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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.
"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
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?
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.
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."
The best way to kill them is to go into your IE security settings and change Download Signed ActiveX controls, Download Unsigned ActiveX controls, and Run ActiveX controls and Plugins from Enabled to Prompt in the Internet Zone.
Spiritual Remains
I agree, the Wired one is highly annoying. They will hopefully get the point when people start spending less than 2 seconds on their site.
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
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
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...
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.
Then, if you want ads, you can just turn them on.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
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.
"This ad will disappear if you leave this site."
It means, while they do not deny the existence of a platform other than Windows/IE, they have no knowledge of such a platform and doubt it would possible to find it.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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
1px square images can be effectively disabled in Mozilla by adding the following to your userContent.css file:
IMG[height="1"][width="1"], IMG[height="1px"][width="1px"]
{display: none !important;}
This file is in the chrome subdirectory of your person profile. It's a bit of stylesheet that overrides everything else and prevents mozilla from loading any 1x1 image. OK so some pages where webauthors might be using these as spacers might display a bit. Boohoo.
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
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?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
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.
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
Sure, some banner ads are the internet equivalent of normal TV ads, such as Thinkgeek's banners, for one, and others that just show you something humerous or witty and hope you remember their company in the future. The banner ads that are doing their best to be the most annoying shit on the planet are the internet equivalents of the short informercials trying to get you to buy their stupid compilation CD, or handy-dandy new gadget that is "Only available through this special TV offer! Buy now! Operators are standing by!" If they don't see sales jump immediately, they're going to cancel those TV commercials (or pull their banner ads from an ad network).
;)
Big companies can afford to run ads that just get you interesting in the brand name, or force you to remember their name whether you like it or not. They plan to be around for years, so they can play the waiting game... aww the waiting game sucks, let's play hungry hungry hippos instead! Smaller companies that rely on selling one little invention or gadget or service can't afford to wait weeks or months for business to start rolling in, they need clicks to their sites now, and if they don't get them, they're going to either start pulling their ads, or finding ways to make their ads more intrusive, so you have no choice but to watch them, and probably will be more likely to click on them (if for no other reason than by mistake cause they're covering up the story you want to read
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!?
Could this be because Mozilla does not support Flash? Or the JavaScript statements "setTimer" and "setInterval"?
y ing.htm
This type of ad can be implemented without Flash, using only DHTML and transparent GIF's.
I would be careful before declaring complete immunity. It looks like this particular advertiser chose to target only IE users.
For an intelligent and mostly accurate discussion (with examples)of the technology, called "DHTML Flying Ads", go to the DoubleClick site: http://richmedia.doubleclick.net/floating/dhtmlfl
I really like this sentence: "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."
Judging by the activity level here, they sure got that right.
I have detailed knowledge of the techniques because I am the author of PopUpCop, a shareware add-in for IE 5 and above that can block this type of annoying web site behavior, if the user turns of script timers and Flash autoplay....
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).
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
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
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.
--
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.