Slashdot Mirror
The Successor To Popunder Ads?
Croaker writes: "So, apparently, boston.com is trying out these new ads called "Shoshkeles" (the marketeer who came up with that name was on crack, no doubt). The result is an incredibly annoying experience of having crap run around the page you are reading, along with sound. And you thought banner ads sucked. The company responsible for the technology, United Virtualities says these are 'browser driven, platform agnostic, sound enabled, free moving forms that marry total creative license to a whole new level of effectiveness.' Effective in annoying, I guess." The site says "the ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser," though. Darn.
First mozilla allows the direct blocking of pop-unders/overs now I won't be seeing _these_ annoying ads.
Go mozilla!
...are bad news. Not that IE market growth hasn't already been growing, but if the ad community can justify dollars for these ads then thing are going the BAD way. Ad-peeps are a group of gods and monsters driven SOLEly by numbers and not influenced by any tech loyalty at all.
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Is there any way to kill them in IE? They are very annoying, and have no obvious ways to kill them other than time.
I know that wired.com has been using this advertisement scheme for quite some time. If you are using IE, you will usually see a palm pilot going back and forth across the screen and then fade away to the Palm banner at the bottom. It's very annoying.
ha ha!
you loose.
i win
mozilla rocks again.
mozilla beat you!
If they only work on IE, then I have nothing to worry about. =)
"platform agnostic" and runs on IE only... those marketeers never fail to amuse me.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
Just shoot them.
It appears they are flash. Normally something like AdShield could stop these but they aren't using any kind of subdirectory or common naming scheme for their ads so at present its impossible unless you want to globally ban all flash animations. But I suspect if it continues you'll see software coming out that lets you block all Flash animinations except in direct response to your click or something.
//m
I don't think that phrase means what they think it means.
How can it be both platform agnostic and IE specific at the same time? Of course, I'm guessing that the advertisers are still working under the common belief that Windows and MacOS are the sole two operating systems in existence.
the Shoshkele is a traditional Polish dance in which the dancers move around the space a lot. interesting it got used, but i wish it were for something less annoying. :)
It really is amazing the length some sites will go to to get you to stop using them. If you visit Lycos or Yahoo with IE you get Pizza Hut pizzas flying around the screen more often than not.
At work I don't notice them, but at home on my cruddy 56kbps they cause a significant slow down - the result? Google gets even MORE of my traffic.
All the webpages loose their "content" and turn into advertisements, like on TV. For those of you complaining, I'd recommend spending your energies working on a viable micropayment system which will allow the webmasters to keep their content driven sites open.
"You need a plugin" to view the ads... hahah. Like anyone's gonna get a plugin just to see some stupid ads.
The reason these "Shoshkeles" don't work with Navigator is poor feature support in Navigator's Flash player. Alas, it does not support transparent Flash movies.
While this "new" form of advertising (I put "new" in quotations, as this kind of thing has been around for almost a year -- though now it's got some ridiculous name) may seem very annoying, the ability to create transparent SWFs in both major browsers is something I have always wanted. Oh well, I doubt that'll ever happen.
So, to be safe, just stick with good ol' Navigator!
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
I just checked it. Click on the Monster.com link on their showcase page.....
It's very annoying.
theres been ads like this on www.nme.com for almost a year!
Go have a look at their familyguy ad (on the homepage - reload a few times if you dont get it)
I was on yahoo.com the other day and I saw this giant lemon bouncing around my screen. I tried clicking on the top of the page to make it go under, but it didn't.
They all appear to be flash, maybe we can modify the plugin settings so that flash won't run without prompting?
Make sure you turn the sound down before you try this.
Nintendo has an ad on some pages that pull up a HUGE graphic and won't let you even look at the page unless you click it, only then will the ad dissapear. I think its for Advance Wars, so beware.
But seriously though. Have you ever seen an important site that requires flash? I have seen a couple, but I could do without them. Any site worth its stuff is not going to 'require' that you have flash. Just simply don't have flash installed and you will be fine.
Personally, I use a program called adsubtract pro and have Java disabled when I browse. If I need Java I just switch it on. This tends to kill like 99% off all ads that I would normally see. It does not kill the text only ads on google, but those never bothered me anyway.
It seems to me that the more annoying that the advertisments become the more people that will use some sort of ad blocking software. Yes I realize that advertisers are trying to get the user to their site to sell them their product, but come on, make your ads relatively unobtrusive and we will all be happier.
Are there any plugins to Mozilla that act like adsubtract pro? The reason I do not browse the web on my Linux box all that often is because IMHO (please dont flame me) IE is compatable with more web sites. I use my Linux box for everything other than word processing and browsing the web though.
-AC
IGN has been using them for a while now. TechTV too.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Celebrate!
Wow! I was floored! How'd they get SWF transparency in Nav?!?!
It turns out that the links just open up stand-alone SWFs. It's not the live site you're looking at!
Cheap. And somewhat misleading.
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Their demos worked on netscape 4.76 with the latest flash plugin under linux. I just saw them.
Idol Star Astronomer
Want to know what else is annoying? The new Microsoft banner ads. Ignoring the fact that they are MS ads, they would still be annoying as hell. They look like one of the large format banners, but if you even accidentally mouse over them for even just a fraction of a second, they blow up into a half page ad, complete with their new Madonna theme song. Can't find a current example (most were for the launch of XP), but they used to be quite heavily on Cnet's download.com and also on, obvoiously, MSNBC.com and MSN.com.
I work in the data center for a moderately large company that sells banner ad software (using a hosted model). All this and more is coming to a web page near you, based on the things our esteemed customers are trying out.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
The site says "the ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser," though. Darn.
It would be kinda funny if this becomes the cause for the death of Internet Explorer. Web surfers would drift away from IE to Netscape/Mozilla/Opera/whatever when the ads becomes too annoying... or would they?
I switch off javascript to stop pop-up ads myself, I don't think I would go one more step to uninstall flash though.
I've just gone and had a look at their demos and sat their thinking "hey those images are poor", and then i loaded another demo and said "hey those images are poor too". While I waited for the second demo to load I tried to click a few of the links... only to find that the entire page was a shockwave file.
Since they claim to be the actual ads I'm more than a little puzzled as to what these things really are...
My favourite quote from the press release was "rich media ad format" - in other words here's a pretty advert that will take you too long to download but which is trying to see you broadband.
If i had broadband that ad is unlikely to be of use to me, and if i didn't I would probably be cursing the fact that you have some damned new advert that wastes my meagre modem bandwidth!
The cretinism of these people never ceases to amaze me.. I was browsing happily a couple of days back, when an ad just like the one described spewed its putrid self all over my screen..
It was for a Mini. Yes, those little cars, seen predominantly on Great Britain's streets, which make you want to throw house-bricks at them every time you see them.
Ad or no ad, I'll get in a Mini when someone pulls me by my cold, lifeless hands into one.
I'll probably not fit, anyway.
Life is thus,
Death is thus,
Poem or no poem
What's the fuss?
technoscout.com :)
or at least something similar since I haven't gone to read the article to see exactly what they're talking about
These work in NS 4.72. I don't know if they're timed or what but it seems like after about 20seconds or so, some stupid ad pops up and scrolls across the screen. It's really annoying if you're trying to read something on the page and I tend to end up not spending much time there. I guess they don't realize they're losing customers from it.
Weather.com has these as well, but they are MUCH more annoying. The one I had filled up the lower half of your screen with water and a broken pipe, and then had someone standing there, and it was an advertisement for insurance.
We responded by pulling our partnership with Weather.com. As we explained to them, banner ads and pop-up ads are one thing, but anything that literally takes over the users computer will not by tolerated.
Random Musings
Cute, but there's no money in something that cant be clicked, is there?
Frankly, I have flash turned off in konqueror on FreeBSD, and hitting sites which make extensive use of flash would only guarantee that i never return again. If you can't create an ad which draws my attention and my interest with just the facts, then so long and thanks for all the fish.
I'm willing to bet that we'd start seeing initiatives within the opensource community to include filters within the opensource browsers (mozilla, konqueror) which automatically blocks 468x60 and 125x125 sized images, replacing them with either an interesting graphic or perhaps a random image from the user's disk. I'd much rather be looking at something I like over something which pops up and hits me right in the face, literally.
Without advertising, the truth is a lot of the free content we get will just not exist. This is a fact of the matter, and for this I tolerate banner ads over the page. However to take it one step further and thrust it into my nose is a little too much. Sites like these will hear the whooshing sound of my browser giving them the pass.
I think a lot of people are learning to turn off a lot of the crap in browsers, particularly the dangerous stuff like ActiveX controls. What technology does this new form of ad use?
So that's what that annoying piece of crud is -- every time I've visited Wired.com recently, one of these damned things kept popping up. It was completely ineffective, impossible to read, I had no clue what they were trying to tell me and it has served only to ensure that I'll never visit that bloody site again.
What I hate about these ads is that they are actually covering the content that I am trying to read (which is the reason why I came to the site to begin with). So I have started visiting those sites less and less everyday.
It is as if you were trying to watch TV and a guy with a "Buy M&Ms" sign would step in front of the TV while my show is going on.
the ads on this page work in Mozilla 0.9.3 on Windows platform.
Ahh, I just fired one up in Netscape 4.75 and it popped up just fine...
And myres was that annoying! That may have been the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life.
I work for an advertising and marketing firm in central Arkansas. Let me tell you, it's scary when the account execs (sales people) and creatives get together and start scheming up new ways to bludgen the public with marketing slogans. The worst are when they come to me asking for technical advice. On several occations I've told them the best thing to do is leave 'technology' out, because they'd only screw it up. They don't listen, and they screw up, nearly every time. This Shoshkeles thing is a prefect example. It COULD have been cool, but instead it's annoying and people are going to bitch and moan. Then it's going to go away.
All we need is a simple link at the bottom of the page that says "Lots of neat stuff". And when you click the link, you _actually_ get a page with lots of neat stuff. That would be freaking amazing! (:
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
These ads just got me to locate flash on Redhat 7.2. It's in the netscape-common package.
Since I use galeon, I don't need Communicator any more, so
su
rpm -e nescape-communicator
rpm -e netscape-common
And voila, no more annoying flash.
John
IE 5.1 on Mac OS X doesn't work, and Adsubtract on W2K blocks them, too. (Checked IE on W2K, but I usually use Mozilla)
... marginalized.
I feel so
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
My my that is annoying, but it does apper that it works with mozilla 0.9.7 and flash 5 from www.shockware.com, it does explain the random apperence of snowflakes on some pages recently. I hope that the next version of mozilla has a way to turn these things off (hint hint)
Sorry to say, but they work in Opera, too.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
While trying to get tickets for Billy Joel and Elton John, I noticed this weird thing fly across the browser window. At first, I thought it was a virus, but then I noticed it was an add for some Symantec product. It was crazy, scared the crap out of me at first. It was definitely intrusive. I honestly felt that popup ads were much better than this thing. you could at least ignore them somewhat because of the feature in Windows 2000 that keeps new windows from opening up in front of your current one if you're using it. If people all just used banner ads, the world would be a much happier place. Are websites really losing that much money with them that they need to become more intrusive?
please me, have no regrets.
Now I have to switch from Opera to IE so as not to miss this thrilling *rgasmic experience!
All of the demo links seem to work annoyingly well in mozilla.
:-(
Does it run under the Mac version of IE? If so, that might qualify as another "platform".
creation science book
These really aren't anything new per se; I swear I saw ads that used DHTML on Yahoo before (the one set I remember had birds flying from a small box ad on the lower part of the page up to the top banner ad shortly after loading. I bet that the yahoo ones didn't use sound, of course.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I've seen 'em all over the place, adcritic.com had them, so did mp3.com.
Microsoft used them to advertise Windows XP a whole lot.
I have the flash5 plugin w/ it, and i'm not surprised they work. Whoever thought they only work in IE obviously didn't do any research into it.
But I've noticed these types of 'fucker'-ads showing up on other sites. I think i'm going to boycott sites that use these ads....
Seems to me that the time has finally come for me to remove this program from my machine. It's already used for those huge animated ads on cnet. I don't mind those too much, but this is ridiculous.
The software isn't listed in the programs that you can remove, but you can simply remove the c:\windows\system\macromed directory. This doesn't cleanup the registry, and you also get nagged to download the software again if you reload these demo pages. If you decline, nothing at all shows up, although when I went to the cnet site, their ads simply showed up as gifs, and you didn't get the popup nags to dowload flash.
... so maybe this isn't such a bad solution.
As much as I would Microsoft to up and go away, well, these ads are not going to kill IE. IE is just too easy to get, runs all the stuff people want, and it comes on their Windows boxes.
However, sites that use these features are likely to lose users. Yeah, they'll keep their techy users who use Mozilla, etc., but their joe-average users will disappear. (Why should I read Boston.com when I can read CNN.com and get none of those crappy ads?)
Case in point is that I almost never visit C|Net or ZDNet anymore. The ads are lousy. The content doesn't justify the annoyance. I use to read Builder.com all the time. Now I just visit Molly.com and see where her latest articles are.
Reality is that advertising is only tolerated as long as it's justified. I click on the ads on Slashdot because they're well targetted. I read BBC News because there are no ads. I used to watch Sci-Fi because there were fewer ads. If it really comes down to it, eventually I'll only visit government sites and my paid subscriptions because like many a business user, I don't have time to wait the 5 seconds on a page while checking to see if an article is worth reading.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I've been seeing sites use this type of advertising for some time now. In particular, I think techtv.com might have been using this advertising technique... not entirely sure though. I remember it was a car advertisement or something, a car zoome across the screen and then popped up in the middle with some words on it. It was a heck of a lot longer than that 8-ball advertisement. The 8-ball doesn't seem too bad, only up for a second or two. The car was up for a helluva long time, closer to 5 seconds most likely.
Anyhow, this isn't anything new.
These guys keep trying to think up better ways of advertising on the web. First it was banners, popups, whatever. They could be better spending their time thinking of something to do on the web besides advertise.
The real problem here is that the web is the number one application on the internet. We need to replace the web with a better internet application. Only, I can't think of anything else. Can you?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It just goes to show MS technologies progress into marketing! One day, you will open Word, and Pizza Hut messages will pop up, or during boot-up, you will see AOL adverts! The merging of a tool for everyone (browser) into an on-line marketing tool! I'll stick with Linux and Mozilla ta!
Quote:
The ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser.
Yes, yes, yessssss ! Victory... V-I-C-T-O-R-Y !!.
I strongly urge the developers of these beautiful , amazing breath taking crap-ads to keep it that way: Internet Exploder ONLY !
K-Meleon user
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
Downloading a regular ad is usually slow through my dial-up connection. The size of the ad usually dwarfs the rest of the page. I definitely do not want to be downloading a flash ad before I can see my content.
First, let me say that line was the most buzzword-complient I've ever seen.
Second, how can it be both "platform-agnostic" and yet only show up on IE? It just goes to show that the buzzword list was created in the complete absence of information on the product.
Third, let me say that I am glad this is IE only, as it won't affect my browsing under Mozilla.
Fourth, what is it with marketing people - do they STUDY to learn how to alienate their customers, or to they just come into it naturatlly?
www.eFax.com are spammers
How can the ads be "platform agnostic" if they only run with Internet Explorer?
Visit adcritic.com and see the annoying sprint ads. It's a neat site but they seem to love this crap.
Well, I went to have a look at the examples, but nothing happened. I guess that's what happens when you turn off scripting by default.
I did see something similar with my old email provider[another.com] - a picture of a cellphone popped up in front of my email message, and started looping crazily around the screen. I changed email providers and haven't visited them since.
However, it can get quite annoying to visit a site (mostly big corporations with "professional" web designers) to see nothing but a blank page... The number of times I've thought a website didn't exist, only to look at the source and see a list of JavaScript calls to display the page.
I'm working on a wrapper for IE5, where you can toggle pictures/popups/javascript/security zone at the touch of a button, so that should sort out most of the problems...
Well, on IE5 for OS X anyway...
If you control-click (or right click if you have a two-button mouse) the menu that pops up as a bunch of Flash options. Click on "Rewind" (there's no "Stop" option) and the ad goes away and doesn't come back.
I know the obvious solution would be to disable Flash, but my daughter likes playing online games that require it, so that's not an option...
They go overboard on this site, were talking martian war machines being chased by a car. Possibly the most irritating adverts every concieved, well maybe not as bad as adverts starring Jamie 'twat' Oliver...
All these stupid advert-technologies can be killed with a simple filtering proxy setup right. The only problem is when microsoft decides that webpages should be made of closed source formats and filtering becomes much harder. What we really need, is a program that scans a page and extracts all the good stuff and puts it in your own custom formatting/fonts etc. and basically makes all pages look the same, with one comman interface. That way, designers can get it out of their dumb heads that they can control what happens on my computer, and instead just provide the content.
:)
Only problem is, if you go to a pop-stars webpage like 'westlife' and the program says "error: no useful content found"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Flash does have some uses. I've been involved in building a web application where we needed to display vector maps (in order to smoothly being able to zoom into the map, a gif certainly wouldn't do). Our choices pretty much narrowed down to two alternatives, a Java Applet and a Flash animation. We used flash simply since it seems to be less of a headache to use for newbies, and somewhat quicker both to install and use. I'm not a great flash fan, and I pretty much hate the use of unnecessary flash animations, but the format does have its uses...
May we live long and die out
Ads with sound. Hrm. Being a Bastard Operator from Hell, I'll surely take pleasure in extracting an explanation from some poor schmuck whose computer is locked in one of those pr0n-popup frenzies, especially now that Jenna Jameson will be making some kind of animal sounds...
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
Then, if you want ads, you can just turn them on.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Contrary to the statements made in the article, they work just fine in Mozilla as well! (At least under WinNT).
Great to see Mozilla catching up to Explorer....
I went to the site using Konqueror, and all I got was an attempt to open a "normal" pop-up. I love the Konqueror's feature that asks for permission before allowing JavaScript to open a new window.
I wonder what's next. If it becomes common knowledge that some browsers are immune to the ads, will more sites try to force you to use IE by checking the USER_AGENT value and refusing to load?
I'm thinking that sooner or later, people will start ripping off this ad style, and they're not going to call it a "Shoshkele". Unless UV patents this ad method, (and IANAL) I don't see how they can keep others from ripping them off. Besides, I've already seen annoying ads like these on weather.com.
Now all we need is a filter for this sort of crap in Mozilla and I'll go back to using it.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
They better have big payouts for ads like that, Im not into losing people browsing to make a buck.
linuxhelpnetwork.homelinux.net
Actually, to me these seem a lot less annoying then popups/popunders. At least for the fact they can't spawn all over your desktop resulting in minutes of annoyance. And they disappear on their own, which is a huge bonus.
The sound part is really obnoxious, though.
Also, this isn't the first time something like this has been tried, although it may be the first time the crap appeared on top of the content you're trying to get, yahoo used something similar a while back on their main page.
As for these only working in IE? Well, that's just because the advertising company didn't bother to spend like 5 minutes getting the implementation to work in Moz, having done DHTML in both IE and Moz, I can say that it's can be a pain, and clutter up your code, to get something that will work in both, it's certainly possible. Oh look, boston.com also threw in a pup under, just for fun. Advertising a broken image, apparently.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The same old method still works online you know...
If you don't like the way the store treats you, don't shop there.
I don't know about everyone else.. but when I go to a site online that has really annoying ads, I tend to avoid it in the future.
If you turn off flash then tha page won't display at all. (I'm using Opera 6.0).
This is bad, does anybody know how to make the page display without the add appearing?
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
The other day I was reading salon and this jaguar ad started out like an innocent 160xmumble standard ad banner. Said something about "rip into jaguar" or something equally retarded. Then this paper-tearing effect starts and extends down and to the left, covering about 30% of the page i was reading. super, super annoying...
You know, really, I don't mind banner ads all that much, as long as they are reasonably circumspect and don't actively try to annoy me. I've even been know to click on some of them if they looked interesting. However, I've pledged to myself that I will not click on the ads for or buy ANYTHING from companies that use hectic, spasm-inducing animated gifs, super-size flash ads, ads with sound, popunder ads, popup ads, or any other species from the menangerie of ads whose theory seems to be "Let's stick our thumb up the user's butt, and he'll be really pissed off now! Somehow, that'll make him wanna buy our cheap crap! Yeahyeahyeah! Hand me the crack pipe again, bob!".
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
well.. as I just tried to load the ads myself (this is probably the first time ever I've tried to load an ad intentionally) the ad agency seems /.'ed. So my suggestion is this: the slashdot editors post irresistable stories pointing to all major ad agencies and watch as /. makes it's largest contribution to the internet by stopping these things from the source. Why didn't we think of this before?
LFTL
the Close this window part of the ad.
It's fine that they can make these annoyances so much more visible, but why don't I ever see ads for things I like or want to see?
I go to a video game magazine online, and I see an ad for a game. I am interested in that.
When I go to either a board on ezboard, a small news site, or some other random site, why do they all have ads for that X-10 camera?!
I am not interested in it, and I don't believe that any of those sites are really bringing in the "target demographic."
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
"This ad will disappear if you leave this site."
I'm a web developer and I had to investigate a technology called 'vokens'. This is the same thing as reported in the article but by another company, www.eyereturn.com. (There boast of 'the only company to offer vokens!) These vokens did work outside of IE.
After research, I found that many of the big compnays are doing this type of advertising but all under different names as if that make the technology proprietary.
So far, realmedia.com, ad4ever.com, doublclick.com, eyereturn.com are all doing them. You can see an annoying one on www.tsn.ca/nhl.
The problem with the technology is great. We found that if we let an external company put a 'voken' on our website with a Javascript Source tag, they could hijack the entire site via the DOM.
A quick presentation to my management with a development box showing how I could, with a voken stored on one of my personal servers, take over our compnay's website and put my own message up stopped our research into the technology.
Do not, under any circumstances put a tag in your code when the source is nto on a trusted server.
click on the splash/whatever ad link @ bostom.com - I just had to laugh.
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Reason being that that on IE 4 and higher on Windows support "window-less" plugins or controls. Meaning that the plugin is not bound to a new window class, but can be instantiated like a another element, such as an image on the page. A window-less control can also support transparency and layering which is why it can float on top of the page.
This was never implemented on the Mac, and I don't think Netscape ever bothered to get it working on Linux either (hard to tell seeing how very few developers released plugins for Linux or any other UNIX OS). So, IMHO, this is kind like a huge plug for alternative OS's like OS X and Linux simply because these ads can't work. If I recall correctly, there are plans to eventually include window-less controls in Mozilla. This is a good idea for designers and such but we all know that some marketing schmoe is going to abuse it. Much like they are now.
I've seen tasteless ads before, but these get the record!
They work fine in mozilla to. This is all just shockwave junk.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
As a marketer, why should I target a community that doesn't support me? (Complains about the profit motive; thinks IP should be free; complains about big ads; etc.)
Enjoy the anonymity while it lasts....
I saw this very type of ad on Yahoo! the other day... it was a lemon that bounced around the screen for a bit, then moved off to the side. Its pretty annoying, and I fully expect to see a lot more of that in the coming months.
These people have to understand how it is going to effect their site! I think it detracts from what the site is really offering, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of viewers won't be inclined to use the site as they had previously. Once this type of advertising demonstrates the damage it can cause to a site's image and readership, then we'll move on the next phase of advertising... how about something that doesn't suck?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
It is as if you were trying to watch TV and a guy with a "Buy M&Ms" sign would step in front of the TV while my show is going on.
Just wait. In a couple of years, when the price of PVRs go down enough so that everyone can afford them, TV stations are going to start doing just that. Shoving advertising on top of regular TV content. Probably taking up portions of the screen like the side/top whatever. Maybe shrinking down the image and filling the borders with advertisements.
Long gone will be the days of bathroom breaks and channel surfing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yep. Works in Moz.096, too.
It seems to use Shockwave ant btw makes
it totally impossible to read the article.
Could have left out the article as well.
While this does not really stop the ads from using dhtml to hork around with your page, having most of the ads DNS name pointed to your own server with a light 404 or (nothing at all) goes a long way to making everything right in the world.
I use to collect my own list, and then I found http://www.smartin-designs.com/ 's site that covers most everything.
Now if I could just figure out how to replace all 1px images with my own transparent gif - damn those web bugs....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
IE works on MacOS, too.
So if you describe the OS as the platform,
it runs on the two major platforms. For
merketing guys, this'll have to count as
'platform agnostic'.
This is nothing new! I've been seeing this for several months, now. Also, it's just Macromedia Flash, so it actually can run on Netscape with Macromedia Flash installed. Maybe the advertisers are too dump to know that, but isn't that a good thing? So advertisers are computer stupid, our government is computer stupid, AOL users are computer stupid. Is there no end?
as far as i know wired.com is running such an ad for Palm Inc. (however you only have the pagesucking ad about one time of four)
I remember ZDNet doing about the same about a month ago for Dell computers.
A big thank you to all of you who use Junkbuster and other ad filtering software. You have proven your point. You can make unobtrusive advertising unworkable. Hopefully, you'll soon be able to drive all advertiser supported content off the web.
Ok, they're really annoying, but at least they're creatively made. And let's face it. Ads are the main driving force of all the media. Why should the net be any different? There is no such thing as a 'free lunch' as everyone knows...
Not that I like ads, but I understand sites need to have a way to survive. What I would like to see, though is:
People really should stop being so selfish. I'm starting to believe that the 'geek' title so many people here are proud to use is nothing more than a certificate of insensitiveness, egocentrism and selfishness...
How about... growing up?
I'll submit this as a bug to the KDE team...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
OK, here's the situation. I go to a page that has Flash content. I don't have the plugin, and I don't WANT the plugin. How the hell do you say "bugger off, I don't want to fetch it, you POS"?
You know, the popup from the browser asking if you want to go get the plugin from somewhere is almost as bad as the ad itself.
I'm using Mozilla on Linux...
It lasted for less than a week, and I never saw anything like it since. I believe people bitched so loudly at them that they decided to stop running the ads. Now they're using the "redirect" ads for the AV Club section (click on link, get a full-page ad that redirects you to the content after a pause). Very annoying.
-Legion
Well, that's just because the advertising company didn't bother to spend like 5 minutes getting the implementation to work in Moz, having done DHTML in both IE and Moz, I can say that it's can be a pain, and clutter up your code, to get something that will work in both, it's certainly possible
Ugh, what the hell is wrong with me?
Let's try that again: "Well, that's just because the advertising company didn't bother to spend 5 minutes getting these to work in Moz. Having done DHTML in both, I can safely say that while it can be a pain, and can clutter up your code, getting something to work in both isn't really all that difficult."
May a thousand scorpions sting me in my intimate places.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course this means information will be less available, but I can afford a little expense to have a pleasant online experience.
Where do I sign up for a pre-paid, ad-free Internet?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The number of times I've thought a website didn't exist, only to look at the source and see a list of JavaScript calls to display the page.
That's when you start sending them nasty messages by writing your rants up in the URL field. You know, you fetch http://foo/ and get the idiotic "we don't know how to send a 301" JS-only redirector. So you click on your location bar, type in some rants about their ancestry, then send it off a few times.
They could even pull it off with a meta refresh if they REALLY needed to bounce you someplace. Lusers.
After seeing those demos, I'm about 10 times less likely to consider AT&T broadband, and I'm NEVER going to visit boston.com ever, ever again. It doesn't seem to me that one doesn't want to ANNOY THE HELL out of potential customers, but these ads seem specifically designed to do just that.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
These kind of ads were used on several internet sites in Norway, until they were stopped because of reader complaints. Everyone hates them, and they're simply a marketing ploy to increase ad response temporarily. They are not effective in the long run and nobody uses them here anymore.
The flash ads are just the demos. If you go to the main page, it's supposed to do the real ad. Of course, since I don't let Javascript run from unknown sites, I don't see any of it (so it may or may not be there). In fact, not running Javascript is the single easiest way I've found to avoid 99% of all the annoying ads (including, it seems, this potentially annoying one).
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Since i use mozilla i wanted to see if their ads would work on it. The reason they work, is that the demos are completely done in flash. Just look at the source, its only about ten lines, and only contains the swf file.
I think it is a bit strange that they arent using the actual html to perform their dog and pony show.
Honestly, I think these ads are the lesser of the various evils. I'd much prefer to go to a site with these ads than with a site with popups/popunders, or worse, a site like ign.com where you get an entire page of ads before you can click thru to your destination page.
Ads are here to stay. I'll take these over the others. Any idea when the United Virtualities IPO takes place?
-Rick
Y'know, reading the comments here, I had no idea what I'd been missing. You people have been stuck with ads that are literally taking over your computers, and not in the old-fashioned millions-of-onexit-porn-windows sense, either. And all you can say is "well, that's pretty annoying, so I don't go to that site anymore"?? Wake up!
At least now I know that everyone who crows about how IE is such a superior browser have been just blowing smoke for the last few years - using the supposedly "inferior" Netscape browser, all I seem to miss out on are annoying advertisements. Sure, I'll admit that Netscape has problems, but I can honestly say that nothing about using NS 4.7x over the past few years has ever been as annoying as having an ad take over my whole computer screen the way it's described here.
Face it - for all your IE boosterism, you've been using and applauding a superior marketing platform, nothing more. Considering that Microsoft is basically an advertising business, maybe this shouldn't be as much of a surprise to me...
...my god, I'm about to turn into one of those lynx-using elitists. Ack!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
....but only runs on IE.
OK.
Since I don't mind this annoying-sounding scheme not being available to me, I'll spare the claimant the glass-encrusted traffic cone of cluefulness.
cheers,
BM
These ads do what they need to - advertise. If they would lose the sound, i deffinetly feel these ads would be the next best thing (as long as they didnt get to lengthy). I like them better then annoying popups anyway,
AJ
-------
artlu.net
has been doing this for some time now as well.
I reflect your pompous signature back upon you.
I saw similar ads for planet of the apes.
Also, they work on mozilla.
This "bug" (actually an enhancement suggestion) would mirror Mozilla's image blocking features for Flash objects. Users would be able to block Flash from all sites, selected sites, or enable a pop-up asking whether a site is permitted to run Flash.
It sounds like a perfect solution for people who want to keep Flash available while avoiding "Shoshkeles" and the like.
OK, I'm an admin at a rather large (5000ish users) messageboard. Pray excuse the blatant plug but this is a fairly good case in point. People tend to spend extensive amounts of time on it, and the average users online is somewhere in the region of fifty during busy hours. So, naturally one would expect the company running the banner ads running our site to be thrilled (well, we dont do business with them directly, instead we go via the GSN network). Err, yeah possibly. Now let's examine the demographic for a second here. Check the calendar and some people's profiles and it would appear that most people are around, say, 14-21 years of age, with a lot living in Canada and the united kingdom, as well as the US.
So why the bloody hell do I see ads for god damn anti-baldness cream?! Saw these a while ago. I dont know many teenagers with a hairloss problem. Only, now we see some long-distance offers for as little as 4 cents per hour! wow! I'm ecstatic! please! tell me where to sign up!!!!
Oh, hang on
See, if you resolve my IP, it ends in .uk
So I'm not eligible for the service.
Drat.
Such a pity they wasted an impression on me.
This shouldnt be happening. Come on, if they stopped using their technical expertise to come up with elaborate systems which send me cookies but don't even sharpen their focus, they might be able to come up with something a bit more clever. Like resolving my IP (I'm gonna view more than one page per site so they can cache it) and serving me an ad based on something that's available in my area. Like an ADSL ISP in the UK with interesting rates - this might actually warrant me to click on it, and considering most people don't suddenly drop everything and tear off to their nearest Volkswagen dealership as soon as they see an ad on TV, that's an impression definately NOT wasted.
Or during the signup process for our site we could supply some information about us. Like the fact that we're a site based around a computer game series, or that most people here arent actually old enough to take out a credit card account with all those wonderful APR incentives. Serve me an ad for where I can get a PS2 or GeForce3 in the UK on the cheap! I'd click that too!
No, let's be big, flashy and patronising. That's always worked, hasnt it. Morons.
Actually all you have to do is set the "run activex controls" setting to prompt or disable. It is interesting to note that if you try this with the demos from United Virtualities then the ad will not appear, but then neither does the original page you wanted to view. If you try this with the live boston.com site then you get the content and no annoying ads.
I wonder if the marketing and sales of United Virtualities intentionaly did this with the demos to "prove" that their technique is "flawless".
Big Question: Do advertisements work, or are companies being duped?
Do advertisements work? Is there really an increase in sales after a product is advertised? Does everyone run out and buy Vidal Sassoon when the salon advertisement plays? Does GM really sell more "like a rocks" because of their ads?
I understand that at one level, advertisements must work: people won't buy a product if they aren't aware of it.
But beyond making people aware (ie. stating "Hey, this product exists, here's what it can do for you" in the simplest possible form), does advertising work?
Do flashy annoying ads work better than static ads?
Or are businesses being suckered by the world's best conmen?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Then you're prompted for each page with any Active X about allowing it to run. This quickly becomes annoying on sites you visit often and you're forced to put them in the Trusted Zone to avoid clicking "No" 80 times, but that defeats the purpose of the exercise.
It's probably easiest to use a non crippled browser instead.
me and my company, Spaz-O-Riffic, also pulled out of our partnership with weather.com.
Hey, I tested the company who's bringing these out, and on wired. Neither worked on my Opera.
(v6, Win32)
I haven't tried it on Linux yet.
these kind of ads have been around for years as I know it. They have been on (in particular) asian portal kind of sites for literally years. Examples would be www.hongkong.com and www.ttyy.net www.sina.com www.netease.com (or at least some of them have the annoying ads) etc...
is that these ads not only take up space on my screen, but also take up all my processers resources. Heck, while running win2k I had to wait for the ad to finish before my computer would open the task manager. Some of us dont have the money to buy new hardware, so these kind of ads are really insulting. This is the reason I bought AMD, Intel had an add on slashdot that used all my processer resources....
I don't care what it says about ie only, these things work in NS 6 too.
Man are they annoying, lets just cover the cover the content for 15 seconds shall we.
-Rob
Bomb IRAQ
GOATSE!!!!
I'll click a link, and switch windows. IE's windows blinks (like an AIM instand message window does when you get a message), then the new popunder ad blinks, causing the original window to blink frantically and annoyingly until i click it AND view the ad. Ugh.
Marketers won't stop until the ads are as intrusive/disrupting as television ads, where you have to basically stop what you are doing (watching your show) and wait until the advertisement is done.
One problem with that is that I, like many people, operate in a totally different mode on the web; more of a directed high-speed mode where I decide pretty quickly whether or not I want to read a page. If I have to wait more than a few seconds before seeing the actual content because of ads, I'll say screw it (unless I really have high expectations about what may finally be there), it's not worth the time. If I had to wait for 10 seconds of advertisements per web page I glanced at in a day, it would add up to some serious lengths of time.
(Actually, even with TV, there are only a few shows that I watch "live"; I usually tape stuff and watch it later, fast-forwarding through commercials, although I do stop and watch commercials that seem interesting. Yeah, I need to get a Tivo.)
Once web advertising has caught up to TV, they won't stop there. They'll come up with something even worse. E.g. you know those tests that humans are supposed to be able to pass, but computers aren't, to avoid having robots get into certain sections of web site, or to prevent computers from automatically enter on-line polls, etc.? (Someone mentioned it in a comment recently, but I can't find it now.) Well, soon you'll have to take a quiz about the ad that just went by in your browser, to make sure you paid attention to it. Or they'll start using product placement like they do in movies and some TV shows. You'll read an interview which says something like "CEO Jack Nife stopped to ponder the question, while sipping his Dr. Pepper and eating a Fig Newton, before replying `We had to lay off 2,000 people so that the other 5 of us could keep our jobs. It's better for everyone in the long run.'"
I'm on a dialup and I find it ironic that AT&T is trying to advertise broadband to me with ads that I would never wait around to see if I hadn't been curious because of this story.
I'm a bit late to the discussion but these are not new. 3D action planet (and probably the rest of the gamespy network) have had these things for a while. Their advertising page mentions DHTML adverts - these really do suck. Imagine reading an interesting article - all of sudden, your machine freezes for 2 seconds, and then this big ad blocks the text. You can't close it or move it so you can read the article. You have to watch it (and hear it).
These are bad, and the only thing they do is manage to alienate their readers. The last thing we need is these things becoming more popular. And that name is terrible - pop-overs maybe better (it 'pops-over' all the interesting info you see, rather than pop-up). I hope these can be disabled, or sites persuaded not to use these. Unfortunately i think its a bit late - once one person does it, others will follow.
So these things question whether we can proove what type of platform is running?
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
"We don't support shoshkeles !!"
This is lame. The internet is supposed to be platform-independant and I like to keep it that way. But now if I don't use IE, I don't get my daily shot of anoying banners/ads !!
Rhymes with yarmulkes, bubkes, more Jewish marketing. What rubbish.
I'll retreat to Lynx if this gets any worse.
Starwars.com has been doing this for a little while now.. it's not nearly as annoying as when it happens while researching SW trivia..
I find these ads very annoying and having worked as one of the lead developers for a competing product (by the company EyeReturn), I feel a little responsbile. ;) EyeReturn's concept is much cooler IMHO.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Aren't advertisers payed to be as effective as possible? And as part of that, shouldn't they be making strides to reach as many people as possible? So why do they state they only work in IE when they obviously work in NS and KQ as well? There could be reasons:
If not for any other reason, this at least shows how different other browsers are compared to IE. Not for technical merrit, but for philosophical reasons. Microsoft and IE are perfectly fine, if not supportive, with creating channels that advertisers can take advantage of. Whereas a browser such as Konqueror has measures in place (cookie management, popup handlers) to help prevent those things from happening.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
> The more recent, more annoying ads are the reason I've stopped using
> weather.com. I like the site, but the ads are just too annoying.
You know, in all the years that I've been using lynx, it hasyet to blink something at me . . .
hawk
Nor me...using Opera v6 Win32, and I didn't see any sklsholroithskemsnsews ads either. Damn, what a dumbass name. Anyway, Upz for Opera!
As I've said before here, the most annoying of these ads is the one where numbers drop from the top of the page to the bottom, accumulating in a big heap, until the whole page is obscured. Then some 'is your long distance THIS cheap' ad pops up in the page, and the numbers vanish. It wouldn't be THAT annoying except that thet whole process takes a couple of minutes, and it becomes progressively harder to read the page you're trying to read.
They're annoying enough that for the most part I don't read IGN anymore, and others I know have made the same decision. I hope these ads bring a lot of revenue per display, because more and more sites will see their readers drop off sharply when they start utilising them.
Today Boston.com is trying out a new ad scheme called the "Chichacolockney"! This new, media rich ad dominates your screen, then wraps it's tentacles around the sides of your monitor and pulling itself out of cyberspace into reality! It then proceeds to run rampant about your home, screaming advertisements for a company, until you catch it and beat it to death.
To avoid viewing flash AND being forced to download it (yes, IE must download completely before it asks to install and run - how else to see if signed, trusted, etc.) you also need to add the macromedia download sites to you hosts file.
Sites where it is downloaded from are: active.macromedia.com , download.macromedia.com, and occassionally www.macromedia.com, and even activex.microsoft.com .
I also cc:ed lmcinnis@boston.com, who is apparently somehow personally responsible for all this. To whom it may concern: I just had the single most annoying experience I have ever had on the web. These benighted spawn of the popup-window, "Shoshkeles", effectively bar me from viewing content until they're done pushing for the duration of their existence on the screen - that is to say, they impede me from doing what I came to the site to do in the first place. I'm a Boston resident with great interest in the local news, local events, and the arts - but you may be assured that I'll be going elsewhere online or (dare I say it?) to a newspaper for my local information needs until this damned nuisance is removed from the pages of Boston.com. I will also not purchase products or services pushed at me in this manner. To drive the point home again: Stopping me from doing what I came to the site to do is not going to amuse me or inform me, it is going to annoy me. Keeping me from viewing the information the site offers is not going to endear me of either the site or the wares advertised in this manner. - Brad Heintz
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange has been using something like this for two months or so advertising 'Oceans 11'. The cursed thing makes it nearly impossible to login unless you click to view the advertisement.
two of my favorite sites are aperrantly using these, wired.com and theonion.com both use these. I didnt realize it though until yesterday when I happened to be checking them at work on a communal workstation, that only has IE. Scary stuff, makes me happy that Opera6 is around, which also removes the problem of any popup ads from appearing.
Sir Timbly of Cannatuna, offical Knight of the Heptagonal Table
And there was much rejoicing!
iCab, the Macintosh-only browser, has a sophisticated set of filtering options, including a site by site option regarding what a site is permitted to do to your browser via JavaScript.
Much like Opera, iCab is small, fast and the development team understands that it's YOUR browser, YOU decide what a site can and cannot do with your computer and browser.
iCab is currently not commercially available, they're are releasing free, incremental beta upgrades as they progress towards the first commerical release.
When iCab does ship their "for pay" version, I'll be among the first to buy it!
Yes, there is a Mac OS X version available, too.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Cant you just disable ActiveX controls. I don't seem to see any of these ads.
- Filtered images: 97,578
So you don't have to look at ads on the web.Filtered windows: 3,868
Filtered scripts: 13,558
Filtered layers: 1,094
Filtered frames: 3,059
Filtered forms: 978
Filtered cookies: 54,518
Images received: 191,787
Connections made: 285,527
Statistics since Fri, 15 Jun 2001.
I say we boycot ALL sites that use these blatantly annoying adds. Banner adds are annoying enough, but I do see how they are necessary. These new adds have crossed the line, however. I say that if you visit any site that uses one of these adds, that you should not go back to that site for at least a week, and then only to check to see if it is still there, and then leave again if it is. Now is the time to make a stand
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
Oh the joys of Advertising. Time to modify AdExt's blocking list to break these ads too! When will these idiot advertisers realize that putting up ads like this are totally and utterly pointless.
I was thinking about buying one of those X10 cams, but now after all of those annoying ads, heh, no way in hell.
http://adext.magenet.net
Brielle
The problem is, corporate web designers don't care. They think that everyone uses IE5.5 in minimum-security mode, with everything enabled, and a whole raft of plug-ins.
I suppose it's almost as bad, in a similar kind of way, to the newbie sites with their "You must have IE5.5 to visit this site, here's a link to microsoft.com, go and get it now!"
There's a good page about it here
Thats just annoying as all fuck!!
The problem with adding things to the restricted zone is that there are so many combinations used that a lot of sites just won't fit.
The best solution I've found so far is to add my own zones thru registry edits. The first of which was a "Windows Update Zone" which enables everything for the couple related microsoft sites since MS pretty much requires it there. I've also got a "Maximum Safety Zone" where everything is set for absolute maximum security. Then I've got several intermediates, some of which are set for sites I love but can't stand certain features.
I use boston.com a lot. Why would I use it over CNN? Uh, CNN doesn't have local Boston area news. Thankfully, I contacted the maker of my ad blocker software and they already handle blocking these ads already. Thank you PopupCop
Could it be the moronic shit that crashes
Netscape 4.77 when I run Real Audio?
If the sound card is used java seems to go
in a stall. Closing Real Audio restore sanity.
I can't even close Netscape at this point except
with a killall -9 netscape.
This puzzled me because I get this on sites
that aren't supposed to have any audio running.
It not only kills this kinda crap, it also protects you from the malicious IE/activeX hole of the week.
Now, since all plugins are installed as an activeX control of sometype (including java and flash), you need to say Yes when prompted for those. You'll quickly learn when to say yes and no from practice. You can't make a mistake since you're basically always saying yes by default. If you say No and some page functionality you WANT to see is lost, reload and answer Yes.
Or pay for your content like your magazines. Jeeze. Magazines. I haven't read one of those in a long time.
Just don't go to the sites that force them on you anymore. No plug in, browser, or technical changes required whatsoever.
Wait... you mean you want to see the news, etc., these sites provide? Maybe then the ad is a very small price to pay.
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
I think the real successor to pop-under ads will be a good business plan that doesn't rely on ads at all! No one wants to pay for ads that no one clicks on, so eventually there will be some kind of ad that takes you to the website and starts showing you why it's great. At this point the web isn't about where you want to go, but about where the biggest advertisers want you to go.
That being said, I think "old school" banner ads are fine, as long as they are linking to someplace that I might want to go to (ala Think Geek on Slashdot). They can sit up there and tell me what they have, and they don't interfere with my browsing.
I just hope that these places with shishuludu ads or whatever realize they're way too annoying, and get rid of them, or just go bankrupt. If the web designer can't say no to the big pile of money marketing brings to him for all the shishusisi's, they need to hire a new guy.
-Luke
I just viewed a Shoshkele on Linux with Netscape 4.75. Of course my success might have something to do with Codeweaver's Crossover Plug-In which I installed several weeks ago.
I've just confirmed success on Konqueror as well. Mozilla m.96 did _not_ work.
I have seen these on my former favorite place to check the weather.
I've never even seen the mythical pop-under ad yet. Now this'll be Yet Another thing I'll miss out on, but get to hear everyone else talking about. I feel like such an outsider for not using Microsoft's web browser. :(
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The other day I was reading salon and this jaguar ad started out like an innocent 160xmumble standard ad banner. Said something about "rip into jaguar" or something equally retarded. Then this paper-tearing effect starts and extends down and to the left, covering about 30% of the page i was reading.
It appears as if this new ad campaign is working splendidly. You remembered everything that happened. And it was "the other day", rather than "15 minutes ago."
These new methods of advertising seem similar to that annoying kid that acts up all the time and thus gets attention. First it's: "Don't link to us!". Now: "We'll annoy the crap out of you!"
Someday there will be no more banner ads. Just stupid companies doing annoying things to get in our way. Then we will wish we had banner ads again.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
how about: ..."
"Shoshkeles, named for the middle daughter of their creator,
Maybe we can get them busted for child abuse?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've just figured it out. By exposing us to more and more annoying forms of advertising they are conditioning us into considering banner ads, which were similarly reviled when they first started appearing, as being not so bad after all.
Pretty soon we'll actually be begging for their return. End result - Advertisers win by a psychological knockout.
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
The point is not that most people want all the ads to go away. Most of us with a brain realize that the ads are required. If the ads are there in a nonintrusive way, then people will be more likely to click on them if they are relevant.
Take weather.com for example. Massive ads for some or other casino every time I visit. Big waste of bandwidth for me - big waste of resources for them. Big waste all round, because I am not interested in gambling at all.
Now, after I have not clicked on an ad for the 700th time, the advertiser should slowly start getting a message. "Hmmm, maybe this guy does not like gambling. How about we try some car adverts on him?" As they have a cookie to track me already, how difficult can this be!?
Using Galeon with the Crossover plugin, I too can appreciate the beauty of Shoshkeles...
-- Out of cheese error! Redo from start.
The technology is called "DHTML Flying Ads" by DoubleClick and is described (fairly accurately, with examples) at this web page: http://richmedia.doubleclick.net/floating/dhtmlfly ing.htm
I especially like this sentence in their description: "However, because they command so much attention, there is the potential for a negative user reponse -- to help prevent this, campaigns should be run in short flights or with frequency caps."
By the number of posts to this thread, I would hazard a guess that the above statment is accurate.
Now for the shameless self-promotion. I am the author of a shareware IE add-in called PopUpCop, which does block these ads. They go away when one blocks script timers and Flash AutoPlay.
After the annoying ad runs, it turns whatever portion of the screen the animation covered into a hyperlink to the advertiser! You can't click on any of the news, pix, or nav bars without getting shanghai'd off to AT&T Broadband (cocksuckers) or whoever else is paying for this crap.
These people should be ashamed of themselves
Try it yourself: http://www.unitedvirtualities.com/demo/at&t2/
Isaac in Cambridge
This reminds me of the "walking man". Too bad there is no way to legally associate intrusive advertisements with viruses.
I just sent an email to "Debra", the CEO of United Virtualities (debra@unitedvirtualities.com). Here is a copy of the email. If you hate these types of advertisements, I'd advise to do the same. At least let them know how much people hate them.
---------
I just read that your company is trying to create these things called "shoshkeles"... basically advertisements that fly around your browser page with sound that annoy the hell out of you.
I would just like to let you know that I hate you, and your company, and all the other evil people like you who are destroying the internet by trying to making web advertising even worse than it already is.
Banners are one thing, but popping up new windows, or making little animations that fly all over my window are taking it too far. Please know that many people feel like I do.
I hope you change your mind about doing such horrible work.
---------
Saw one this morning. Supremely annoying. Off goes nytimes.com to the "Restricted Sites" zone.
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Thank god for Proxomitron (winxx afaik).
:)
I haven't seen a popup, popunder, banner ad, java ad, flash, etc for the past year thanks to this program.
It runs in the system tray, and you set it up as a proxy server in your browser (works with every browser i've tried). And even has the option of using an external proxy for those not directly connected to the net.
Ohh and it's easy to define your own rules, and blocks ad's for anything that uses the browsers api (like kazaa, older versions of MSN messenger's ads, etc).
And no I have no relation to the people that make it, I'm just quite happy with it.
*snickers at the people that still use IE*
I'm running the linux version of communicator 4.78 and I'm seeing them. I do have the flash plugin installed, but disabling it in the application prefrences doesn't seem to kill the ads.
Just tried the site pages using Opera 6 on Win2k. They are as annoying there as on IE.
I'm using Opera 5.2(and 6.0 on another comp) and WebWasher 3.0. So far the only way that I've been able to force it to display the adds is by going to the demo page at united virtualities.
:) I think the only reason it displays on the demo page is the whole thing is flash.
I've tried every other posted url and I've been quite unable to get it to display adds
Links:
http://www.opera.com
webwasher.com
http://www.unitedvirtualities.com/
What we watched at the mediacenter was a flash demo of the advertising. The webpages themselves were actually part of the flash, so anyone with a flash plugin would be able to view the ad.
I went to the main boston.com site and didn't get a Shoshkele ad. But I did with IE.
ac023
Is a mid-size window with a puzzle piece. It seems like they are trying to open up a full-scren Flash window (I am sooo disappointed). It would be really bad for browsers to allow this, not only because it's annoying but also because it allows Trojan horses (pop up a screen that looks like a Windows NT loging screen, for example).
And of course product placement is rampant. Ever notice how many black-and-white cow-splotch-pattern Gateway boxes you see being carried around on shows like ER? It's not accidental, I'm sure.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Apparently ever /. weenie sees this as a golden opportunity to crawl out from under their rock and scream about IE sucking. Here's a tip for you clueless wankers:
/.ers knocking IE for being Evil without acknowledging its strengths.
Tools | Internet Options
Security Tab. Click Custom Level. Select everything under "ActiveX" to "prompt" (or "disable").
Click Ok. Click Apply.
Enjoy your Shoshkele-less surfing.
Sheeeeesh.
-Kasreyn,
who is tired of
P.S. Since Boston.com were so nice about carefully commenting what their HTML does, I should have my "Kill Shoshkeles" rule for the Proxomitron written in about 20 minutes.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I am the author, so I should know.
Guys, this sucks, but we've got to pay our hosting bills. And that's all there is to it. One of my sites (we won our second annual VH1 Music Award for "Coolest Fan Website" just last weekend) is tremendously popular. Bajillions of hits each month, and traffic increases by about 15% each month, every month. In the past 16 months, we went from getting $4 CPM to $0.22 CPM on our ads, and that number is rapidly dropping. With a monthly hosting and bandwidth bill of $450, that's just not cutting it. Now only about 10% of our ads shown are network ads; the rest are for t-shirts and stickers that we sell. So now we have to put a lot of work into printing and shipping shirts, which sucks; we just want to be running a website.
Y'all can't free-ride forever -- these hosting and bandwidth fees have to be paid somehow. Yes, the ads suck, yes, they're poorly-placed, yes, they don't pertain to you, yes, they're intrusive. But that's not our fault. Most of us are just trying to break even so that we can pursue our hobby sites. So suck it up and deal with terrible ads.
-Waldo Jaquith
wow. I saw the demos.. thats some annoying crap. I swear awhile ago I was on the TechTV site and they had something like this except it was a football player running across my screen. I forget what the add was about but I was so pissed off to see that this is what they will do to make us watch adds.
Daddy would you like some sausage?
lol, good one :)
Seriously. So long as they do their bit (must remain less than 30 seconds) and take off to no longer obscure the window and do not create a nuisance window which I have to close I won't mind too much.
This is fine unless the marketing assholes decide to clog a page with twenty ads doing their bit in a offensive cacophony and so long as the ad goes flat and silent afterward. If these ads POPUP and make noise everytime a new banner image is loaded I'll block these pages or proxy filter them. At this point they are civil and only slightly bothersome. I close all popup ad windows instantly without exception. I also avoid websites which use them.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
very entertaining defacements?
I don't think anyone should knock IE for being terrible, because it is a worthy effort, especially since Netscape stopped trying (although that really was MS' fault) and Mozilla doesn't have a usable UI yet. But there are much better alternatives out there. In OnmiWeb I can not only turn off scripting, I can leave it on and set "Scripts can only open new windows: in response to being clicked" or "Scripts can only open new windows: never." In addition to a bunch of other great privacy options such as deleting cookies on quit, running applets only when clicked on, built-in browser masquerading, just to name a few. Also noteworthy is the fact that other browsers don't need this feature because no one else in willing to expose thier users to the security exploits inherent in ActiveX. Even the Mac version of IE ships with ActiveX disabled. IE suffers from the mediocrity that plagues all MS products; that doesn't make it bad, but most people want to go for something better.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Out of all of my years of surfing, the only ad that I have clicked on was a ThinkGeek ad at the top of Slashdot. Why? It looked interesting, and it didn't block the content of the page. It didn't block any links, it didn't play any sounds or music, it didn't even spawn countless popup windows. It just took me to the site. Why go to CNET and be forced to look at some Windows XP ad when I can go somewhere else and get the information and news that I need right away, with no delay. I don't mind seeing the typical banner ads on a page. What I do find to be annoying is when the ads become the main focus of the page, and when they become more important than the page's content.
Honestly, I think the major problem with web advertising is the fact that advertisers under-estimate its effectiveness.
Think about it, if you were watching a television and an ad for a new car came up, and you had a button on your remote to stop watching your show and get more information about the car, how many people would hit the button? Zero. That's exactly what banner ads are doing.
Impressions are everything, clicking on a banner ad is unsurprisingly a very rare occasion. Just like the ads on TV, when you have a banner ad you're paying for product exposure and awareness, nothing more. Advertisers shouldn't expect a banner ad to turn directly into profit (ie, user clicks on banner ad, goes to site, immediately buys product. See: affiliate programs) since no other ad model expects this (except maybe those Call Now! TV ads.)
I honestly don't have a problem with these flyover ads. They're in there for the right reason: exposure. Banner ads never really did the job as far as exposure goes, simply because they're very easy to completely avoid glancing over for the trained web user.
These new ads are probably clickable, but I would expect that the exposure element is what you're paying for. You don't have to read the site, so you have no right to bitch. I think this model will end up being the most successful (though yes, the most annoying for anal Slashdot anti-ad centric users.)
Too many people here seem to forget that the ads are not target towards Linux running cookie-avoiding anti-Flash/Glitz/graphics geeks. They're targeted towards the people who look at the web like an interactive up to date television, and for those people, this will probably succeed better than the others. You guys are a speck on the radar, and for all the snickering about "haha platform agnostic my ass!" and "I'll just turn off Flash! I am so smart!" they might be the ones laughing all the way to the bank in the end. I guess we'll just have to see.
--
I might be prompted to installed the Flash plugin from Macromedia, but do you think I'm going to say no just so I don't see some ads? Even though it prompts me, somewhere along the line I am going to want to install it because I like to view some Flash content...
Ayyyee.... = \ heh ad's suck
even if your the one making them.
Ive made quite a few banners in my dad but never ugly crap like some of the ads ive seen (slashdot on the other hand at least has targeted ads, thinkgeek isnt a bad thing to see the latest code poet shirts and such = ) where as if its not bright green with funky fonts and ugly pictures its pron. plain and simple. no one wants to see ads thats why they invented the remote"(TM)"!
Another mark on Konqueror's belt!
Funny, I never see these ads either, and I'm running IE6. I see them at work on some other folks systems, but never on my system there, either.
I guess that running webwasher and having my IE settings right stops them
What ads?!
Thx to trusty old atguard nothing gets by.
If that doesn't work i'll just edit the browser agent to something other than IE, to easy to bypass.
NEXT
Move along people nothing to see just a very short lived fad.
My favorite anti-popup tool for Windows is PopUpKiller. It works with IE, Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla. Check it out.
I tried their samples on my G3 (tried it with IE 5) and it loaded the website, brought the Schlotzky or whatever, played it once, and *WENT AWAY TOTALLY*
If this means the end of that goddamn "punch the monkey" flashing blinking seizure inducing banner ad crap, then I'm all for it.
i would much rather see ads that just GO AWAY after they annoy you. The problem will come when people start making these things pop up every 5 minutes or something...
It sure is a good thing that flash streams itself without blocking the rendering of the rest of the page.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
Yes those ads are obtrusive and annoying.
I am gonna write a template email to complain to the companies who hope to sell products with those ads. It will be something like :
Dear sir, madam,
I recently viewed an advertisement for your product XXX on the site YYY. This advertisement was very annoying and obtrusive and, although I support advertisement, I feel that annoying your customers is NOT a good commercial practice.
Therefore, as you chose to annoy me, I choose to boycott your products. I will also send an email to the 278 friends in my address book calling them to do the same. I will also post a call to boycott your products on my weblog.
...
I will only do this to the most annoying ads so that it has a real value.
What do they think ? That we are sheep ?
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Somehow I doubt they're going to bother porting it to the two commercial Unices that IE just barely runs on.
I went to one the other day and it ran over the page, erased all the text and would not show it again until I clicked on it's little close icon. Problem was it took ~10 seconds to even bring up that close box. I immediately closed that and closed the website, never to return.
If I don't want to buy their junk, I won't buy it regardless of how slick they make the presentation.
Here's a novel idea: advertise something I WANT to buy (hint: not much) and provide a nice text link followed by a 200 or so character description of it!
That gets rid of the ads all right, but it also causes a window to pop up saying "Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page." I don't know what's worse - seeing the ads or having to click 'ok' to even see the page.
Any way to disable that windows message?
Tired of annoying pop-up ads? Want to disable any type or types of javascript or anything else coming in? Proximitron will help you do that. Its a proxy you run on your system that cuts out the banners, ads, etc... and it is fully customizable. http://www.proximitron.org/ --- Easy to set up (a little harder to customize) ... I bet these lame sound ads will be just as easy to kill.... :)
If you don't, you're paying something like 75-150 per year for a subscription to the ones that don't spam you.
All I ask is for these clowns to view it like any other advertising- they don't get "click-throughs" with TV, print, or billboards, why in the hell should they insist on it with the Web? Just because it's doable doesn't mean that they're going to get a useful metric from it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What it boils down to is that the effect is nice, but it blocks out my viewing of the content while I'm in the middle of reading it!
This is analogous to pushing an advert right in the middle of a news item in a newscast without waiting for it to be finished. This is not going to work very well because it's the worst of all worlds.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why would any site want to cover their own content with someone elses???
Ya, it only last for a couple of seconds, but that still long enough for me to find the back button...
Tech TV's site did this for a bit too...
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
How about active ISP filtering, similar to the way SPAM is starting to be delt with.
Something like:
1. tech savvy user is annoyed with webpage ad, so he emails Orbz or similar with the offending site.
2. Orbz then publishes the site and work-around to a master list.
3. ISP downloads master list automatically daily, and integrates itself into their proxy (pretty much all ISP's use 'em now weather you like it or not)
4. And voila, Average-Joe mom & pop users are saved from "the man".
Hell, the ISP could even provide proxy options: ilikeadsproxy, and killtheadsproxy. Thence, giving the user a relatively simple CHOICE... and perhaps not ruffling these spam/ad peoples feathers. (I can just see the lawsuits now.)
I have Navigator 4.78, but it appears too...
A lot of the comments have been based on not understanding this. People post "it works in $browser on $OS."
More fundamentally, this is a persistent problem with Slashdot. Neither the story submitter nor the editor takes the two minutes to dig up and answer the most obvious question or confusion that will arise from the provided links. Therefore instead of an informed discussion we get lots of people blundering around in the dark, powered by misconceptions.
I went to the site mentioned in the article and tried out the various ad links. They all worked as advertised for me, running Mozilla 0.9.6 on Mandrake 8.2. So I don't think this technology is really restricted to IE/Windows.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
Oops! I've just deleted the Flash plug-in two days ago, both from my Netscape and IE, being annoyed to death by those obtrusive ads I couldn't freeze by the browser Stop button. I'm afraid, we are seeing the end of this technology. Once many users disable Flash to get rid of the ads, there will be no incentive for Web designers to use it legitimately. I cannot remember a single site using Flash that I actually cared about and that was useful to me. See also: Flash: 99% Bad - Alertbox article by Jakob Nielsen (October2000)
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
hey... whaddda ya kno...
The Essence Project
http://bpaosf.bpa.arizona.edu/~mark/essence/
If anyone can get their hands on the s/w please post a link.
Every episode contains a piece of product placement. One episode they will go on about how great Mountain Dew is, and the next they will give away a Pontiac car.
For me, I think product placement is better than intrusive advertising. But you should never kid yourself that Survivor is anything but one long advert.
a browser that blocks this stuff will be ruled as using an illegal circumvention method to modify copyrighted content?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I'm curious if popunder and popunder ads and inline banners really get more hits than the traditional top-o-the-page banner
I've clicked one or two banner ads that attracted my interest. I don't really mind them. On the other hand, I find other forms of ads so irritating that I ignore purely out of spite. And I doubt they really succeed in getting the user's attention any more than other forms of ad - heck, they probably get less of my attention since I usually close ads that open in separate windows before they can load. And I've never actually followed a link on one of them.
So, at least if you limit the research sample group to me, the top-o-the-page banner is infinitely more effective than other ad types, which are generally a complete waste of money.
From the looks of things most of the go away on their own. The number one biggest problem with popups is the fact that I have to go close them.
i am sorry to say but this is not new at all! I remember seeing planes fly across my screen in an advertisment for pearl harbor about a year ago on weather.com So this is definitly not new at all.
-Windchill2001 The One, The Only, The Cold...
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
I don't know why Microsoft ported IE5 to Solaris, but they did. I run it all the time.
Oh, wait. I didn't mean to ruin your sarcastic joke.
I've got questions, baby:
Could I set something out to filter this kind of content? Do these crap-ads have a particular extension? Perhaps they're hosted on a particular server?
Modded up as "insightful" after posting the same nonsense everyone else did.
They are *screenshots* of a site. In flash as opposed to being a gigantic animated gif. As in not the actual sites. As in not the actual ads. Do you look at screenshots for a game and think that the game is a slideshow of jpgs? Does nobody possess the capacity for analytical thought anymore?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
You just had to go and remember the brand name. Now they're gonna keep doing it.
Junkbuster works just fine, thank you very much!
You can put swf on the list as well as
download.macromedia.com and
activex.microsift.com and kill flash forewer.
Works great for me.
Wrong,
These all use flash AND DHTML - animated pransparency is not available with dhtml only.
There seems to be a persistent problem with stupid people making uninformed claims on slashdot.
Oh, and due to the fact that they are utilising flash transparent window mode - its not even compatible with all IE5 platform versions - let alone IE4 and older.
For example IE5 on the macintosh doesnt render transparent wm correctly.
No sig.
I'm running Windows and IE 5.5. I've also set my hosts cache set up so that ads are blocked. I did not see the ad.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
GENIUS! Advertising, the stuff that only gets one click per umpteen-thousand views has reached the next level...
except, the audience is limited to IE on PC's with default securities enabled...
gee, why didn't I think of it first?
wow! such bright thinkers.
Oh, come on! the only dHTML that's used in these things is to move the layer the flash is in...
this stuff will only work on ActiveX compatible browsers (using the activeX version of the flash plugin). Nothing new, nothing special... whoopty-do!
What happened to that old fashioned tradition of targeted advertising? While I don't remember the exact numbers, Google got something like 20 times the clicktrough because they display ads that relate to what people are searching for. Funny thing is, they're making a profit! Weird, huh?
So what's the deal for selling ads that have absolutely no relation to the site they're shown on? Or have nothing to do with the readers? If there were a form I could fill out outlining my interests that ad companies could access, or section in my browser preferences (similar to Opera's Advertising tab) that was standardized across all browsers that they could use for targeted advertising, they would see more clickthroughs, more mindshare, and more success in their advertising.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
While karma-whoring, it IS still interesting:
s hoshkele.zip
.js file that appears to be the majority of what it can do:
v aat_v01.js
Here are the (apparently) main files for the thing, lifted from boston.com. They place it outside of the tag, of course, because they wouldn't want to have the page validate with the W3C.
http://diamond.jvlnet.com/~jadecristal/shoshkele/
More interesting, though, is probably the
http://diamond.jvlnet.com/~jadecristal/shoshkele/
Someone with more JS coding experience than me can take a look at it...
Of course, if you were using a real browser, you could just give it a list of regexes.
And have it not load images sourced from different domains than the html. And have it not load images of very common banner sizes.
But of course, that'd require running a real operating system...
'Platform agnostic': Works on both Windows and Macs. *nix users are a tiny portion of the page-viewing world. Even if you add in venturesome Mac users who're running OSX.
'No plugin': In the rest of the world, where people do not compile their own kernals, the copy of IE that comes on your hard drive when you get your computer comes with the Flash plugin. Hence, no plugin download is required. This goes for Windows and for Macs.
(Although, annoyingly enough, the only browser on OSX that the current plugin for Flash works in is IE...)
Thanks for doing the dirty work and grabbing the source. I wish I had mod points right about now!
Timothy speculates the marketeer who came up with the name "Shoshkele" was on crack, no doubt. Maybe, but here's another angle.
It's a Yiddishism, a familiar, affectionate or endearing variation of Shoshi or Shoshanah, which is Hebrew for Lily or Rose. It's a pet-name you might use for a sweetheart or, more likely, a very young daughter. Her dad may be clever and proud of his accomplishment, but I feel sorry for the little girl whose name was lent to something so obnoxious. Not exactly a very nice tribute.
__
Fred
Uh - yeah - thats what the "d" stands for in DHTML- dynamic didnt ya know!
Please refer to the word "idiot" in my previous post.
No sig.
It uses ActiveX controls. Anyone who enables ActiveX controls is simply asking to have their hard disk erased eventually by some web-site. I tried the Shoshkele examples and thankfully they didn't work for me.
If you disable ActiveX, then your surfing experience will have the double advantage of being both safer and free of that popunder crap. It's a no-brainer.
It uses ActiveX controls. Anyone who enables ActiveX controls is simply asking to have their hard disk erased eventually by some web-site. I tried the Shoshkele examples and thankfully they didn't work for me.
If you disable ActiveX, then your surfing experience will have the double advantage of being both safer and free of that popunder crap. It's a no-brainer.
There is a grey area of sufficient mass to sink the Titanic in there.
I don't believe in the existance of God. On the other hand I don't believe that God does not exist. Which in no way says that I believe God exists. I am agnostic in so far as knowing that it is impossible to prove (scientifically) that God exists or not.
The link you have supplied is the regular thological crap. Agnosticism is NOT "I don't know if there is/isn't/are/aren't God(s)", it is "I know that it is not possible to prove the existance or non-existance of God(s)". Atheism is NOT "I don't believe in God", it is "I believe there IS NO GOD". These are vastly different concepts, although often confused by virtue of being "opposite".
The typical position of an agnostic is therefore NOT to believe in a God (or Gods), but on the other hand not to believe that there are no Gods. In other words: They may or may not exist; all I know is I cannot use science to prove this one way or the other; therefore its not going to bother me.
"Agnostic" is not a word derived purely from the roots "a" and "gnostic". It has a distinct theological meaning (as do many other words, such as gnostic, which refers to a specific system of religious beliefs; agnostic certainly doesn't imply disbelief in or the anthesis of gnosticism). The linked article has about as much actual logic as saying that an aphid is not a phid (wtmb).
Remember, the opposition to a view is not necessarily the opposite.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
The reason these "Shoshkeles" don't work with Navigator is poor feature support in Navigator's Flash player. Alas, it does not support transparent Flash movies.
And it loaded in my Netscape 4.7 browser why? Magic? Or you just never run Netscape? Just wondering...
And yes, please decapitate the person who thought this shit up...
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
What can I say? The useability of these new adverts completely sucks. If you checked out one of the demo pages and tried to click on it, then good luck.
All I ended up doing was clicking on the advert, which although nice and transparent so I couldn't see it, was still in the way.
And I couldn't tab past it either.
Not my web site. I'd never run adverts. They need not have my clicks if they don't want them.
Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?
It does.
http://www.nancies.org/
It's a simple fact: each pageview costs more to serve up than the advertising revenue that it brings in. Even when every page on your site is 30k.
-Waldo Jaquith
Well, the Onion (on the editorial/column pages) is using a type of ad which has the same effect as the functional (i.e. not flash) demo from boston.com did. Not sure how to read the source code, or even if it shows the source for that ad... but it seems to be a javascript controlling a bunch of gif's and wav's, the gif files (transparent placeholders) are still around after the ad has run its course.
These production versions run in mozilla under win ME, so it's likely there was just a browser spy if statement to keep us mozilla users from having our browsers crashed at boston.com because they weren't done.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Gee, thanks... didn't you know that 'dynamic' refers to oh- so much more than floating layers? these ads are flash, the layer they are in is dHTML. Thus, the ONLY (meaning a very small amount of complete project) is dHTML (D meaning "dynamic").
Please refer to "moron" and repeat until thick skull has been compromised.