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
-- He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
TomatoMan
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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?
-- --
http://frobnosticate.com
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
Syberghost
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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 Do you want the minimum wage repealed to fix it?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?
by
MKalus
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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
-- If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
frank_adrian314159
·
· Score: 4, Funny
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...
-- That is all.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
Ed+Avis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
-- --
Ed Avis
ed@membled.com
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
dachshund
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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?
by
pcidevel
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
--
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
by
SilentChris
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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?
by
TWR
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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!
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.
-- --
Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Re:Of All Times...
by
benedict
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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.
--
Ben
"You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Re:a problem waiting to happen
by
ncc74656
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- 20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
How does this figure?
by
KurdtX
·
· Score: 5, Funny
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.
--
Kurdt I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Re:How does this figure?
by
Bearpaw
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
A need for Distributed Content Storage
by
Starship+Trooper
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage
by
foobar104
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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!
"Reason Why..."
by
dghcasp
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Sheer Incompetence
by
Waffle+Iron
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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:a problem waiting to happen
by
jd142
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
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.
-- You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Re:My suggestions
by
Jburkholder
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
>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.
So bandwidth's a problem? Post it to slashdot!
by
bprotas
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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!!!!!!!
Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1)
by
daviddennis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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
apple.com/trailers
by
foobar104
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
(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.)
Will you distribute my bandwidth?
by
Saeger
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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?
--
-- Power to the Peaceful
Re:a problem waiting to happen
by
mr100percent
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They did, numerous companies requested they take down the ads. Either they came to an agreement, or in Apple's case, removed them.
Yes. Ask Akamai (they tried), or other CDNs...
by
kriegsman
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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)
Typical Internet Bust
by
pgrote
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
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
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well, I guess even adcritic couldn't stay alive, no matter how much advertising they got.
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
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
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?
-- http://frobnosticate.com
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.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
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.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
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.
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!
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.
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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!!!!!!!
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
(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.)
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?
--
Power to the Peaceful
They did, numerous companies requested they take down the ads. Either they came to an agreement, or in Apple's case, removed them.
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)
Let's be honest and call AdCritic what it was ... a place to waste time during the day.
... did you ever try to watch an older commercial on AdCritic? It was horribly slow and most times you would give up.
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
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.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.