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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.
But if these ads are as annoying as some people think, then "if you use this browser you won't see the ads" becomes a feature.
Am I the only mozilla user who clicked on the link anyway, and had the page sit there doing nothing until I got bored?
I don't seem to have a problem I don't see them at all I also don't have flash installed and I click no when it asks me if I want to install it
In my hosts file I have
127.0.0.1 shockwave.com
127.0.0.1 www.shockwave.com
127.0.0.1 flash.com
127.0.0.1 www.flash.com
127.0.0.1 www.macromedia.com
127.0.0.1 macromedia.com
I also have a lot of others like x10.com and ads.aol.com but it seems to help if you don't use flash for these "new" types of ads
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
this also helps if its in your hosts file
127.0.0.1 ad-adex3.flycast.com
127.0.0.1 ad-flow.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad2.peel.com
127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com
127.0.0.1 adbureau.net
127.0.0.1 admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 adcontroller.unicast.com
127.0.0.1 ads.1bn.org
127.0.0.1 ads.gamespy.com
127.0.0.1 ads20.focalink.com
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 clubchance.com
127.0.0.1 fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 focalink.com
127.0.0.1 friendfinder.com
127.0.0.1 hits2you.hypermart.net
127.0.0.1 ln.doublclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 popups.infostart.com
127.0.0.1 servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 x10.com
127.0.0.1 msn.com
127.0.0.1 msnbc.com
127.0.0.1 www.megago.com
127.0.0.1 megago.com
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
Am I the only mozilla user who clicked on the link anyway, and had the page sit there doing nothing until I got bored?
I clicked the link, and much to my suprise (dismay?), the ad appeared and worked fine. I then tried the other four ads from link, and they worked also. This is with mozilla nightly with the crossover plugin on x86 Slackware 8. I think moz has gotten a little *too* featureful.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Try researching it a little better next time. The entire page is done with flash. What you see behind the ad is not html. Right click and *zoom*. You cannot zoom html in nav4 nor can you in mozilla (yet). Even then, the text gets blocky. If a web browser supported zoom then it wouldn't get blocky because it has complete control over the font sizes.
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
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.
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".
That might be a good idea if ads were the only reason to use popups.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
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.
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
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.
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It seems that the old standard "fake windows error dialog" advertisements have been replaced by the latest trend: "if this is flashing, you win." (Funny, I never seem to NOT win.) I just wonder why these people can't come up with an original idea?
At one gardening site for which I'm the webmaster, we thought we had found a reasonable answer - a service that put only relevant, targeted banner ads on our site. A good idea, that addresses most peoples' concerns.
Unfortunately the company providing this service found that it just couldn't make this into a profitable model. They couldn't charge the advertisers more money than the shotgun ad placers (i.e. DoubleClick) did, but it obviously cost them more to do this. In the end they were part of the dot-com bust, and now we're once again in the position of trying to at least break even while not alienating our user base.
I hate ads too, but any site with any significant traffic - including slashdot - just can't keep spending more than they're taking in. Eventually venture capitalists expect a return on their investment.
As an aside: As CSS develops, and browsers continue to improve their support for it, *nix users can expect to see these intrusive ads on their favorite browsers as well. You can possibly hope for "opt out" switches in your browser (like Galeon provides for images), but it seems unlikely that the Mozilla or Konqueror developers are going to refuse to support the W3C standard.
#DeleteChrome