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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.
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.
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."
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.
CLickthroughs are a perverse form of measuring an adds effecity, and adopting this is why Internet advertising revenues have dropped so sharply. Ads are about increasing mindshare, getting word of your product out, and convincing people to try it. They're not suppose dto be "Hey look! Ford sells cars! I'm going to go buy one right NOW!". When was the last time you saw an ad on TV, to immediatly hop in your car and drive to the mall to purshase the item? CHances are, next to never. But maybe later, when you want something in that area, you will remember the ad. This is how advertising is supposed to work. All this clickthrough nonsense as a measure of how effective an ad is is retarded.
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.
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?
"platform agnostic" and runs on IE only... those marketeers never fail to amuse me.
Well, the literal meaning of "agnostic" is "in a manner without knowledge." A- gnostic. The dictionary lists "professing ignorance."
Perhaps running on IE only really is being agnostic. :)
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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.
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?
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
Why would you want IE to die? Throughout the past few years it's the only browser that's even made a halfway-decent effort to render HTML and CSS correctly. Netscape sucks like a suckhole, and Mozilla has just recently become useable. If anything, IE should be praised: it saved the web from being dragged into the abyss of the idiots who wrote Netscape who can't read W3C spec sheets to save their lives.
Ah, but I bet you're one of those people who hates IE because Microsoft makes it, and because hating Microsoft is so vogue on this site.
Except the whole demo page, content included, is a large Flash file. (You can't interact with any of the text or links -- try it.) I assume to get it to work on a real page they'd have to float a Flash ad over the page using layers, which probably won't convert over so well between IE and any standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera.
These ads are not targeted at you, nor at consumers who fit your profile. The tech-saavy user who is bothered by intrusive ads does not register on the radar screen of the advertisers and ad firms buying these ads on sites such as boston.com and weather.com.
I like to think these ads are targeted at my parents. Mom is not going to stop visiting weather.com because an ad for allergy medicine dumped a bunch of colored leaves on her web page for a few seconds. In fact, she likes the ad. (If you haven't seen this ad, get on an XP system with IE 6 and watch. It's actually pretty cool.)
While it probably annoys dad, he's not going to go back to watching the weather channel on TV, because the web site gets him the weather instantly compared to waiting for the local forecast on TV. And it would take quite an interruption for him to make him seek out another website for his weather.
Bottom line is that "joe-average users" don't give a shit about ads, and aren't going to alter their media consumption patterns to keep them away from what you may consider "lousy ads." The advertisers know this, and so are keeping up with technology in the name of competition.
JB
(IANAA, but I do have a degree in Advertising.)
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!?
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).
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