess they found out that ad volume alone would not support their operation. Glad I didn't buy that stock (YHOO) when it was up in the $200's...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
You said :
Salon is a great site, and I'm personally willing to put up with a few ads.
When in fact the truth is that Salon is and always has been (since their URL was 'salon1999.com') a complete pile of shit.
Salon is a site where biased idiots spout of bullshit on any subject they wish and call it 'jounalism.' Once in a great while a decent story will drunkenly stumble onto Salon's pages, but that is an event not unlike a hillbilly finding crude oil in his backyard. You shouldn't attempt to set your watch to it.
Thanks,
David W. Matteson, Esq.
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
We are all theives. We all steal from each other, profit is excess value placed on a product/service. We just call it capitalism so we feel better about ourselves.
But you should still support things you take enjoyment from. Otherwise, you might wake up one morning and not find it there anymore.
> companies that run Web ads are probably as interested in ads that people don't hate
i used to use absolute telnet. it made me believe in adware. it was a good program and i didnt mind the banners. but there were a couple ads that made it difficult to work. one had a flashing neon background. it was really hard to type in the console while it was flashing. i wrote them and complained... no reply.
You can either subscribe (please do) or you can use a product like WebWasher to filter out the ads. It does an excellent job, is free for non-corporate users, and comes in Linux versions. It works with Netscape, IE, and Opera (haven't tried with Mozilla, but WW doesn't seem to recognize that I have it installed).
The only ads I disallow are Flash ads and pop-ups/pop-unders caused by page loads or page closes. The pop-up is understandably blocked, I think; Flash ads make NOISE, and I don't want my computer to make NOISE unless I ask it to. One Flash/javascript ad on ign.com shook the screen, "tore" a rip down the center, and played an INCREDIBLY loud sound clip as well, then opened an unclosable floating window which also made noise. This is something I *have* to put up with? It's like watching television; when the commercials come on, we hit the MUTE button and talk, keeping half an eye on the screen for when the show comes back.
BTW, with IE 6.0, the banner ads on http://www.tale.com do not appear, EVEN IF I TOTALLLY UNLOAD WEBWASHER. Whatever "tech" they're using to disallow pressing the "next" button if I haven't seen the ad quite obviously is not working.
Everyone with a brain tries to justify their actions. If I didn't think something was OK, I would not do it.
But people who refuse to justify their beliefs are worthy of nothing but scorn, because when their beliefs are wrong, there is no way of challenging them, and because, more often than not, they have no rational basis for those beliefs.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Waaaay back in the day, some companies experimented with a type of ad called an interstitial. When a surfer clicked a link, the page it led to would consist of an ad and a "continue to next page" link. If no action was taken, the ad would loop for n seconds and refresh to the next page.
Web viewers hated it. They found it very annoying, instrusive and a waste of their time. The format died quietly in the midst of then-novel schemes like popups.
(Geocities, one of the earliest non-porno sites to use popups, tried interstitials first and found that people universally hated them. Of course, they'll go on to tell you that popups were met with "overwhelmingly positive feedback" :) Go figure.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Microsoft thought of that, but they couldn't get Windows running long enough to test the software.
--
AC
is to read the content on your PDA instead. You only get the top two or three articles in each section and no images, but having the text in your hand at the breakfast table sure beats reading the back of the cereal box.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
I like what you said, and to make a better point of what the future may look like. I would like to point out a small project I'm working with.
This small web site will not let users in from certain IP address ranges, and will not let the content be viewed if cookies are set to "no". visitors must be over 13 years old. Simple as that. It's not paid content, but the site owner want's to know that each person got their "dose" advertising.
What I did like is 2 things, that over time ( 25 page loads ) no more ads came into view. That was it for about 7 days, then it restarted. and if you clicked on a link to another site. No more advertising from both sites for 7 days.
So in a way, I think, I was paying the test sites by understanding the advertsing rules of those sites.
I liked the idea.
-onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
1) No one obliged you to visit Salon
2) I really prefer interstitials to pop-whatevers.
3) That's all... There is no 3d point, you may read on now.
--- THIS COMMENT BROUGHT YOU BY ME ---
(remove one can of compressed meat to mail)