Adcritic Shuts Down

punt (among way too many others) writes: "Adcritic, the archive for Television and Radio Ads, is no more. Read the reason why here"

Comments

That sucks

[core10k]

-.- They were pretty damned cool.

I'm really gonna miss them

[Kris.Felscher]

what a great site, it's a shame to see them go

hmm

[mlong]

Well obviously I am not them but I don't see why they could not have found a sponsor willing to donate their servers. I see it all the time at sites...like kuro5hin for example.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"Donate their servers?"

Do you know of any companies willing to give away server space and bandwidth to a site that's based purely on high-bandwidth streaming videos?

a problem waiting to happen

[anon757]

I always thought of adcritic as a problem waiting to happen. On one side, there's the potential legal problems of showing copyrighted content (i still can't belive they never got sued), and on the other hand, there's the enormous expense of the bandwidth & storage space they would need. I will dearly miss ad critic, but am suprised they lasted this long.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[filbo]

Why would a copyright holder of an ad sue a site that was basically "broadcasting" their ad to people at no charge to the copyright holder. Ads aren't something you make money from by keeping them to yourself.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[ncc74656]

I always thought of adcritic as a problem waiting to happen. On one side, there's the potential legal problems of showing copyrighted content (i still can't belive they never got sued)

What company, in its right mind, is going to complain about someone running its ads for free? They ordinarily pay big bucks to get the word out...AdCritic runs (OK, ran) their ads whenever someone wants (um...wanted) to see them.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[bugg]

Yeah, those ad agencies are really tough about unauthorized airplay. They want to make sure that only the stations that pay them for the right to air the ads air them...

A little common sense, that's all I ask.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the type of company that shuts down fan web sites for using copyrighted material (think harry potter etc). They're just as good as commercials and they are being shut down. I could certianly see companies objecting to the low resolution that the ads are (were) shown in on adcritic. Also, I know they had to pull some of sony's playstation ads at one time.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Boltmeyer]

Uh, bugg.. Ad agencies pay stations to air their ads. Not the other way around. If stations paid for ads, then Fox would have nothing but beer, car, and bikini ads. (Sarcasm intended)

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I understand why people put those sarcasm tags around their comments.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[jd142]

Why would a copyright holder have a problem? I can think of several:

1) Ads for related materials that actually have the affect of diminishing both brands. McDonald's doesn't want a Slimfast ad associated with its product. They don't want people to think that fast food makes you fat.

2) Ads for competitors. If adcritic (and I not saying they did this) showed a lame McDonald's ad and a really cool Burger King ad, McDonald's would be upset because it would appear as if the site were using McDonald's copyrighted material to both trash McD and advance BK.

3) Old ads that are either inappropriate, out dated, or reference an item that no longer exists. Let's pretend that a year ago, you had an ad for your FlightSim game that showed people flying their simulated planes into the WTC? Or showed someone bursting into a cockpit to play with the real controls? Would you want that ad up and associated with your company now? How about an ad that promises premiums for proof of purchases for a promotion that expired a year ago? You don't want people sending in the junk and then being mad at you because the promotion is over (yes, people are this stupid and as a company, you have to protect yourself against stupid people). Or maybe there's a commercial that says "look for the bright blue bottle" only you changed to bright green 2 months ago.

4) What if the adcritic site is really doggy and people think you can't afford a good server because your commercial doesn't run. Or worse yet, what if they call you for tech support when they can't see the picture. We all know the people who call tech support for even stupider things.

I'm not saying adcritic did any of this or that these ads were there in this format. I'm simply pointing out that there are very good reasons for companies to want to control how their ads are presented to people.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies close fan sites because they want to drive people to their propaganda filled official sites.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

(Sarcasm intended)

Real pros don't need sarcasm tags. Kind of like the guy in the grandparent post.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[RazzleFrog]

All excellent points but even in any of those cases a simple "cease and desist" letter would do the job. I don't see adcritic putting up a big fight.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[filbo]

And I was pointing out the reason why no copyright holder ever sued them...

Are there reasons why someone might not think that having their ad up on someone's web site wasn't entirely positive? Probably. But apparently everyone whose ad was up on adcrtic felt that the free exposure outweighed any downside.

As for old ads with out of date products, well, I think that saying that goes "there is no such thing as bad publicity" would be appropriate. So what if someone no longer sells "X." The ad is continuing to get the name out there. And that is the main point of ads. While advertising a specific product is often a primary goal, the overarching purpose of marketing is to keep that brand name in the front rather than the back of consumers' minds. So that when they want a quick hamburger, they think "MacDonalds."

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[mr100percent]

They did, numerous companies requested they take down the ads. Either they came to an agreement, or in Apple's case, removed them.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[ab315]

The context of the advertisement is a major part of the strategy. It's not just about the number of times someone looks at the advert, but about them having the desired emotional state. This has to be controlled if it is to be effective. Overuse of the advertisement outside the appropriate context will "immunise" people to it.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[jgerman]

I don't buy that. Once it's made available to the public tough. You might as well take your argument a step further and say that no one can even DESCRIBE an old ad because they may not promote the interpretation that the company wants.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

He was making a joke, you fucking moron.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[zeno_2]

I think the only time I saw when adcritic took down an ad, was when apple asked to take down the fake apple ad. The ad was some people meeting in some barn or something, and one of them handed the other a briefcase full of money, and in return they got an apple g4, they then put it in their car and killed the other guys or something. Been a while since I saw it, I thought it was a great ad, but it ended up being a project that some student did in california I think.

I still think its too bad, I loved to be able to show someone an ad I saw the other day on tv, its pointless to tell them to watch the same channel, as they probably wont see the ad again, unless its run a lot. Ive seen some company websites that have their ads from tv as downloadable movie files (the one I am thinking of is gap.com.. if yer wondering why i was at gap, it was for that angus commercial with the chick playin the guitar). Anyway, too bad to see them go, I hope something else comes along that is similar..

Zeno

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Senor Crappy]

What company, in its right mind, is going to complain about someone running its ads for free?

Well, Fry's electronics for one. Not too long ago, there was a site, frysad.com that had scans of their newspaper ads. This site was not run by Fry's, so they had their lawyers shut it down.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Jay L]

The potential problem is not so much with the company that bought the ad, but with all the parties that MADE the ad that may have explicitly retained Internet rebroadcast rights. Actors, producers, etc.

I used to live in the Washington area, which for some reason has a rich market for well-produced radio ads. I tried to get permission just to put a few on my personal web page, and each time was told that I couldn't, they didn't have the rights.

That was years ago, and I didn't pursue it too hard; I'm sure AdCritic managed to work something out legally. But it does take work.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

That happens only if the add is shoved down someones throat as in its application on TV.

On a site like AdCritic though, the ads were always only shown on an end users request.

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[bugg]

(Sarcasm intended)

Oh, I'm sorry, the concept of sarcasm is lost on me. Could you please explain to me how I could use it in my posts?

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The same people who insist on putting up movie trailers in copy protected Quicktime. Why can't I save them so I can show them to my friends and convince them to go to the movie?

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[AA0]

There is a damn good reason why Ad Critic never got sued. The company that made the comerical had to submit them, pretty much taking out any legal action there ever could have been.

I knew the site was dead long ago, it used to be my favourite site, then they cut bandwidth, to the point where anyone trying to download something to watch was just stupid. It took hours to download a 30 sec clip on a connection which can normally do it faster than real time.

The whole model was stupid, and the site should have forced the company the ad was for to host their own damn commerical, as they were getting free advertising anyways, and half a dozen commericals draws not much bandwidth compared to the hundreds on the site.

I haven't visited the site in months, and then only to see it was still the most useless site on the web, as you can basically preview the commerical name...and thats about it.

Giving kids a bunch of money to run a business isn't smart, as most kids are stupid (hell, I'm still one).

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[mr100percent]

It's called a "spec" ad because the maker wanted to get a job making a commercial for Apple or something. They weren't hiring, I guess, so he made a commercial to submit for their approval.

The premise was an illegal arms trade was going along, until the Feds break it up. They open the crate, and see.....a G4.

"Sarge, is that....?"
"It's one of them supercomputers."

They pack up the goods and send it off, but the driver turns out to be...one of the dealers!

Re:a problem waiting to happen

[zeno_2]

The one I saw had a chick in it, didn't seem like a sargent or anything, very spy like.

I read a story on it and it was some guy from a school doing a project. I think what your talking about is similar but a different commercial. It has been a while since I saw it though..

Zeno

Irony.

[bonzoesc]

Oh well, I guess even adcritic couldn't stay alive, no matter how much advertising they got.

Re:Irony.

[plover]

The real reason they shut down was because too many people were viewing their site with Junkbuster, and it just stopped paying the bills!

It's like some kind of Steven Wright joke: "I tried surf to adcritic.com with Junkbuster turned on. Junkbuster got so confused it took me to the doubleclick page..."

John

Re:Irony.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like some kind of Steven Wright joke: "I tried surf to adcritic.com with Junkbuster turned on. Junkbuster got so confused it took me to the doubleclick page..."

That was really lame.

Shit

[yrrw]

I hate this!!!

Re:Another Stupid Idea?

[Miles]

In a culture where advertisements are as much entertainment as the shows to which they are attached, they provide a service like any other entertainment review site.

Boy this is really surprising!

[IIOIOOIOO]

I wonder why companies would possibly try to stop someone from attempting to make money from their intellectual property. I'd imagine that this was a situation where the MPAA had a brotherly talk with its foolish 'younger brother.' Something along the lines of.... 'So these guys are abusing you, eh? Let me show you how to fix them...'

Re:Boy this is really surprising!

[Rhone]

Thanks, that's one of the funnier examples of "I'm saying something completely stupid because I didn't click the link and read what was going on for myself" I've seen in a while.

Re:Boy this is really surprising!

[IIOIOOIOO]

OMG, those are links?!?!

archive.org

[milkme123]

Bleh.. The pages are still available at http://web.archive.org/*/www.adcritic.com , but all of the video content was at movies.adcritic.com or akami. :(

Surely someone mirrored the content..

Re:archive.org

[diesel_jackass]

i hope someone did.

where is everyone going to go after the next superbowl?

Their explanation?

[SetarconeX]

I love that quote: "We still believe our business model will work, It'll just have to work for someone else?"

So close to admitting they suck as businessmen....yet still with some optimism. I like that.

I guess their bandwidth must have sputtered

[afree87]

They probably needed a T17 to transfer all those ads... why didn't they get the companies to pay for the bandwidth?

Re:I guess their bandwidth must have sputtered

[Anonymous Coward]

They used Akamai which essentially puts mirrors of their content at a bunch of locations around the world and DNS chooses the server that is closest.

Re:I guess their bandwidth must have sputtered

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is a T17?

Re:Another Stupid Idea?

[kellin]

Nah. Adcritic was fun. It allowed you to peruse and enjoy the handful of good commercials without having to sit through the painful ones (like the rotating world land rover commercial, UGH). Nothing wrong with an entertaining website at all.. and thats exactly what adcritic was. I'm sad to see it go, even if I really havent paid attention to it in the last year or so...

Dang

[jhaberman]

This is really too bad. Adcritic was one of those sites that I enjoyed, but never to the level of regular visitation. I suppose that is why they shut it down. I mean, seeing funny commercials you don't get at home is interesting, but for the average joe out there, who would want to pay for it? Not this joe. That's for sure.

Ya know what... I think this here internet thing is still evolving...

Jason

Re:Dang

[c0rtez]

but for the average joe out there, who would want to pay for it? Not this joe...

Jason

Aw, man, i was hoping the J in jhaberman stood for "joe"

Re:Dang

[3-State Bit]

>but for the average joe out there, who would
>want to pay for it? Not this joe. That's for sure
I would, and /am/, as soon as they reply with an address to send the check to. I serioulsy need this source of advertisement, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Think about it from the point of view from someone who watched /no TV/.

Re:Dang

[geekoid]

actually they shut down because they got to much business. i.e. the bandwidth charge was killing them.

Re:Dang

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah man, I think this should be a governemnt subsidy to big business. I mean, if you don't watch TV, how are you supposed to get your brain washing.

Re:Dang

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd figure that the products that get their advertisements out to people would be willing to chip in enough just to keep the thing going...

Cheaper than the superbowl.

Incubus

[Anonymous Coward]

"Grab the next motherfucker marmaduke who refuses to submit to these pelvic ostentations."

"I've stumbled upon a brain fart which melts away your molds!"

Is it the price of bandwidth?

[TomatoMan]

Is the price of bandwidth the biggest factor in the demise of so many dot-whatevers? I know my colo provider charges a bunch for bandwidth, so I'm afraid to host successful sites. The cost of the server isn't the big deal, nor the cost of maintenance. It's that you pay for every visit - even the spiders indexing you and spammers trolling for addresses.

If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it? Who's at the top of the food chain here? What are their interests? Are there other ways they can be fed?

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[jayhawk88]

Bandwidth/hosting costs certainly seem to be the most mentioned reason most sites close, at least those that become victims of their own success.

As for doing anything about it, I'm not sure what if anything can be done in the short term. Big Business owns and controls the fat pipes and backbones, and they sure as hell are going to try and make as much money as they can off of it. It'd probably take a new technology (true wireless?) at this point to wean off that tit.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Otter]

Is the price of bandwidth the biggest factor in the demise of so many dot-whatevers?

Forget dot-whatevers -- it's now gotten to the point where it's impossible to host a just-for-fun site once it gets sufficiently popular. Look at (I won't drive Lowtax further into debt by mentioning his site's name). People are willing to drop $10 a month on hosting for their vanity site, but they won't spend hundreds to keep it up once it becomes popular.

The tipping point is where banner ads are insufficient to pay for the bandwidth of a normal site (never mind a monster like AdCritic). I think you're right -- what's necessary is for access providers to realize that growing available content grows their businesses.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Syberghost]

If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it?

Not every problem can or should be solved.

The primary problem that causes most convenience stores to go under is the cost of labor. Do you want the minimum wage repealed to fix it? (Note: some people do, I'm not attempting to argue the point, just to present the things you have to consider.)

The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[MKalus]

Yes, that's the problem.

I was / am running with two other guys swma.net a website that is / was showing Star Wars Graphics / Models (The Star Wars Modelin Alliance).

We're offline for the past six months because we couldn't find a deal that we can afford.

Right now we push around 300 GB / MONTH but as soon as the new movie comes up we are toast, I am sure it'll jump above 500 GB, and believe me: There is NO hoster who can give us a deal under $1500/ month for this amount of bandwidth.

We might be back as we got a sponsor, but I have no clue how we are going to server all the people who are going to swarm it again without killing our donor off again....

Advertising doesn't pay, and a tip jar gave us 20 bucks in 3 months. Gee, thanks.

Michael

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could try using some sort of peer-to-peer system, possibly Freenet (I don't know of any other system that supports HTML pages). It would be a hassle for most people to access the site, but I guess it would be better than nothing.

For a site like AdCritic, with lots of large files, peer-to-peer would probably work much better. I think something like Swarmcast would be appropriate for them. The web pages would remain hosted on their server, but the videos could be stored on the P2P network.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about $99/month rackshack.net for 300GB/month bw on a RAQ4. Round-robin DNS a couple of those?

I'm not affiliated with them, just know someone that rents a RAQ4 from them.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[archen]

I guess you could say things have come full circle. It used to be that you had to optimize image/file sizes for the people with old modems like the 14.4 . The lucky 28.8 people weren't so much of a problem. Then it became "high bandwidth" on the users end and websites stopped optimizing. Perhaps this is just the beginning of going back to optimizing those files to save bandwidth on the server end. I know that I've been stripping down a few sections on my page here and there (but I've always been more for small graphics, lots of text). A difference of 50k per page can make a huge difference when we're talking a lot of hits.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[SirSlud]

Well, count me in. We run a website that compiles slang terms (again, no link, we get enough traffic as it is) .. one day, we were linekd by memepool.com, and basically incurred 140$ extra dollars on a 30$ hosting plan.

We had to move hosts, but I dare say that we could outgrow the new one in a month or two if we made a concerned effort to bring in more traffic than we can handle.

One last point: the online advertising industry is still in the shitter, but it won't always be this way. Remember when the media placements (ie, sites) had all the leverage in negotiating inventory buys by the ad networks? Well, it won't be like that again, but the websites won't remain the advertisers' whipping boys for too much longer either. It should even out over time, and offset some of the charges incurred by bandwidth usage.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[frank_adrian314159]

I was running a website that was showing Star Wars Graphics... Advertising doesn't pay, and a tip jar gave us 20 bucks in 3 months...

Yousa no shoulda use a tip jar. Yousa use Jar Jar. Ha Ha Ha...

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Osty]

The primary problem that causes most convenience stores to go under is the cost of labor. Do you want the minimum wage repealed to fix it? (Note: some people do, I'm not attempting to argue the point, just to present the things you have to consider.)

The answer here is, "It depends." What that means is that if the minimum wage is a fair, low wage that allows for subsistence living and little more (if even that -- we're talking a minimum wage here, after all), then fine. But when you have places like California that have a minimum wage of $10+ for certain jobs (hotel workers, in this example), that's just wrong. So in that case, yes, the minimum wage should be repealed. If you're talking about the $5.25 McDonalds jobs, then no, that's fair enough. It could actually be a little lower ("Back in my day, we were lucky to get $5.00/hr for a job!"), even. Yes, it sucks for the people that have to try living on such a wage, but they have options. They can get a second job, they can try for a better job, they can get government help to go to school to better themselves and get a better job, they can join the armed forces, etc. When many American jobs are being exported to other countries because the labor is exponentially cheaper, there is obviously a problem.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[dachshund]

Or distributed content distribution, as with Akamai. With all the filesharing that's going on, it surprises me that there are no good p2p apps that perform this task.

And no, Freenet isn't there yet.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Ed Avis]

The bandwidth payment model is kinda broken. Mobile phones really took off once it became established that you pay for _making_ calls and not so much for receiving them (though a flat line-rental charge is acceptable). It shouldn't cost a site more if it's popular; rather, the users requesting pages should pay for the bandwith they consume. (This is a tiny amount of money, and it's not the same as micropayments - you really are paying for usage of a scarce resource, and it's between you and your ISP.)

The trouble is that for marketing reasons ISPs want to offer nominally flat-rate services (even though in reality they'll kick you off for going above some arbitrary limit) but hosting companies charge for actual usage. And there is AFAIK no payment structure to decide who is 'responsible' for a connection - just packet counting. Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.

Another way out would be for small or hobbyist sites to run throttling webservers and stop serving pages temporarily when some quota of bandwidth runs out. However, the pages would remain accessible through web caches. This would lead to a demand from users that ISPs run a decent http cache, again pushing some of the responsibility for the surfing habits of 'random hordes' onto the ISP rather than the (un)lucky website.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Saeger]

There is NO hoster who can give us a deal under $1500/ month for this amount of bandwidth.

$3/GB? You can do better than that, as long as you aren't afraid of hosting with some porno outfit--they're used to dealing in volume...

--

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Nachtfellen]

Actually, if everyone followed this logic, we would live in a world with a quality of life that is much lower than that which we have now. It is difficult to imagine that many of the industries that are profitable today would be so if they had to build their business model around the prices of even a few years ago. An example that immediately comes to mind is the decreased cost of higher bandwidth in people's homes. Almost no one would have broadband if they had to pay as much for T1 downloads as they would have in 1996. Much of microeconomics is focused on the study of the decreased cost of inputs into a product over time.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[dachshund]

The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.

You're absolutely right. Problem is, there is no good business plan available for most sites that want to distribute content or news. If you run a TV/radio station or a newspaper with a regular audience in the millions, you can do quite well off of the advertising $$. If you run an even more popular website, you're going to make a fraction of that amount.

Some say the scarcity of advertising money is due to the limitations of the format. To a larger extent, thought, it's an artificial situation brought about by major advertisers' unwillingness to gamble on an unproven format. They have the money, so they say which formats live or die.

A good example of this is advertisers' unwillingness to experiment with time-shifted TV advertising. Right now it's well within the limits of technology to customize the advertising displayed to every viewer with a modern cable box or Tivo. But advertisers don't even want to experiment with this technology because they've got a very reliable system that works purely on the basis of what type of people tune in at a given time. Even though a lot of their money is being wasted on people with no interest in a given product.

That's business, and I understand your point. However, I do find it to be a shame that such a promising area of business is being starved to death as a result.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[marick]

I don't really understand, isn't there some way to throttle down the bandwidth by restricting the number of users accessing your site at any time? Could someone enlighten me on why this is difficult?

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[pcidevel]

The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.

So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).

It's very bad for the competition to have some pressure point to use to drive smaller buisnesses out of the market. If a larger competitor can drive up the cost of raw materials, or labour, or bandwith and he can weather the storm at a loss then he can easily create a monopoly, and raise his prices to a point that hurts the consumer.

The upward spiraling cost of bandwith coupled with the lowering pay of banner ads and the mom and pop web pages being run out of buisiness because of these costs are definately a bad thing, and something needs to be done to fix it. The internet is the proverbial freeing of the printing press, it's something that humanity has needed for quite some time. Driving the cost of using the internet up is stripping the average person from having a medium to publish his works, and that isn't good. We are quickly returning to a state where mega-corporations (including the government) can destroy any negative speech towards them by driving the average person off the web and stripping their ability to self publish. It's definately bad here on the net, because what's to stop a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).

This is definately a problem that needs to be solved.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[enrico_suave]

previous poster said, "... they can get government help to go to school to better themselves and get a better job... "

what are you that LESKO guy on tv with the bushey eyebrows and the garish purple question mark suit?

E.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[SilentChris]

I'm actually wondering *why* bandwidth seems to cost so much. You're really only moving very small bits of electricity down a wire -- you don't have the costs of housing huge servers and keeps OS's up and running to handle them (yes, I know there are costs in setting up a router, but really it's just a "setup-once, forget it" kind of thing, outside of occasional security maintenance).

I sometimes think bandwidth is the gasoline of high-tech: a relatively inexpensive resource, presumably finite, that companies can charge extra for when they feel it is "necessary". Hopefully, bandwidth will follow current trends and ride waves of up-and-down prices like gasoline.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[RembrandtX]

Bandwidth .. what does it REALLY cost ?

while i agree .. not everything should be free,
i also have to question people's markups. [read gas/utility gouging] Selling something at 400+ markup when your the only game in town and wont let anyone else in .. thats a different story.

[to your anology of minimum wage / supply demand -- if there is a large amout of unemployed people, minimum wage doesnt DROP, it just doesn go up.]

i mean .. 303 gb a month .. thats not that much stuff bw .. 600 cds of info .. a lot .. to be true .. not even 1% of what goes through only 1 of the 5 major backbones.

for that matter .. does it *REALLY* cost 12 cents a min for a long distance phone call ? (when another company can give me 5 cents a min)

its the same boat .. look at the major backbones .. ATT, MCI, Sprint .. ring any bells ?

now .. i know .. i know .. you are paying more than that physical costs .. your paying for r&d , your paying for past and future expansion, and your paying share holders.

[i *DID* used to work for @home you know ;P]

however, i do sometimes wonder why 1.5 mbit SDSL is $200 a month in the U.S. and like $70 a month (canadian) in Canada. Or why My pals in Canada get cable modems for $29.00 a month .. yet I pay $49.00 (us)

sometimes living in a free economy can suck.

[i wont even get into price fixing theories about being the majority share holder for a cable internet company *AND* a major DSL internet company]

for that matter .. why do cable companies charge $70 a month for cable tv that i used to get in the 80's for $20 a month ?

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Osty]

what are you that LESKO guy on tv with the bushey eyebrows and the garish purple question mark suit?

I am not Matthew Lesko. I find the guy annoying, and insulting (that's my money he's trying to give away). Regardless, the government is going to subsidize poor people. That can't be helped. However, I would much rather my tax dollars went to putting people through school so that maybe they can eventually become tax payers themselves and take some burden off of me, rather than feeding the crackwhore baby factories through welfare checks. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[MKalus]

The throtteling on a per user basis is not so much an issue, we're also looking in "banning" IPs of people who leech, but in the end the shear amount of people visiting is killing us.

When Episode ONE came out we had at peak times 800 visitors / second.....

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[MKalus]

MMhh,

thanks I have a look at them, so far we didn't look at them, and quite frankly I don't really care what's on other boxes as long as that thing has decent througput etc.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[MKalus]

I don't know about the RAQ4 but we tried it on a RAQ3 and that one keeled over with the DB in the backend.....

Plus I am not necessarily very happy with the RAQs themselves, but then: Beggers can't be choosers I guess....

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Greedo]

Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.

That'll put all the bandwidth suppliers to the pr0n industry out of business PDQ.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[TWR]

p a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).

Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.

Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.

So, yeah, the system works.

In other stupid things you said:

So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).

Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.

If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...

Today's lesson: if the only way to win is to be big, get big!

-jon

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[pcidevel]

Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.

Doesn't have to be a DOS attack, just generate real page hits.. it wouldn't take but a few extra thousand page hits a day to take these mom and pop companies down.. just require that every person in your mega-corporation checks the competing web sight or the negative publicity websight three times a day to see if there are any updates.. that will easily create enough hits to drive a small website owner under.. ;).. or you can just create a script that checks for updates to the page every second.. if you get called into court (HIGHLY unlikely) you can say: "Hey, we were just trying to keep updated on changes to the site, we didn't know that monitoring them that heavily would cost them so much bandwith"

Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.

Ohh, and this works ohh so well.. mega-corporations never ever ever use their resources to scare people with litigation into submission(/sarcasm)... Mega-corporations always have more resources than the grass-roots effort, and when it becomes a challenge of who can keep it in court longer (as it always does) the corporation almost always wins...

The other completely moronic dumbass statement you made was:

Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.

If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...

It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.

Initially this looks good to the consumer, they are getting products at a rate that is so low that the companies are loosing money to get it to them. However, as soon as the competition is all gone (as it will inevitably happen, when playing this type of last man standing game), then suddenly it becomes very bad for the consumer, as companies no longer have to focus on good prices (so prices skyrocket, as they always do when there is a corporate "You either buy it from me or you don't get it" mentality) and they also loose focus on customer service.

Today's lesson: mega-corporations and monopolies are bad for the consumer

BTW: My name is also Jon.. It's always refreshing to find someone else that spells their name jon (as I'm sure you are aware it's a fairly rare spelling). ;)

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[denzo]

The trouble is that for marketing reasons ISPs want to offer nominally flat-rate services (even though in reality they'll kick you off for going above some arbitrary limit) but hosting companies charge for actual usage. And there is AFAIK no payment structure to decide who is 'responsible' for a connection - just packet counting. Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.

I see a few problems with this billing method:

• Authentication: People are known to perform IP spoofing, and IP addresses will be hijacked and people will be billed for connections they never initiated (yes, I know this is supposed to be harder to do when using IPv6, but what about physically hijacked connections, such as stolen logins at college computer labs, etc).
• Administration: I can see it now, ISPs will start charging an administrative fee per connection for having to itemize the connection charges in the customer's bill.
• Control: Not only will employers be logging their employees' web usages, but now they have to pay active attention to it because they have to bill them for non-business-related surfing, or firewall all sites except those that the employee is authorized to use.
• Privacy: All middle-men sites will have a neatly itemized (see above) bill of the user's web surfing. They can resell this information to marketting companies (not to say that this isn't happening now, but it's less effort for the ISP to do so now... they don't even have to reformat and filter their connection logs).
• Accessibility: The digital divide will widen, and only the richer people will be able to surf more than a couple of Web sites. Public libraries and schools will no longer be able to offer the same amount of access as before.
• Cost: Who's going to regulate how much a host will charge for its bandwidth usage? Will one host providing ad banners for more popular web sites charge more per GB than one that has relatively little? How is the user to know what they're getting charged?
• Abuse: People can now put up huge bloated web sites just to slam users, and not have to pay for it.
• Demos: Software companies will inevitably lose revenue that is generated from purchases that are made after using a trial version of their software, such as game demos (I know of at least 10 games off the top of my head that I bought because I was impressed by the demos I played). It won't be a free trial anymore, it'll cost us for the bandwidth. By the same token, those free patches we can get for software will now also cost us money.
• ... ad infinitum ...

I also can name a lot of advantages from this, such as responsible sites creating tighter HTML code and graphics, etc. But the disadvantages far outweight these.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[emmons]

Mobile phones really took off once it became established that you pay for _making_ calls and not so much for receiving them

Unless you live on the good 'ol USA. We pay for airtime, it doesn't matter if you call out or recieve a call. Personally, I prefer that to having the caller pay a surcharge for calling a cell phone. It's the owner's convenience, not the caller's. Why shouldn't he have to pay for it?

If only we would pay by the minute rather than a fixed monthly charge for X many minutes...

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Syberghost]

It is difficult to imagine that many of the industries that are profitable today would be so if they had to build their business model around the prices of even a few years ago.

You don't have to imagine it, in the vast majority of industries that has always been the case.

What, do you think every business that has ever existed has lost money on every sale and been propped up by tax dollars? If so, there wouldn't be any tax dollars to prop them up.

Almost no one would have broadband if they had to pay as much for T1 downloads as they would have in 1996.

This may come as a shock to you, but the government doesn't mandate low rates for broadband.

As for those companies that take a loss on it without making that loss up somewhere else; Excite@Home ring a bell?

Meanwhile, RoadRunner is doing fine, charging $10 more a month. Even at that, I doubt they'd be doing so well if they didn't have their cable services, with the vast majority of the subscribers getting more than the low-rate-mandated basic cable.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an ad-supported internet company. The root of the problem isn't bandwidth charges --it's that small, static banner ads don't work for marketers. No-one clicks on them, or buys off them. The end result is that you've got two choices -- make the ads more effective (Read: invasive and huge) or move to a subscription/donation model. (Read: Go out of business)

I always find slashdotters attitudes on this very amusing. There's invariably a post complaining about the size and invasiveness of ads, directly followed by a post that complains about the dearth of sites with good content.

This isn't meant to be a flame, just frustration at the fact that people don't seem to recognize the difficulty of the problem, or offer up viable solutions. They just complain.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[geekoid]

If your walking in the mall, would you pay to go into a shop that Might have something you want, and pay to look at each "type" of item?Plus you know they'l' replace all there .jpgs. with .gifs, so you use more bandwidth.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[gulfan]

With my Webprovider I pay $5/Gig, It's not that much but it does add up.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[TWR]

when it becomes a challenge of who can keep it in court longer (as it always does [guerrillanews.com]) the corporation almost always wins...

One example does not a pattern make. And it's not even a good example. According to this article, Coke is being accused of letting its copyright (sounds more like a trademark than a copyright to me, but I'm not an IP lawyer) on the classic bottle design lapse, and then defending itself against some guy who now claims to own the copyright on the bottle image because he used the bottle design in some internal pitch that may or may not have been stolen by an ad agency (and not by Coke). A pox on both their houses. IMHO, this guy is abusing the copyright system just as badly as Coke is.

If it was something along the lines of this guy being sued out of existence by Coke because he had proof that Coca-Cola causes brain tumors, that's one thing. I'd say you had a point. But Coke trying to squash a suit over an image that's been theirs for a long time? Give me a break.

It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.

Question: how did Wal-Mart get to be the size it is today? Secret government contracts? Murdering its competitors? Or brilliant management? There is NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING that Wal-Mart did that any of a billion other mom-and-pop operations couldn't have done. The Walstons just figured it out first.

Furthermore, if the modern mom-and-pops want to form their own MegaCorp, they can. They'll end up doing VERY similar things to what Wal-Mart does, because it's the only way to turn a profit on their margins. Retail is a sucky, sucky industry to be in.

Now, I agree that monopolies are bad things. But there are no monopolies on selling Tide or crappy clothes made by child labor. No one has ever presented evidence that Wal-Mart jacks up prices after it drives all of it competitors out of business. If they did, K*Mart would then move in and eat Wal-Mart's lunch. See, not a monopoly.

I agree that smaller companies usually provide better services. But you have to pay for those extra services, and most people are unwilling to do so. That's why Wal-Mart wins.

Before you think that I'm a loony "corporations are always right" Objectivist, I think that Microsoft's illegal tie-ins and restrictions on bundled software are in a totally different category. In that case, MS has clearly violated US anti-trust regulations that prevent a company that has monopoly power in one area from using that power to obtain a monopoly in another area. And, to my non-lawyer mind, intentionally presenting false evidence and lying during an affidavit is perjury. But no one is charging Gates or Balmer with that, so we should just forget about it.

-jon

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[AntiTaco]

www.somethingawful.com

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[mscout1]

Yousa no shoulda use a tip jar. Yousa use Jar Jar. Ha Ha Ha...

Gehg! Quick! kill him before he says it again! Puns involving the world's most anonying CG charactor should be a capital offense!

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[rjmcmahon]

The pring to is based on voice business models which haven't evolved to support data needs.
The web site industry basing their biz-models on advertising as the revenue source seems to have been the mistake we all are paying for now. Its going to take awhile to fix it as investors have been burned once.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[3247]

You're really only moving very small bits of electricity down a wire...

Which wire? In your cost calculation, there is no wire.

Actually, bandwith alone is cheap. It's bandwith over long, expensive wires that makes up the price.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Ed Avis]

I was thinking about payment being made from one ISP to another (or from user to ISP) at the connection between their two networks. For example you would pay a small per-megabyte charge when web browsing with your cable modem; your ISP would pass on most or all of that charge as payment for the other ISP it contacts to fetch the page. Spoofing your IP address to evade payment isn't really possible because you're billed by your own ISP based on what physically goes over your modem link.

As for 'administration fees' and that sort of thing, I just hope that competition among ISPs will help to keep down this sort of abuse, just like competition between banks. I wouldn't mind paying a fairly calculated fee for the bandwidth I actually used, but I'd ditch my ISP quickly if they started inventing random new charges.

'Digital divide': no I don't think so. An analogue modem uses such a piddly amount of bandwidth that the charges wouldn't be worth bothering with, or at any rate dwarfed by the phone bill you pay anyhow. I'm not thinking of charging for content, just for the resources you actually use. You could make the same 'X divide' argument about metered electricity usage, or phone bills, or anything else where you pay according to consumption. It doesn't make the principle wrong.

Cost: you'd pay just your own ISP, at a fixed rate (say one cent per megabyte). You can imagine a scheme where the ISP charges more for worldwide traffic than for connections to nearby hosts, but I don't think it would get that complicated in practice. Customers could just move to the ISP offering the best rates.

Abuse: I was thinking of small charges, just enough to pay the costs of bandwidth. In fact it would be sufficient to make the charges less than the actual cost of bandwidth - if they covered 80% of the cost then a small site could serve five times as many users before running out of money, and that might be good enough. It wouldn't be profitable to put up 'huge bloated sites' - not that many would visit them anyway.

You are right that in some cases charging for bandwidth will inhibit usage of the net (demo versions of software or whatever). That is more psychological than economic, since the amounts are so small, but important nonetheless. I feel this way as a user myself - it's just _nicer_ to know that you are paying a flat fee. Perhaps the answer is to have a bandwidth-payment system but stop it at the final link, so ISPs pay in proportion to what their users consume, but average out the costs between all users (rather like how it is now).

The one advantage you do cite, an incentive for sites to write tighter HTML, is not actually true. If instead of paying $x for your outgoing bandwith you are paying effectively $x / 5 or even zero, there is _less_ incentive to create smaller pages. OTOH there is a (tiny) incentive for users to visit less bloated sites.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Dunkirk]

There's no other way around it. If you want a community centered around a service, you have to sell subscriptions. I think this is the lesson that people need to learn. If people don't value something enough to pay something for it, then you don't need them downloading whatever it is you're creating. Sure, I want stuff for free. Everyone does. But there's nothing wrong in charging for a product with value. If you started charging, yes, your downloads are going to fall off sharply. BUT, there comes an intersection point where your bandwidth costs drop off to meet a rising income, and you can tweak your pricing model (and donated bandwidth) to find a happy medium. This seems so obvious to me, and I've said exactly this to at least one very popular web site's creator, that it's just like a magazine subscription. Charge about that price for about that level of content. It's very simple math: if you can't find enough people willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile (even if that means breaking even to you), then it just doesn't make sense.

dk

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[radish]

I disagree - it is the caller's convenience. If someone is calling me it's because they want to speak to me. If I didn't have a mobile they'd have to leave a message, and wait for me to call them back. Instead, they get to ask me the question or whatever it is and get a response straight away. When I call out - then it's my advantage, i.e. being able to make calls easily from anywhere.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[enrico_suave]

FWIW, I concur... but the similarities in your initial comment jumped out at me and I couldn't resist the lesko reference.

e.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[MKalus]

Oh we were considering it, just one TINY little problem:

We are a Star Wars themed site. If we start CHARGING for this stuff or even worse are "members only" we probably get into trouble with Lucas Film Licensing.....

What safes us right now is that we are NONPROFIT, the moment we change it, we're toast.

Michael

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[Royster]

If I were given the choice of leaving a message or paying extra for a call, I'd leave a message.

Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[radish]

That's your choice - if someone wants to ring one of my landline numbers and leave a message they can, if they choose to call the mobile they know they are paying more for the privilidge. I really don't see the problem here...

Great...

[Schnapple]

..now where am I supposed to go to see the "kitty rustlers" ad from two Super Bowls ago.

Actually I figured the money for bandwidth could kill them - so how is it that Internet Archive site is able to afford up to 12GB per month in hard drive space?

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

EDS still has it on their site available for download. Search on "cat herders".

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth and Disk Space are you COMPLETELY seperate things.

Silly silly person

Re:Great...

[Schnapple]

Yes but they both cost money, and I would imagine the hard drive space (12GB per month) would cost more than the bandwidth.

I was mainly curious how these "just for the hell of it" sites (archiving news posts, archiving the whole freaking Internet) survive, unless they're bought out (ala DejaNews -> Google)

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but something has to get on to the disk - using bandwidth, and off it again - using bandwidth.

Re:Great...

[Guy Innagorillasuit]

It's still available at EDS's site.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Amazon.com owns Alexa which is more or less a big part of the internet archive. So in effect they've already been bought out.

Of All Times...

[SMN]

I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this. . . where am I gonna be able to find MPEG'd versions of next year's Super Bowl commercials now? It's often the only sports game I watch all year, and really just for the commercials -- but I like to download the funny ones afterwards. Can someone else recommend another site that might archive the Superbowl ads?

Also, their Investment Page is still up, so you can get some idea of the shear amount of traffic they receive -- 32,500,000 videos streamed last January alone (that's a lot of bandwidth)!

In case anyone misses the irony, this is a site where people go looking for ads -- you'd think it's the perfect market for any advertisements. If banner ads can't succeed even here, then the future of free websites isn't looking too bright.

Re:Of All Times...

[benedict]

How about adforum.com?

I've had problems making their stuff work on Mac OS X -- their codec is apparently not supported -- but I bet they'd be willing to work on that if enough people complain.

Re:Of All Times...

[ptrourke]

In case anyone misses the irony, this is a site where people go looking for ads -- you'd think it's the perfect market for any advertisements. If banner ads can't succeed even here, then the future of free websites isn't looking too bright.

You know what they say - why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? Seriously - why pay to put ads on a website that puts them up for nothing?

Re:Of All Times...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are MPEG1 videos. If you view the source, you can see the file names, and download them. I think almost any system can play MPEG1 (I had no trouble viewing a video under Linux), it might be the plugin that's causing problems.

Re:Of All Times...

[Anonymous Coward]

Via ReplayTV or TiVO: Gnutella, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Morpheus . . .

~~~

Re:Of All Times...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think USAToday.com had most of the ads online after the last Superbowl.

Re:Of All Times...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want the superbowl ads, check usenet. alt.binaries.multimedia is almost guaranteed to have all the good ones (and many of the lame ones) within a day or two.

Finding 'em on HTTP may be harder now, I dunno.

Re:Of All Times...

[benedict]

Hmm ... I'm having trouble parsing the needed
file names out of this HTML soup.

Asking me to read HTML myself is almost like asking
me to run Windows. ;-)

See them on FuckedCompany.com

[iiii]

They are the top article right now on fuckedCompany.com

p2p, where are you when we need you?

[mecran01]

Maybe something like http://www.filepile.org will spring up, only hosted using swarmcast or some other p2p tech. It seems like central servers are an expensive way to host something like adcritic.

How does this figure?

[KurdtX]

Wait, a site that was "All ads, all the time" became too popular? And advertisers could track which ads were more popular than others objectively and exactly? I've always said most marketeers wouldn't understand technology if it smacked them in the face. Guess I was right.

Damn, if they couldn't find funding, slashdot's fux0r'd.

Re:How does this figure?

[Bearpaw]

Wait, a site that was "All ads, all the time" became too popular? And advertisers could track which ads were more popular than others objectively and exactly?

Nope. I mean, they could, but only in that specific context, so the information wasn't useful to them. Adcritic's audience was not the intended audience, and it's unlikely that any statistically meaningful information about the latter could be drawn from the former.

Advertisers probably have much better methods of judging the actual impact of ads than Adcritic could ever be.

Re:How does this figure?

[Gogo Dodo]

I don't think the companies whose ads they showwed were paying anything to AdCritic. So they weren't making any money there.

As for banners, I would imagine they would get drowned out when you're looking at the real content... uhhh... ad.

Re:How does this figure?

[rogo78]

Check it out: you've made the New York Times. Congratulations, one user on Slashdot!

http://nytimes.com/2001/12/20/technology/20ADCO. ht ml

Can't say I'm surprised

[Otter]

I'll miss Adcritic, but I can't say I'm surprised they couldn't make it. The bandwidth they were using must have been mindboggling. Given how hard it is for sites serving mostly text to stay afloat, I can't see how they could have done it.

I don't think they were getting any revenue from the companies whose advertising they were airing. (They did have permission tp distribute them, by the way.)

Re:Can't say I'm surprised

[unithom]

Uh, actually, Peter did receive a small amount of initial $ for each ad, but that didn't scale. The site also had a number of banner ads, though anyone will tell you how little those can make you.

He also experimented with paypal donations, especially during the superbowl, and was trying to implement a subscription-based service, with differently-throttled bandwidth.

And of course, there's always the analysis of the data collected from user votes, server logs, and the like. I think they were trying to pitch the data as market research.

IMHO, AdCritic was a perfect vehicle for advertisers because it was a pull media, not push; instead of spending millions broadcasting their ads to predicted demographics and trusting the statistics, they could pay pennies and target individuals who wanted to see their ads. Those are justifiable, well-spent advertising dollars any way you look at it.

I just wish that Peter et al had been gutsy enough to make that case and set up a proportional, 'pennies per download' model (for the companies advertising, not for subscribers). Everybody wins: big companies can justify spending the money when there are proven results, and we'd still have funny ads to watch.

Re:they did free mumia

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if they fail to conduct a hearing in 180 days or less. If they do so within the time limit the death penalty is still applicable.

The web giveth, and the web taketh away...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's been at least a year since they're bandwidth just dropped, and instead of being able to stream ads in real-time (on my cable modem), it took ten minutes for Quicktime to download them, and more often then not it just failed. I'm surprised they lasted this long.

But, here's some good news: TheHungerSite.com is back up! Not sure when it happened... it was several months ago that it got shut down... but it's back up now.

Ah Well..

[Sinjun]

...they never could get my favorite commercial anyway. Remember 'Dog's Worst Day' from Super Bowl 2000 (Rams - Titans). Budweiser commercial with the dog on the set of the Western movie. I laughed for 15 solid minutes.

A need for Distributed Content Storage

[Starship Trooper]

This is just one example of why peer-to-peer distributed systems like the Freenet project need to be developed. The Web is limited in that there needs to be somebody willing to maintain and update the servers on which data is stored, and that when a huge central resource like this can no longer afford to maintain their service, gigabytes of data can be potentially lost forever. What we need is a distributed system, where content is automatically propagated between nodes and can be downloaded from any one node, independent of venture capital and ad revenues.

Freenet does much of this, but still falls short of the ideal and still needs a lot of work to become viable. "Unpopular" data on Freenet is automatically destroyed to make room for more popular data, which makes it unsuitable for prolonged archival. There still isn't a decent search engine; finding data requires that you obtain the "key" from somebody who knows where to find it, which is inefficent and makes it hard for new Freenet users to locate data. If Freenet data could be made more permanent and easily searchable, or if somebody else could develop and promote a P2P network that isn't just a haven for warez and stolen music, it would become a great alternative to the struggling Web.

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[KurdtX]

You mean like what Akamai does? They even do it seamlessly. Of course, they're not free, and they don't do everything you want, but I'd say it's a good step, if I understand you correctly. (No, I have no relationship with them)

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[foobar104]

Freenet is nifty and all, but it lacks a few important things: content control for synchronous updates or deletions, an HTTP gateway, and so on.

(I know, I know, these things are largely orthogonal to the purposes of Freenet. This is kind of my point. Read on.)

I've always liked the Akamai model-- static content is distributed to edge servers, and users are directed to their optimum edge server by magic. (If I knew how Akamai did it, I'd be doing it myself instead of talking to you freaks.)

The thing with that model is that you can put plain old HREFs on plain old web pages, and instead of the content being served by one NetBSD box (or whatever) that explodes every time Taco even thinks of posting a link to it, the actual content comes off these load-balanced servers all over the world.

There's only one problem with this: it can be either really expensive, or really unreliable. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it both cheap and robust.

Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache. (I guess each file-- image or movie or document or whatever-- would have to be on a single server, because it would have to be served up by a single HTTP request.)

When you're away from your computer, it acts like a little caching edge server for web content. When you sit down and start using your computer, it drops off the content network until it's idle again.

Because every request goes through a central request broker, the system should be able to handle edge servers coming on and dropping off the network all the time.

Okay, so there'd have to be a central authority to handle all requests... but there wouldn't necessarily have to be just one central authority. Say I set up "webcache.org" (although that name is taken) and you access content on it by going to "http://webcache.org/cachemonster.cgi?somerandomst ring." Then the guy down the block sets up "getyerowncache.org" and does the same thing, only URLs to his cache network would have to go through "http://getyerowncache.org/...." But all the content lives on a single network, and every broker talks to every edge server.

(How do the edge servers know about the brokers? Why, through a central registry, of course. Look, if I had it all figured out, I would have done it by now!)

I dunno. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I don't think so. I just don't have time to work on it.

Step right up, folks! I'm givin' 'em away for free, here!

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[foobar104]

Yes, I'm replying to myself. I just re-read my post, and it sounds like a pretty damn good idea.

The model thusfar: you have a central web server that has copies of all its own content (naturally) that is also running cache broker software. You also have one or more computers elsewhere that talk to the content server: "Hello, I'd like to cache some of your content. I have so-n-so megs of space free. Give me a file!" The broker makes a note of the server's location and sends it some data. The server caches it.

When the central broker receives a request for a URL, it figures out which content server has the file requested, picks the one "closest" to the requester, and redirects.

What we'd need:

• A protocol for communicating between content server and central broker.
• An algorithm for figuring out how "close" a content server is to a requester
• A reference implementation of a request broker, probably as a CGI program. How to implement the database: NDBM, or something more complex?
• A reference implementation of a caching content server.

Any volunteers?

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[Drizzten]

Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache.

But wouldn't this expose hundreds and hundreds of unsuspecting people to various lawsuits from copyright holders and such? They'd have little to no idea what files would be sitting on their drive and I'm certain some lawyer desperately searching for a way to justify his existence would love arguing in a courtroom about how you participated in a "wide-ranging consipiracy to pirate and steal from legitimate copyright owners" or something similiarly exaggerated.

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[foobar104]

But wouldn't this expose hundreds and hundreds of unsuspecting people to various lawsuits from copyright holders and such?

Hmm. Good point. Maybe there could be some kind of loophole based on the fact that the content server running on your computer only ever gets content from the request brokers, so those brokers have to be responsible for their own content.

Maybe if the content server started out by allocating a big sparse file on your system, and filled it with the content in the form of raw binary data. So the individual users would have no easy access to the content in the content share at all. Hell, while we're at it, just encrypt the stuff with some fast commercial-grade encryption to make it possible to store sensitive materials from private web sites on distributed servers.

Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage

[WWWWolf]

Freenet is nifty and all, but it lacks a few important things: content control for synchronous updates or deletions, an HTTP gateway, and so on.

I started using Freenet about... oh, 6 months ago, and all this time it has had a perfectly working HTTP gateway (FProxy) that allows viewing Freenet content in web browser and insertion of stuff - and it's bundled with the main distribution... Yep, I use Freenet mostly to read Content of Evil (that isn't visible for some reason right now - flaky insert?...)

A classic case for a public-service website.

[sulli]

Adcritic, Slashdot, Body Modification Ezine: sites that provide a valuable service to readers and fans of a whole industry, and yet can't pay the bills. How to make it add up?

Of course they could go the Salon route, and introduce "AdCritic PREMIUM!" with larger vid feeds for a few bux. Or they could hire a laid-off pr0n editor and introduce pay-per-view. But there's got to be a better way, one that rightfully assigns the cost of serving the ads on the advertisers themselves, who surely want people to see the ads.

Here's the answer: a mandatory annual levy on the advertising industry to support AdCritic. It's commonly used in agriculture, to support those "It's the Cheese" and "Got Milk?" ads; and courts have ruled that it's legal.

This is the right solution for so many reasons. Advertisers pay for a service they benefit from; advertisers, buyers, and consumers get their ads in full-motion QuickTime, Windows Media, or Divx; and people see the ads and buy more stuff! Everyone wins.

Re:A classic case for a public-service website.

[Graff]

Of course they could go the Salon route, and introduce "AdCritic PREMIUM!" with larger vid feeds for a few bux.

They did this. Adcritic had a pay version which would let you view the ads in a much larger size. I never did it, but i saw it advertised on their site.

Adcritic, IMDB, and the Quicktime Movie Trailers sites were three of the sites I would use all the time to see what cool ads and movies were out and to get more information on them. I'm sad that Adcritic couldn't make it, I'm fairly certain the Quicktime page is safe, but I hope IMDB can stay up.

Re:A classic case for a public-service website.

[Ewan]

IMDB is now a part of amazon.com, and is getting quite integrated into the site for providing reviews, film information and so on about DVD's amazon sells.

This should secure IMDB for now.

Re:A classic case for a public-service website.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the answer: a mandatory annual levy on the advertising industry to support AdCritic. It's commonly used in agriculture, to support those "It's the Cheese" and "Got Milk?" ads; and courts have ruled that it's legal.

Milk / cheese / etc. industry ads also require a law in order to exist. If all the milk processors got together and tried to do the same thing, they'd be fined for colluding and price fixing. OTOH, the supreme court did rule that forcing mushroom packers to pay for industry-wide ads was illegal.

Re:A classic case for a public-service website.

[EaglesNest]

Is it really a public service to have archived advertisements? I think the Ad Council, the industry's umbrella group, already does levy membership fees (although I don't think they're mandatory). Their mission is to "identify a select number of significant public issues and stimulate action on those issues through communications programs that make a measurable difference in our society."

In short, they product public service campaigns. Among the real public services they provide is producing public service campaigns of the "Save the children" variety. Memorable campaigns include "Take a Bite out of Crime" and the McGruff crime dog, The UNCF "Mind is a terrible thing to waste" and my favorite, the Crash Test Dummies.

Never heard of them.

[CmderTaco]

They must have had bad advertising...

"Reason Why..."

[dghcasp]

Ummm, we realized there is no money to be made by showing ads for free...

It's an interesting comment on our culture that AdCritic existed in the first place; that ads have become entertainment. While *insert-network-here* would probably be rather upset if a site copied and posted *insert-hit-tv-show-here* onto a web site, I don't think advertisers (product or agency) ever complained about getting extra viewers for their ads...

Are we moving towards a society where the value of product placement will cover the whole cost of entertainment and we'll be able to get free copies of *insert-new-hit-movie-here* because it'll be completely filled with Dr. Pepper backdrops?

Although personally, I don't feel any grief that humanity has just eradicated the last known resovoir of "Where's the Beef!" I bet the CDC felt this way when they eradicated Smallpox.

Re:"Reason Why..."

[gmhowell]

Coca-Cola paid $100million for Harry Potter rights.

It could be argued that the Olympics are paid for solely by their sponsors (I'd argue against that, but the argument can be made)

Blaming the inevitable on the recession...

[ergo98]

From their explanation: Our business, although strong, has been unable to weather the current economic realities beseiging the United States today.

I really wish failing dot COMs would quit blaming the "current economic realities", rather than simply saying "the commerce model for the internet hasn't panned out as we hoped, and those sucker VCs got a little wiser". Seriously it wouldn't matter if it was the biggest boom ever right now: There was a D-day seen coming for all sorts of these sites, but now they have the convenience of going "it's the economy, stupid". No it isn't, and the downturn didn't change their existing total lack of profitability.

www.fuckedcompany.com

[Hates]

For a funny and brash discussion on the topic go to:

Fucked Company

Pay for Play?

[jhaberman]

I just had a thought... I'm surprised that they didn't go to all of the companies who's ads they were streaming (and it sounds like a LOT of them) and say, "You know, we got your ad viewed by 50,000 additional people last month. You should concider paying us to advertise for you."

I know you gotta advertise to make money in this world... if a company saw that people were voluntarily downloading their commercials for entertainment purposes, that has GOT to be worth something to them.

I have to imagine that would be every bit as effective an ad placement method as a newspaper or magazine ad.

However IANAAM (I am not an ad man).

Jason

+1 However, Important Slashdot Announcement:

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the reaction of the infamous-wannabe-cyber-hacker-journalist
Jon Katz to this event?

Thanks in advance,
Woot_spork

P2P...

[dygytyz]

Here's a good argument for P2P sharing if there ever was one. I would be personally willing to share the entire Adcritic site on my machine through LimeWire just so other people could have the opportunity to view these videos.

Another service that comes to mind are MojoNation. Ifyou can't a big pipe outright, buy smaller pieces of many pipes and combine them.

Is anyone offering to mirror the site or is it even going to be possible to do so?

Please, people! Restraint, please

[The Great Wakka]

One last time... AdCritic is slashdotted. Horrible, really.

Reason from their site.

[scott1853]

It's a small reason, don't know why the /. editors didn't post it because the site it getting hammered.

Just Choose It Later.

AdCritic.com has enjoyed a sucessful life as a leader in the area of archiving television and radio advertising and related information for both consumers and the advertising industry. Our business, although strong, has been unable to weather the current economic realities beseiging the United States today. The short answer: we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat!

We thank you for your continued support of AdCritic.com, and hope that we will be back in full swing someday soon.

Interested in helping out? You could always just send us some money... or send your condolences.

Technically, the economic winds changed for the online world very quickly, and caused us to have to change our business plan to match those changes. The development lead time of those new changes, coupled with a lack of resources to develop our research facilities to their full potential, put us in a position where we simply could not continue our operations without outside funding. We still believe that our business model will work; it will just have to work for someone else, as our timing was not ideal. We'll work on that.

Sad but funny

[SuperguyA1]

They still are soliciting investments?

What?

[Minter92]

"We bacame to popular to stay afloat" What the hell does that mean?

What nimrod thinks you can make money from the web anyway? If you make a site to make money you won't.

Re:What?

[susano_otter]

If you make a site to make money you won't.

Exactly! Which is why TurboTax Online fails to make giant piles of money every year.

Or maybe you've heard of a little thing called "internet porn"?

I don't think it would work

[Juju]

Companies pay adds to be out when they want them to. Anything outside this, probably does not interrest them

Besides, how do you want to implement this? Something like banner adds? A little pay each time somebody sees it?

I don't think companies would agree to pay for that.
First, it's hardly targeted: no control of when people see it or on who sees it (think in term of countries.)

Second, how could they measure the effect? This is very important in term of marketing: No way to measure the effect == no perception of benefit. If they can't see it, they won't pay for it. Why do you think banner adds flopped so badly?

Something along the lines could work if they made company pay to put their adds on-line, but do you think the site would still be successful?

I think the idea is doomed!

Have you noticed how many similar sites went down as soon as they started to be popular for their videos?

Sheer Incompetence

[Waffle Iron]

The entire media industry is supported by ads. Giant corporations like AOL Time-Warner have made buckets of money for decades by making the public watch ads only 10% or 20% of the time.

Here we have a company that had people look at ads 100% of the time. But they couldn't stay afloat even though they were sitting on top of a huge gold mine. Why? It's because they didn't bother to send a bill to the advertisers.

If they would just hire an administrative assistant to print out invoices, they would be in the black in no time!

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[MisterBlister]

I don't entirely understand your post?

Are you saying that AdCritic didn't bill the people who advertised using banner ads on its system? If so, where did you hear that?

If you're saying they should have sent out invoices to the people whose television ads they were hosting, uh?? What? A company is supposed to pay anyone who shows its ad, even if it never asked for them to do so?

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[BrookHarty]

And the statistics. Companies pay ungodly amounts of money for statistics. They could either find a reseller or a maybe even an multi-billion dollar ad agency. They are the equivalent of selling people popup banners.

Hardest part is the contacts, many good businesses go out of businesses for not having contacts. Same goes for bad businesses, CEO's with contacts can get people to pump money into a worthless company.

I made a comment that Slashdot should have a jobs website, now they have one. (Id like to think it was my idea. lol) How about the same cartel take adcritic under the wing and get them up and running.

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[nojomofo]

No, I think that the point was that they needed to change their business model. Had they figured out a way to charge those companies whose ads were being seen, that could have been a large revenue stream. As it was, though, they just gave away lots of free advertising space....

Of course, then you get into the problems of having companies paying for placement, and thus losing "outside observer" position of being able to fairly give all ads equal billing.

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[burrito37]

According to Ad Resource, the average cost for banner ads is ~$25/CPM (that is, $25 per 1000 impressions). If AdCritic charged this amount for their 300,000 page views per day (according to their own investment page), they would take in $7500 per _day_. This is over $200k / month! Shouldn't that be enough for bandwidth expenses?

Furthermore, from an advertiser's point of view, 30 seconds of a potential customer's attention should be a lot more valuable than standard banner ads which most people ignore anyway... Perhaps the CPM price charged by AdCritic could be even higher....

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[Waffle Iron]

I meant the second interpretation, they should bill the original TV advertisers. Yes, it is obviously a ridiculous idea; the irony of the whole situation is just funny.

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

$25/cpm ain't happenin any more unless you don't even sell 10% of a large ad space like adcritic's. Most likely, they weren't able to get anything over $5/cpm recently. In fact, these days, it's tough to get any ad that isn't a popup to pay $5/cpm (try $2-3 cpm for banner ads).

Until ad prices rebound and banner ads actually improve in quality (These HAVE to be directly related... most banner ads these days majorly SUCK), many ad-supported sites are going to have to find supplemental incomes to continue making profits or end up the way of adcritic.

The shakeout is on...

Joel

Re:Sheer Incompetence

[Nebrie]

No, a site like AdCritic plows through $7500 a day like candy. Second, that's $7500 only if you can sell off every single ad they serve. That's not even close to possible.

Sad Confused Shock

[KarmaBlackballed]

I felt AdCritic was one of the benefits of having Broadband. Now it is gone and I'm not sure why. The "why" page just says they did not make $. Okay. Why didn't they make enough money?

There seems to be a missed marketing opportunity here. If their traffic was really so big, you cannot tell me that the vendors whose commercials they displayed could not be approached for some payola. This is more advertising for them. Why wasn't their spiel compelling if they did approach vendors?

When I first found the site I assumed it would eventually create a new marketing avenue where companies focused on creating funny/appealing commercials with the up front intent of hosting it on AdCritic. The strategy there being the better the commercial is, the more eyes you will have looking at it.

Perhaps AdCritic was just a little before its time. Maybe the demographic was not right. Maybe it will be back when everyone's mom and grandma has broadband. Maybe it will be back when folks at companies controlling ad budgets really understand the marketing power of the internet.

Re:Sad Confused Shock

[Anonymous Coward]

You wrote: "you cannot tell me that the vendors whose commercials they displayed could not be approached for some payola"

How about this: "the vendors whose commercials they displayed refused to pay"

Happens in Brick and Mortar Businesses

[gmhowell]

Not uncommon, even in meatspace. You get popular, you expand. In most businesses, income lags behind the service. You give lots of service, but the income doesn't show up for a long time.

Kinda sucks to see them go. Now that I finally have a cable modem at home, I might have wanted to visit more often.

Re:Happens in Brick and Mortar Businesses

[Dynamoo]

Oh man! I just got broadband too and AdCritic was one of the reasons!

Anyway, NTL (my cableco) is looking so financially wobbly it's just not true so I may lose that too.

Life sucks. Oh well, at least I don't live in Afghanistan :)

How to (maybe) get some of the movies.

[ahaning]

Go to Google, type in www.adcritic.com. [ENTER]

Go to the Google Cache link, click it.

In the cached page, right-click and copy a URL that points to a commercial's page.

Go back to Google, paste that link in. [ENTER]

Go to the cached page for that commercial's page.

Some of the movies may still be up.

So sad...

[stressky]

I'm really sad to see them go...was one of the few websites I still visit on a regular basis, but there's no reason why P2P filesharing or a binary newsgroup can't fill the gap created.

Give them a prize...

[Kletus Cassidy]

A dotcomm that was dumb enough to get into the high bandwidth consuming game of distributing video streams with revenue coming from banner ads and the like when all around them it has been shown that sites can't even afford to pay for the bandwidth costs of just serving some dynamic HTML doesn't deserve pity but instead a Darwin Award

That's where I got the Linux .avi

[nicarley]

That's a sad thing-they actually had a pretty cool website & offered an entertainment website. That's where I downloaded IBM's 100% Linux commercial.. (for those of you who haven't seen that--its worth downloading if you can find it..Or let me know And I'll email it!)

Re:That's where I got the Linux .avi

[Anonymous Coward]

If thats the one where the guy thinks his mainframe was stolen, I got it from the IBM site, and it was really funny. Although it was a few months a go, I would bet its still there, good luck finding it though their site seems to me one of the more convoluted sites out there.

Problems from the start

[clark625]

They were doomed from the begining. I mean, people go to their site _only_ to view and laugh over, of all things, advertisements. How in the heck do you sell quality ad space on there? Maybe the Amazon.com solution would have worked better for them:

People who liked this ad also found these ads enjoyable:

The new Pepsi Commercial "Do-dad"

The new "Wazzup" Commercial

I just don't see them really making money unless the advertisers paid to be listed on the site.

When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[Kozz]

This will get modded as a troll, I'm sure, but I think this is a question worth asking: When might Slashdot fall?

It seems that the biggest and baddest of companies have a difficult time paying the bandwidth bills when they become popular.

Do you think the economy will turn around in time to save Slashdot from a similar fate?

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[Anonymous Coward]

This will get modded as a troll, I'm sure

It would, except you used the reverse psychology trick that seems to fool the moderators every time. I fully expect to be moderated too hell for pointing this out.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[MisterBlister]

I predict Slashdot will eat itself.

Urm, what I mean by that is that VA (Not Linux) Systems or whatever they are called this week will force more and more changes (ala the OSDN bar) on Slashdot. As time wears on and they get more and more desperate they will force larger, more unfriendly, less-able-to-be-removed features. The users will eventually get sick of it and go elsewhere.

The other alternative that could happen is Slashdot could try a for-pay subscription service and realize nobody is willing to pay for badly written regurgitated stories (that just point us to other websites anyway), trolls, and unsubstantiated Microsoft bashing.

It would be nice if one of the Slashdot editors answered this question, but I won't hold my breath....What happens when VA up and dies one day? Do the rights to publish Slashdot revert back to Taco as an individual? Do they fall into limbo?

Last troll out, turn off the lights.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[daviddennis]

Doubtful. The thing saving Slashdot is that it has a clear, identifiable audience that spends big bucks on stuff. The audience also includes many people who are heavily in demand, even in this economy. So you get lots of employment ads, and lots of gadget, hosting and Linux server ads, and that should be enough to let them pull through.

Bandwidth is probably their greatest expense, but it's almost pure text and thus not enormous. Granted, it's a lot of pure text, but one 30 second video is bigger than any Slashdot story will ever get to be.

Finally, you have something like five people running the site. I know Rob makes $90k a year, and everyone else probably makes correspondingly less. So it just doesn't take that much to keep it up and running, compared to (say) Salon, who has maybe 25-50 professional writers to feed.

D

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[smack_attack]

such irony.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[skoda]

The thing saving Slashdot is that it has a clear, identifiable audience that spends big bucks on stuff.

Yeah, all these Napster-using, MP3-ripping, RIAA/MPAA-boycotting, free-software-advocating, anti-patent/copyright-shouting, DirecTV-pirating, web-ad-busting, "Information wants to be free!"-sloganeering people sure sound like a big-spending group.

(Sadly, I don't know if I'm sarcastic or dead-serious.)

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[gnovos]

I think /.'s saving grace will be that if the money ever DOES run out, the readers will keep it alive. I know there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people here on /. who would be willing to host this site. If it were done in a round-robin style of hosting, every geek in the country could get a week of hosting slashdot to notch his belt. It could easily become a rite of passage for the entire community.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, forgot the caveat. Mentioning VA Whatever's precarious financial situation will get you bitchslapped by the editorial staff. Job security through obscurity.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[plover]

Granted, it's a lot of pure text, but one 30 second video is bigger than any Slashdot story will ever get to be.

I dunno, JonKatz stories seem to ramble on forever...

John

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[daviddennis]

Yes, but ...

* You need a pretty cool computer to run all the free software
* You need some really powerful servers (penguincomputing.com, sun.com, ibm.com) and bandwidth (rackspace.com) to serve up all those MP3s.
* You need a portable MP3 player or in-dash player to take 'em on the road.
* People who love technology are suckers for stuff like Sony AIBO Robot Dogs.
* Finally, many of us influence purchasing decisions. For instance, I convinced my work to buy an IBM server to replace our ageing VA Linux (RIP) system, mainly due to IBM's reputation for supporting Linux. That was for relatively serious money, at least compared to the cost of ads on Slashdot.

To give you a little perspective, I was just talking to one of our mid-level accounting staff, a very nice lady. It was almost embarassing comparing my three computers in active use, my top-of-the line digital photography studio, my copy of Final Cut Pro for the Mac and so on with her motley collection of items:

* A DVD player
* A still camera
* A 386 computer

To make matters worse, about half my expensive gear will probably be replaced by new versions sometime next year. Who doesn't need a faster system for Final Cut Pro, after all? I'm a sitting duck for whatever Apple introduces next month.

What about her stuff? I'd be surprised if any of it gets replaced until it breaks.

I suppose this sounds like bragging about my gadgets, but I think it makes a really important point: People who read Slashdot are willing to spend major bucks on technology. Granted, there are some poor people reading Slashdot, but even they would be willing to spend if they had the money. For technical gadgets, Slashdot is marketing nirvana.

(And I'm betting most of us don't bother to avoid the ads, at least when we're on broadband connections).

D

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be cool, when its my turn Slashdot will get slashdotted.

Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)

[rjmcmahon]

Our information society would offer more interesting information if we paid for intangible goods. Limiting purchases to physical goods limits our potential. It also wastes the natural resources which nobody pays for but rather uses solely for exclusion.

I can't believe this...

[weave]

Why the hell weren't advertisers paying out the wazoo to be on adcritic? Here's a place where people actually go voluntarily and watch ads. No attempts to push it down their throats. What a great way to get your message out. Imagine that, people WANT to see your ads. They have hard solid numbers of who is watching the ad versus some black magic neilsen crap where most people have switched channels or doing a system dump.

(They *could* get a better name however. It just sounds so, er, critical...)

AdCritic Business Plan

[MisterBlister]

1) Build free website consisting of many multiple-megabyte video files sure to cost us thousands of dollars in bandwidth charges per month. 2) ... 3) Profit!

My suggestions

[devphil]

If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it?

If I said, "Use less bandwidth," would you call me an asshole?

How about, "design ads that don't suck up the bandwidth that you're using the ads to pay for" instead?

The early AdCritic site was simple and straightforward. One banner ad, medium graphics. The usual "best viewed with" collection of tiny icons. It loaded fast and quickly.

A month ago I went there for the first time in a long time, trying to find the Clinton "Last Days" movie. I was on a friend's computer, with no filters and all the graphics turned on. Five minutes later it was still retrieving streaming animated banner ads for all over the page, X10 popup and popunder ads were having their gory way with my eyeballs, and the actual text of the page wasn't done loading yet because all the high-bandwidth advertisments hadn't finished hoarding the network yet.

I gave up and got my Clinton video somewhere else.

Re:My suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd lean more to calling you clueless. The ads almost all came from external servers that the site doesn't have to foot the bandwidth bill for. Besides, even if the ads did come from their server, and their were 10 times as many of them, it still wouldn't be as much bandwidth as sending the video would require.

Re:My suggestions

[Jburkholder]

>because all the high-bandwidth advertisments hadn't finished hoarding the network yet

Aren't the ads served from elsewhere, though? I would expect that the guy running the site doesn't have to worry about the bandwidth consumed by the ads.

Adcritic's problem seems to have been his own content. Serving video in exchange for banner impressions wasn't a sustainable business model given the popularity of his site versus the shrinking web advertising revenue, I guessing.

Re:My suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

It loaded fast and quickly.

That is patently absurd. How could anyone design a web site that is both fast and quick? It's impossible I say.

Re:My suggestions

[Cloud 9]

Aren't the ads served from elsewhere, though? I would expect that the guy running the site doesn't have to worry about the bandwidth consumed by the ads.

You're right, the ads usually are hosted by another provider, but the problem arises when the user viewing the page gets so flooded by all the ad banners being downloaded that he/she can't get what he/she wanted in a timely fashion. Personally, if I can't view content in 30 seconds, I give up. Many people are a lot less patient than I am.

Re:My suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but they have to take responsibility for filling the client's pipe.

Re:My suggestions

[Colz Grigor]

Adcritic's content was served up via Akamai.

Maybe Akamai's service is too expensive? I'd recommend that any Akamai stockholders think twice about their investment.

::Colz Grigor

--

Re:My suggestions

[Jburkholder]

well, yes ... but that's a separate problem from the one that made them shut down the site

Re:My suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

Akamai is horribly expensive but they are making enough revenue to pay their absolute costs right now.

I am a .com victim of a proposed competitor of Akamai and we were going to charge about double what akamai was and it was not surprising when we could not get a single customer lol.

Re:My suggestions

[kootch]

do you know this or are you guessing?

if adcritic needed akamai's service but couldn't afford it, maybe it was adcritic's business model, and not akamai's that was to blame.

looking at their company's revenue numbers, it seems that they've been posting incremental gains in their revenue... they're still not profitable, but damn near close and getting better.

think about it. if adcritic wants to be able to serve up thousands of video clips to millions of people, they need to create a business model that can support the overhead of their company. the leading cost to their company WOULD be their bandwidth. If they can't figure out a way to justify the price, then they can't be a sustainable business model. Should they require a company to be charitable so that they can make money? i don't think so. and why should you recommend that any akamai stockholder think twice? yea, their stock hasn't performed well lately, but they've got great clientele that aren't going away.

Re:My suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

they were NOT using AKAMAI for over 12 months.

Re:My suggestions

[Tony.Tang]

I think you're going off a bit too much. After all, most of the bandwidth suckage is probably the video, don't you think?

Also, popunders usually come from somewhere else, which wouldn't have hurt adcritic that much.

So bandwidth's a problem? Post it to slashdot!

[bprotas]

Hey guys, here's an idea: let's take a website that's shutting down because it can't afford bandwidth, and post a link to it on the frontpage of slashdot!!! That will show them what REAL BANDWIDTH USAGE COSTS!!!! MWA HA HA!!!!!!!

DAMNIT!!!!!

[night_flyer]

I didnt even knew this site existed, and now Im looking for the Alice Cooper pitching the Marriot Hotel commercial... any place else to look?

well, i hope they didn't throw it all away

[blisspix]

I hope adcritic has organised to donate their digital archive to the Internet Archive, or a University/Special Library somewhere so that people who need the archives can still use them.

I know quite a few advertising lecturers who would find it an invaluable resource.

Unfortunately, it seems that too often these sorts of projects come and go (Questia, another floundering enterprise) and the information is lost forever.

Or how about getting them to voluntarily pay?

[Galvatron]

Introduce a price per download. Sort of reverse royalties. Mandatory payments only make sense when there is no way to exclude people from the benefits. For example, milk ads benefit all milk producers, so whether, say Berkeley Farms chips in, Berkeley Farms milk will still sell better due to advertising. In the case of ad critic on the other hand, if McDonalds doesn't pay for their ads being downloaded, ad critic will not offer McDonalds ads. Simple enough.

Re:Or how about getting them to voluntarily pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

The tricky part of this idea is establishing a pricing structure that will earn appropriate amounts of $$$ from, say, Coca Cola, while still being affordable for small-time local ad-makers.

Worse, if you require payment to show ads you severely limit your range (and thus your drawing power), not to mention any pretense of unbiased coverage. OTOH, if you host some ads for free, it's hard to justify charging for others.

Levying a charge based on the profit margin of the companies might work...

WTF??

[Stultsinator]

How could a website that shows commercials for a living, and people love going to that site just to watch those commercials, lose money?

Evidently they aren't getting advertising money from the companies whose commercials they show. That would be silly. However, if they are getting that money they must be blowing it all on an obscene amount of liquor and women. Can you imagine a TV channel as popular as adCritic that just showed commercials??

Business 101

[Anonymous Coward]

we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay in business

Doh! You're supposed to make more money with more customers, not loose more money with more customers.

The evil old economy rears its ugly head again!

apple.com/trailers

[foobar104]

(Hope this isn't redundant; I just skimmed the comments at 3 before posting. That's right, baby. I'm bad.)

I visit apple.com/trailers pretty regularly-- at least once a week. Apple uses it to showcase QuickTime technology, and I'm sure there's some arrangement between Apple and the movie studios to get those trailers out there.

I wonder if Apple would be interested in picking up Ad Critic's yoke? I mean, the infrastructure is already there; Apple's got their content for the trailers site akamai'd all to heck, so it's as immune to the Slashdot effect as a site can be. And I'm sure agencies would like to get more eyeballs in front of their ads, especially now when PVRs are just starting to give viewers a viable choice to watching them on tee vee.

(Uh-oh. I mentioned Apple, QuickTime, and advertising all in one post. From the time I click "submit" we'll have about two minutes to reach minimum safe distance.)

Re:apple.com/trailers

[jonknee]

I remember downloading the biggest possible version of the starwars episode I trailer... It was like 20+ megs... it didn't matter that half of the world was downloading as well I got it at excellent speed. I recall that they had millions of downloads of that X an average of 15 megs = around 30 terabytes... now if they don't bust the bank with that the bank's not going to be busted!

Re:apple.com/trailers

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is hardly going bust. A 20MB trailer only costs about two cents in wholesale bandwidth.

That's amounts to a CPM of $20 which is cheap advertising for a $9 movie ticket + tie-in crap, etc. If the trailer had a REALLY bad conversion ratio, and only convinced 3 people in 1000 to spend money to see the movie, they're in the green.

Re:apple.com/trailers

[augustz]

Much as dislike quicktime for various reasons, apple.com/trailers is no small miracle.

However they do it I am impressed, both at the consistent high quality and the bandwidth they must pump out. It has got to be huge.

Bravo. Hope they charge the studios a bit for showing the trailers, if it's on apple.com and I like it I got to it.

Re:apple.com/trailers

[Tide]

No thanks. they've got their own bandwidth concerns.

What about iFilm?

[xZAQx]

I wasn't much of an adcritic.com fan (in fact, I don't think I ever watched a movie from there), however, what about ifilm.com? All they do is streaming movies, and lots of it. They don't have an insane amount of ads, although, they do have enough ;) So I wonder how they are still "afloat?"
Bottom line: I think someone at adcritic was a little too drunk off their 1999 profits to watch the news about the collapse of all the other .com's in time to save their own 455.

Will you distribute my bandwidth?

[Saeger]

we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat!

Too bad. Another victim of their own success; trampled to death by an insane bandwidth bill (judging from their content).

You know what would keep guys like these afloat? When somebody finally comes up with a viable P2P system that acts as a basic "userland akamai" for 'non-profit' fansites. As the audience size grows, the members continue to support the whole (well, at least when it comes to large, static pieces of content), instead of the site being crushed under the weight of its popularity.

Fat chance?

--

Re:Will you distribute my bandwidth?

[Wesley Felter]

I saw one site (I forget the name) using the Red Swoosh P2P CDN.

Re:Will you distribute my bandwidth?

[[wy1d]]

http://www.deviantart.com

R.I.P.

[King Buzzo]

that was some funny shit
like the Mr T one about the lottery, only thing i couldn't find was the billy dee williams colt 45 ad.

This is unfortunate

[Michael_Jarvis]

I'm just grateful that I have my favorite ad of all time archived...that SmartBeep ad where the young woman is on a blind date, and she passes gas in the car while her date walks to the other side. She doesn't realize that there are two other people in the back seat.

send money....

[3-State Bit]

I don't know about you, but I sucked up probably several dozen dollars' worth of bandwidth through my company LAN downloading movie trailers from them. Kinda' sucks that they're just giving up now, not even setting up a subscription-based something or anything -- I don't watch TV but do see movies occasionally, and this is a majro blow to my movie-marketing exposure, which we all know is the main way we choose which movies to watch. If you want to show your support, contribute a dollar or something
here[1] and maybe we can get them to give us /something/.

Maybe if they see a few thousand people show their support with a token gesture, they'll think about scrapping together a subscription-based something...

NOTE: Does anyone knows of a company that has something like Amazon's honor system but without the 15% commission?

[1]http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-pa ge /P32T4TFRI0LWCA

Anyone surprised?

[ge6-oZZ]

I hate to sound like unconcerned, but is anyone really surprised by this news? I'm surprised that they lasted as long as they did.

I honestly thought...

[mblase]

...for a long time, that they were getting paid by the advertisers themselves for hosting their commercials. It seemed a perfect scheme. I was honestly surprised when I learned they weren't (and yet the advertisers weren't protesting; why complain about free advertising which they normally had to pay for?)

If they'd just established a revenue model that way, no doubt they'd still be afloat. Ah well, so goes the market.

what I'd pay for right now

[mjgamble]

CD-R archive of the site. Sell those at cafepress if they'll let 'em. I'd rather shell out $10 for that than wait to download 650MB of .mov files. Have multiple volumes. Have best of. Sell the '01 Superbowl commercials on a CD by themselves. The '00 election commercials. C'mon, it's too damn easy to make money . . .

Re:what I'd pay for right now

[Ratbert42]

Exactly my suggestion. Put VCDs of the Budweiser frogs on eBay.

Somehow I imagine the advertisers would have a problem with that, but they sure didn't have a problem with adcritic losing tons of cash streaming their commercials.

super bowl

[gtdistance]

Does this mean I have to sit through all the football between commercials now, instead of just looking online?

Dammit.

you know..

[linuxbert]

Its kinda ironic, when a company, that Does nothing but show ads has to close due to insufeciant revenue.

Advertisers spend millions on ads to air on tv, and here we have a site, that people go to ON PURPOSE to see ADVERTISEMENTS. un, if thats not marketing i dont know what is, and it can only add to the ad's market effectiveness.

Why were they paying to post others' ads?

[AugstWest]

I mean, what kind of a business model is that?

It seems to me that they should pursue the anti-pay-per-view model, in which the people making the content (the advertising companies) should pay adcritic for each end-user viewing of their ads...

The only irony I see here is in the inanity of the original business model. It amazes me that people are still surprised that it's difficult to run high-bandwidth sites and stay afloat, and this has GOT to be one of the highest-bandwidth sites out there.

Why were they pursuing "taditional" web-ad revenues when their real target should have been Coca Cola, Budwesier, etc....

News alert: The Economy Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked adCritic when it was free. Once they became a pay site I simply stopped going. Not being a site I went to frequently, it just didn't make sense for me to subscribe. It's kinda funny that they claim to have believed in their business model, 'cause they were changing it in the last months.

Also just forget the "our economy sucks" lines in your explanation. Yeah, it kinda does, but your business should react appropriately to the economic times. If it cannot, then it deserves to go under. I'm getting tired of company after company saying "we did nothing wrong, the economy just sucks." Yeah, right.

Truth is your company survived in a wildly speculative time and when the market took a conservative turn your "business model" did not cut the mustard. Funding dried up since the prospect of short-term profits was almost nil, and you had to close shop because your burn rate ate all your cash. At least be honest about it.

[At least they didn't blame it on 09/11.]

Gee I wonder why,

[phoem]

I bought a tivo so I would not have to watch Commercials, why would I then watch them online!

Just Screw Me

[Quinn]

The real reason they shut down is because they found out I can finally view all their Quicktime content with the Crossover plugin. God hates me, yo.

alternatives

[dsaljurator]

Personally, if you want to sift through all the shite commercials and just look at the cool stuff, you might as well just got to the boards screening room ( http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/ ). They seem to have an eye out for cool shit. take the recently posted Playgroup music video. http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/musicvideos /192/

they run mod_perl to boot. oh yeah, and i work there.

Yes. Ask Akamai (they tried), or other CDNs...

[kriegsman]

In order to keep up a snappy site, AdCritic had to deliver a HUGE amout of data. It's not so much that the needed to deliver it at 90 megabits per second all the time to each browser, but rather that each browser was likely to download several megabytes of data over the course of their visit to the site. And basically, moving a megabyte of data from hither to yon costs something.

They tried contracting with Akamai to have them deliver the videos for them but two things went wrong: first, many viewers didn't actually see an accelerated performance, due to cache faults on the Akamai servers. And second, and perhaps more importantly, AdCritic was delivering so much data that they were running up a bill in excess of $50,000 per month.

After several months, AdCritic refused to pay, and Akamai shut them off. They then tried to get another content delivery network (CDN) to carry them "for free" in exchange for promotional consideration, but it just wasn't worth it in the long run.

Without a CDN to power them, their site ran slowly most of the time, and ultimately the math didn't work out:
ad revenue < cost of data delivery = RIP.
I suspect that fundamentally, their business model was flawed from the start, but they had capital to burn, and so they did.

-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, Clearway Technologies (the first CDN company, now owned by Mirror Image Internet)

Irony

[fuzzytech]

A site of gratuitous advertising can't make enough money to stay in business...

Kinda silly that the TV stations can make enough off one of these ads to power a website for a long while...

Hopefully someone will pick this site up, including the staff; what a shitty time to lose your bread n' butter.

Typical Internet Bust

[pgrote]

Let's be honest and call AdCritic what it was ... a place to waste time during the day.

This is really nothing more than a small site, that got popular, found out it couldn't pay the bills with ads and dropped out.

When did they become the archive of television commercials? Does it strike anyone else as odd that archives are typically academic pursuits suported by trusts, grants and donations and not commercial ventures?

And abou the archiving ... did you ever try to watch an older commercial on AdCritic? It was horribly slow and most times you would give up.

Yes, it was a cool idea. I used to send folks URLs to the ads I liked.

Is it a money maker? Nope.

Where they really archiving television commercials? Well, if you call picking out the funniest, most outlandish and humor filled then yes.

Actually they do mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not think so, but advertisers have to pay royalties on the music that they use. In many cases, their contracts only cover the scheduled broadcasts of the commercial. By allowing the commercial to be viewed outside of this, the advertiser faces a legal and financial nightmare. The advertiser would actually have to pay every time you watched the ad.

Lack of business acument.

[Taco Cowboy]

What happens to AdCritic is not legal problem, but rather, the lack of business acument.

Look, advertisement is advertisement. Whether or not it's on the US teevee or British tube, it's still advertisement.

The problem of AdCritic is that it's too US centric, and when the US economy took a Southbound train, the entire operation went south with it.

If AdCritic wasn't focusing 100% of its operation on the US, there are still some other (profitable) things for it to report / critique, elsewhere in the world.

Believe me, I am an American, staying in a Gawd Awful Moslem country, where the ads are really, _really_ lousy. What is needed here is someone to critic these lousy ads, and AdCritics could have made a ton of mullah by doing it.

And I believe there are other places in the world equally needing the services of AdCritic.

China, for instant, has a BOOMING economy. And with 1.3 BILLION consumer population there, the payoff is huge.

Unfortunately, the folks of AdCritic never has the sight of the world beyond the border of United States.

So they die.

Re:Lack of business acument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well as adcritic stated, the problem was not a problem of getting people to look at the ads but in getting the revenue. I don't believe that they were charging to have the ads put up on the site so where does that leave the revenue stream, well ads.

hmmm... selling advertisement space on a site that has on demand broadcasting of ads. There must be something wrong with that though hahaha.

Re:Lack of business acument.

[clmensch]

Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think you mean business "acumen", not "acument".

I wish pop-up advertising would go this way.

[Mustang Matt]

Too bad companies don't start to release notices that pop-up advertising is too expensive to be worthwhile. That would make my day!

Too successfull

[kryptik_79]

"The short answer: we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat!"

Is there such a thing as this in the advertising world? If they couldn't afford the bandwidth, why not just add a registration page. Make people register to see the ads, then include in the registration a survey sponsored by a paying advertiser to cultivate demographics data...

This is what you do when you are successfull, not being able to handle the implications of being successfull is to me a failure.

This ideology however goes against the beliefs of many of the viewers here. We don't want to give anyone our personal information, especially not to see advertisements! That is exactly why this model would work, only the people prepared to be an asset to the advertisers would view the content. Limiting bandwidth while increasingly targeting the market.

But hey, this is for advertisers, people actually interested in making money, not our wonderfull .coms.

Well.

[shymog]

It's sad to see Adcritic shutting down. It seems many sites are getting too big, too fast to survive todays world. What's even worse is that some decent sites, like Adcritic are going down. I'm actually disappointed with AC's folding, unlike with the insta-folding of stupid sites like Fuali.com.

Final Days

[peacefinder]

Drat! Now where will I show my new short film "AdCritic: The Final Days" ??!?

Duh

[Thorin_]

Not even looking at the page I can guess why they are no more. They tried to stream gigs of adds for free. Bandwidth costs money and the banner add market wasn't going to make them enough.

Logical...

[tyllwin]

The advertisers pay good money to have the ads put on TV, where there's no real way to show a direct correlation between the number of viewers and purchases.

But they *won't* pay adcritic because everyone knows that on the web, only click-throughs matter, the number of people who merely see it (just as they do on TV, or print) isn't a reason to consider the ad effective.

What am I missing here?

TiVo should sponser them!

[MDMurphy]

I'm another one who's disappointed, TiVo and AdCritic were a killer combination. Since everything I watch on TV is via my TiVo, I rarely see commercials.
Occaisionally someone would say "Hey see the new ***** commercial with the Jack Russell Terrier?"? My answer would be no, but I'd go to AdCritic to check it out.

Would be good PR, good complement to TiVo. No, we don't want to eliminate all commercials, we provide the on the web site. No, your television watching isn't interrupted by commercials, but you can view them, at your leisure later!

Hmm.... must forward idea to TiVo...

adcritic shuts down

[Anonymous Coward]

Adcritic may be gone, but www.adreview.com and www.adforum.com are still around.

Marketing's Dream Come true?

[Warthog9]

Let me ask this, if there was a way to rate an add (I.E. how many times it was viewed) wouldn't this be a WONDERFUL way to figure out how to effectivley track and develope ads that would sell a product? I mean honestly this was an ideal situation for researching that type of phenominon, WHICH ad's do people like? and it's a known phenomenon that if you like an ad you are more likely to like the product (and vice versa). I would have thought the advertising adgencies would have helped out with this site just for the population / viewing data ALONE! But obviously this is not true, but if they won't fund something like this how WOULD you fund it, subscriptions? I honestly don't think I would min being charged on a per-download basis of an ad but... then again ::shrugs::

An idea

[Kallahar]

Why not allow a certain amount of free hits per day (or free bytes). Beyond that, people would have to pay to get in (in the form of micro, or monthly, or collective (buy for everyone)) sort of payments. That would allow you to cap your prices, and recoup the money it costs to serve more people. My site gets 10 gigs/month for $26, plus $10/gig over that. If each file is 100k, that's 10,000 people that could be served for every $10 payment. Fortunately, the only time I went over 10 gigs was when I got slashdotted and hit 10 gigs 26 hours later :)

Travis

fuckedcompany.com

[mrpotato]

Peter Beckman (ex]Founder of AdCritic.com) posted himself that news over FuckedCompany.com: see it and the following discussion here.

Badwidth is a bitch, even for small sites

[jagripino]

Today I saw that happen to a small Brazilian classic gaming site (www.atari.com.br), the website owner is a friend, he had a 2GB download per month account, and since he was serving a somewhat heavy content (.bin files for Atari games) he had no option but to run a script that stops serving the content as soon as the limit is over.

The bottom line is: he got too succesful too fast...

Up until now he could maintain the site with small ads, but there is no way he can go to the $75/month rate for more bandwidth with that.

What may have happened is: in the old internet days, when ads were actually valuable, the ISPs got used to (and thus created a pricey structure for) serving sites with large bandwidth. The ad model has "failed" (not: it was being charged on astronomical rates due to a misconception) and the ISPs still have to adjust to the "new" internet.

Will trade

[antonsthlm]

suck-up reviews of anything for bandwidth.

Here is a test

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787blah vshvdxi 9j9787
blah again

OT: Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?

[ecd]

this is something my clients (and, however unfortunately) my fellow developers have failed to grasp of late. yes, there is demand for a lot of information, and yes, it should look pretty, but that doesn't mean using seventeen tables for your page layout. you've tapped into a vein here that is worth exploring, because the message is so similar to the web standards project's hiatus claim: the problem no longer lies with the browsers (or in this case, the bandwidth and access providers) but the developers who cling to out-of-date methods to create sites.

this is the next step in thinning the herd, i guess, and improving by virtue of smallest and fastest becomes biggest and best.

imho.

ecd.
"Who puts gum on a roof??" - the tick

We can't forget our public past, should they?

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Advertising is meant to be seen, seen, and seen again.

Advertising is the social history of 20th century America- it only makes sense that it be preserved, and especially the embarrassing bits.

Unicasting was never a great idea

[btempleton]

AdCritic was unicasting video, which has always been a strange and not very efficient idea. I never figured the business plans of the other video broadcast sites who wanted to send out free video. Looks like the only folks willing to pay are corporate video producers who have a lot riding on it.

Think about it. On a major TV network, the advertiser pays only one cent for each user who is presented the ad. Why should they pay more than that to a web site like adcritic, even if adcritic did try to charge the advertisers?

Indeed, why pay more than a cent to deliver a low-res version of the ad with a long wait? Well, perhaps to a more receptive viewer, since some chunk of those TV viewers are in the bathroom or fast forwarding, but still why pay more than a couple of cents?

And you can't deliver megabyte files for a penny, not that effectively. The internet is great but it's not (without multicast) for broadcasting. Broadcast TV is many orders of magnitude more efficient at getting data out to a lot of viewers if that data is video.

Plus on TV you watch the ad and you get a free program with it to boot.

Online radio faces the same problem, though the bandwidth need is not as crazy. But still, regular broadcast is orders of magnitude more efficient.

Re:Unicasting was never a great idea

[MikeBabcock]

Multicasting video assumes that all your viewers want the same piece of the video at the same time. This is true for video teleconferencing or live events but almost never true of something like adcritic.

that is an idea thats time has come

[Archfeld]

P2P web-sharing. Did I not read somthing about IBM developing an application to support this ?
With the proliferation of broadband cable and dsl pipes I'd know I be happy to host small bits. If someone could apply a fasttrack like mechansim to locate the copy nearest to you....

Maybe they just couldn't run a spell checker

[g8orade]

besieging beseiging whatever

good

[Anonymous Coward]

next time use mpeg-1. ad critic dieing is
wonderful. such a useless site. god damn
that stupid quicktime.

I'd pay for a DVD/DVD-ROM archive of adcritic

[Nonesuch]

mjgamble writes:

CD-R archive of the site.

CD-R? Nowhere near enough capacity!

I'd pay for a DVD of the entire adcritic site.

Make it region-free and unencrypted, with access to the editorial content of the site via DVD-ROM.

Pressing disks is probably still cheaper than their bandwidth costs had been :-)

FuckedCompany

[Nonesuch]

They made the Fucked Company Hall of Fame, and the comments are a lot funnier than the ones showing up on Slashdot.

Dear Pud:
We're fucked. Damn.
Peter Beckman
[ex]Founder of AdCritic.com

Dear Peter:
Fuck you! Your site rocked. Why didn't you just make it subscription-only after you had the audience? Your "slow-bandwith-unless-you-pay" shit was dumb. Subscription-only might not have worked, but why didn't you try? Woulda cut your bandwith-bill down, and coulda made a couple of bucks.
Pud

When: 12/18/2001
Company: AdCritic.com
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 200

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Well no surprise

[/dev/trash]

They showed ads. So how do you pay for a site with all ads? Make a deal with the ad creators? Ask viewers to pay, which I think would violate the fair use part of the law they were using to defend archiving the ads.

What is your price of bandwidth?

[kengreenebaum]

Just what do folk pay for bandwidth? I pay my ISP, Northwest Link, $25 for service including the 1st Gig of bandwidth then $10/Gig there after(which I consider expensive)...

Re:What is your price of bandwidth?

[dvlabs]

Adcritic was paying $2/GB, which we all hoped would be low enough to make their model work. Unfortunately they just couldn't get the revenues going in time to manage the debts they accumulated from their previous provider, who charged them $10/gig. Fortunately for the future of video on the net, bandwidth prices continue to drop!

WTF?

[WickedClean]

What a bunch of crap! He blames their failure on their popularity? The small print is just a bunch of business-jargon. Well...at least he didn't blame it on the 9/11 attacks.

The inside scoop from DVLABS

[dvlabs]

After a year of hosting Adcritic, DVLABS sadly had to ask Adcritic to go offline. More on the story from our perspective can be seen at http://www.dvlabs.com/adcritic.

Overall, our relationship with Adcritic has been a very successful partnership and we have been proud to distribute their content. We wish the founders the best and hope Adcritic finds a way to re-emerge a stronger company.

After reading the numerous posts here and on fuckedcompany.com, it's obvious to us that Adcritic has a lot of loyal fans who would like to see it back online.

Daniel Summer
Founder and Lead Engineer,
www.dvlabs.com

Re:DEAR CMDRTACO

[Anonymous Coward]

Please IP ban this troll. His trolls are overused and have become stale and simply not funny anymore.

thank you

Why is colo bandwidth so expensive?

[swb]

It seems that it's not so much the cost of bandwidth, but the charging for every {giga,mega}byte of bandwidth at colocations in addition to charging for rackspace.

For example, for about $2k per month I can get a MPPP dual T1 internet connection, 3Mbit/sec, and run that link for all the wire will deliver all month long. Even at 80% constant utilization that's 800Gbyte per month.

Most colo schemes seem to want to charge more than this -- at least 30 to 50% more, in fact.

What accounts for that? Presume a typical site has the disk/ram/cpu to deliver enough content to burn through 800Gbyte/month, is A/C, a router port and electricity worth the extra money? Is it the "strain" on hosting center uplinks that a popular site, connected at high bandwidth to the provider's network?

Assuming that high-bandwidth direct connections that colo customers have yields high demands on network uplinks, why not give customers a break and provide rate-limited network links for a substantial savings? Or if you're in the market for running a high bandwidth site, buy connectivity rather than colo space and run it for all its worth.

Re:Why is colo bandwidth so expensive?

[Ioldanach]

For example, for about $2k per month I can get a MPPP dual T1 internet connection, 3Mbit/sec, and run that link for all the wire will deliver all month long. Even at 80% constant utilization that's 800Gbyte per month.

Most colo schemes seem to want to charge more than this -- at least 30 to 50% more, in fact.

Looking at rackspace.com, 800 GB/mo runs $2002.00.(note, that $2002 is the amount you pay in addition to the rest of the package deal, which already included 30GB, so that's $2002/770GB, which is close enough for jazz here) Even if the colo scheme wants to charge 30-50% more, why do you think that is? Do you have redundant agreements with several providers, allowing you to be certain your packets will always get through? Do you have a secure site, extensive backup power plan, onsite staff 24x7 to handle power outages, etc...? This is what you're paying 30-50% for. Colo costs of the hardware and connections include their cost of infrastructure. When you say you can get it for cheaper if you do it without the colo, that's fine. But you also have to add in your own expenses for hosting your server(s) before you can arrive at the real Total Cost of Ownership.

Re:Why is colo bandwidth so expensive?

[swb]

If I'm buying bandwidth from the same provider I'd be buying colo from, I guess I'm getting all the connectivity they have to offer at the colo, just rate limited by my link to them.

I think the physical infrastructure of many colos (remember, we're talking lower end hosting options for high bandwidth sites, not "build an infrastructure for Amazon.com") is way overkill for lower end sites. They need decent ventilation, not industrial refrigeration. They need a solid UPS, not their own 200KW power plants. They need a good lock on the door, not 3' of steel reinforced concrete and biometric id.

10-15% is an acceptable premium for decent AC, good UPS power and reasonable security.

50 Years of Coca Cola Ads

[MathJMendl]

Ok, so this might just be a start, but I think we all can agree that coca cola ads are some of the most memorable over the years. Believe it or not, the Library of Congress has archives of information important to America's cultural history, and at

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/

you can find 50 years of coca cola ads. I especially like the ones with the polar bears.

Re:Sheer Incompetence / Free loader problem

[rjmcmahon]

TV was invented in 1923. It took a long time to develop the business due to its broadcast nature and the free loader problem.

The main mistake for the net rollout seems to have been assuming advertising revenue would support a unicast network. In hindsight it seems obvious the free loader burden should have been avoided.

Now its time to learn from our mistakes and start paying for the resources we all consume. Websites should follow the lead of the porn industry and only allow paying members access to their content. (Credits to those members who actually contribute value may further enhance the site while allowing for community.)

Otherwise we won't have a free market information economy for a long, long time.

We have such things...

[cduffy]

...but they aren't getting use. Consider Swarmcast or MojoNation; both offer similar models. Freenet can also serve the purpose (though its performance can sometimes be poor, that's better than not having the content available at all).

The only problem is that none of these systems has enough (mainstream) content to attract users, or enough users to attract content.

NYTimes article on the situation and economics

[jeffsenter]

Apparently Adcritic had a huge bandwidth bill to pay following a spike in interest with last year's Superbowl and they were never able to pay off this debt. NYTimes article...