Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo News Posts Advertisements as News
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is now putting ad banners as news stories. This is highly misleading and is an awesome way to sell out."
I don't really think Yahoo has been sold in in a few years, but this
is a new level of yucky. No doubt it is a sign of things to come:
the news is the ad. The ad is the news. It's one step worse then the
bizarre advertising/news merge that was amazingly evident when Disney/ABC was doing
with Monsters Inc while Time/Warner/AOL/CNN was hyping Harry Potter.
Oh, in case they change it, basically they have a list of news stories,
and one of them links simply to a page advertising (not surprisingly) X-10. The link isn't marked as an ad -- its simply one of the headlines in
the news list. It's one thing to have more ads... it's another to
simply disguise the ad as actual news. Update The ad was yanked.
For those who missed it, there were a dozen news articles, but one
was an advertisement. It was indistinguishable from the actual news.
Buy a digital camera today!
I noticed today that Yahoo started putting ads up that interrupt you -- i.e. you click a headline and an add page comes up, with a link to the real story -- forcing you to find the link and absorb the ad for a second.
Is this all we're talking about, or is there something more "sinister" going on that I missed?
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
Can someone please describe what the hell this article is talking about?
"And like that
Google is bound to be next. Its the typical result of MBA's getting involved and applying some of that hard earned 'knowledge'.
Am I the only one who didn't see the advertising link in question? I know there's this large banner on the right that says 'ADVERTISEMENT' at the top, but they've had that for months, and you'd have to be a moron to think they're putting it forward as real news...
I scanned through the news articles and while an x10 ad (and boy, why does it have to be x10) popped up underneath the news article, I didn't see any articles merely being links to advertisements. What am I missing here?
Witty quotes suck.
Every paper news source will label Anything over 1 full page as an advertisement, so how can they get away with this. Actually it's even worse than a multipage ad that isn't labeled. It's like having an entry in the Table of Contents that says it's to a featured article, and instead takes you to advertising. How sickening.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I can safely say that Yahoo isn't the first company to do this. Better yet, morning news shows are the worst. Weight loss, hot movies, fashion 'tips'... just thinly disguised product placement.
Dear sirs, it is my sad duty to inform you that journalistic integrity is dead.
Well, check out www.whatreallyhappened.com... there's still *some* left, I think. They're just alarmist, as opposed to corrupt.
I guess this is just the online version of magazines which never give a bad rating in a review if the manufacturer advertises in the same mag. They'll learn to conceal this better over time.
What is the deal here. I can only find a coloum clearly marked Advertising. This has been done by UK sites for a while by the way. I feel sorry for Yahoo as I thought they were quite cool earlier on but now has pretty much nothing but "milk toast" to offer.
Help fight continental drift.
I didn't see any. Can someone toss up a link to an actual ad? (I can't believe what I just asked for)
Press releases have been masquerading as news for a long time. I worked in a small office once where we sent out press releases saying that this person had sold so much insurance or that person had sold so many dollars worth of real estate. They were advertisements, pure and simple. But they were presented in the local paper as a real news story.
The only difference is that in this case the ad is paid for and presented as news instead of being "free" for those places that write their own press releases.
It IS news. Somebody's selling you a product and they want you to but it from them. What could be more newsworthy than that? :)
This space left intentionally blank.
who picks these stories anyway?? they must be really hard up for stories on slashdot these days....
i hate pansy republicans
Using this system also greatly speeds up my web access as I am no longer pulling tons of ads everyday.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
News papers have been doing this for years.
Although, at least the news papers have the decency to print the add in a different font, or put "Advertising Special Feature" on the page somewhere.
-Mike
I can't find the suspect article. They all seem to go to actual news stories. Somebody please show me the conspiracy. I can't believe they pulled it already, since I saw this posting early on.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I've been using My Yahoo for awhile now to get my news, but the corporate bias is pretty evident; stories always seem to have a twinge of flavor in favor of the dollar. Whenever I see 'evil cyberterrorist arrested' I typically hit slashdot to get the REAL story.
The popups Yahoo uses are even getting past my disabled Javascript lately. If I have to deal with headlines as ads on top of bias and popups, well... bye!
Does anybody know of a news portal type site which goes EASY on this sort of thing? Ads where they ought to be rather than ads all over the place, including in the news headlines themselves? Is there an acceptable 'mainstream' news outlet that's not as invasive as this?
Jack: "Hey bob, I just went to yahoo news! WOW!! The news stories are so informative! I never knew I could lose weight by eating and watching tv. I read that I can run a car without oil with this new engine addtive! Did you know that they have a device that can increase your fuel mailage by 20% and it only cost $19.95?"
Bob: "Wow, I should read yahoo news more often!"
The journey is better then the end.
How can anything that has the label "ADVERTISEMENT" (in all caps, to boot) above it be considered 'highly misleading'? It seems pretty clear to me....
Okay, you don't have to like this type of advertisement and there can be thoughts about the 'psudo journalism' feel of it, but as long as it says that it's an add, how is it any different from the "Special Advertisement Section" that shows up periodically in Newsweek, Discover, Sports Illustrated, etc.? Just ignore it and continue reading what you want to read....
-Mark
I went there, and there is a column on the right hand side with the word "Advertisement" at the top. All those links are ads, but it says so right at the top!
/., Bad!
There is also the ubiquitous pop-unders and such.
Come on, this is a really badly reported story!!!
Bad
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
In my opinion, this would be suicide for atleast the news section of YAHOO. Most ads tend to be annoying, some very in your face annoying, when it starts getting to misleading, thats when companies better think of another way to get money, 'cause they are about to loose a lot of customers. I think at times Ads are a necessary evil (hell, look at the top of this page..) but when they get too annoying, or misleading (ie.. yahoo's news articles that turn out to be ads) thats usually when people just stop visiting, well.. atleast thats when I would..
(excuse the spelling errors, spell check on vacation, along with brain :)
I mean, why didn't they think of this sooner?
"..so you see, Sir, we HIDE the ads randomly IN the news. Then when they click on a news headline, it really brings them to an AD!"
"So...... basically we're going to lie?"
"YES!!"
"And what happens to the new story that is replaced by an ad?"
"WHO CARES?!"
"Good lord, Johnson, that's BRILLIANT! I knew I wouldn't regret hiring my ex-wife's cousin."
It would be much trickier of them of course to have the ad links appear randomly, so that they're difficult to duplicate. That would be a pretty difficult thing to prove...
Ñ'
If you pay close attention, you might notice when local news stations runs pre-packaged product news as a story. Companies often send promotional materials packaged as news stories. The most recent one in my memory in LA was a story about a fitness product being sold to gyms which claimed to measure metabolic rates via a breath analysis device. The story, including video clips, was nearly identical across several local news stations.
They're putting ads between letting you read articles and the like. It seems to happen randomly as far as I can tell and they're doing it on http://groups.yahoo.com/ too - that's where I first came across it. It's unpleasant to say the least, but not dishonest.
I don't like trolls and mod against me if you like, but I'd prefer if you'd reply.
Weeellll ... if you say so... but -
All I can see for adverts on there are the irritating click-through adverts they have, and the box on the right with 'advertisement' sneakily added above it with a list of amazingly predictable make-money-fast headlines in pseudo-real-link blue (time zone to time zone, never set your watch again! Apparently).
I can't quite see how it would be possible to stick adverts in this list anyway since they credit the source of each story after the news article's title. Somehow I can't quite imagine clicking on a link
- Brilliant new Internet Camera comes on the Market - X10 (Jan 8, 2002)
Added to which, if they are really doing what this story claims they're pretty darn hypocritical, given that they have stories like Pop-ups begone! How to kill those pesky ads in their database.
Oh, in case they change it, basically they have a list of news stories, and one of them links simply to a page advertising (not surprisingly) X-10. The link isn't marked as an ad -- its simply one of the headlines in the news list. It's one thing to have more ads... it's another to simply disguise the ad as actual news.
So.. which link is it then? Could it be just an error with the page? Or your browser load it funny(i've seen that with my Norton Internet Security ad blocker... makes the ad in slashdot disappear, and puts it in as one of the icons... weird)
Don't think your favorite movie star happens to find a certain brand of beverage or food by chance. Its all bought and sold. I've watched scenes in movies that served no other purpose than to promote a product. Also in magazines, you'll see what looks like the magazine's review of a product to only discover in small letters: advertisment. Not to mention deceptive email headers, like "Re: Something not even related to the product I'm trying to sell". It was just a matter of time until Yahoo sold out like they did. We need to backlash though, otherwise other companies will follow Yahoo's lead.
Like some of the others, I don't see what we're talking about. None of the links went to advertisments.
Are we so quick to condemn a company for, gasp, trying to make money that we're ready to crucify Yahoo for what is probably just a glitch?
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
This isn't new, print publications have been doing this for years and years, they just always have some fine print somewhere saying "paid advertisement". I think it is dumb and misleading to the less intelligent and insulting to the rest of us. But it certainly isn't a new concept.
The article itself is not contaminated (or I'm simply lucky enough to have missed yet another x-10 pop-up). On the right side of the article, under the "advertisement" section, is a list of links that look like they go to stories. When you click...well, you get the picture. Frankly, I'm not really that worried, since it is labeled advertisement, albeit in small type, and the "stories" are pretty obviously advertisements. Marketing guys seem to all talk alike...:) -Pride
they are merely doing in a blatant way what ABC,CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN do. Does anyone think there has been any such think as "news" that wasn't bought and paid for, by some entity, since the advent of mass media? The only real game when reading any piece of news is figuring out WHO paid for its placement; sometimes it is an ideological motivation, sometimes financial, often times both. Yahoo is merely being a bit less slick and blatant than the NY Times or USA Today.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
And this is different how?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Another example of how the pr0n sector of the net is leading the way in creative ways of making money off "free" content?
:)
I imagine someone at Yahoo got busted surfing pr0n during office hours some weeks ago and claimed he was just "researching the business model"
I'd like to believe that when the right woman comes along I'll have the courage to say, "no thanks, I'm married."
We know all we're going to know about Jean-Bihne-Ramsey (sp?), the little girl murdered by her parents who now live in Georgia because the local police in Colorado botched some things. But rest assured, the news syndicate will continue to drag that fucking story back into the spotlight. Because (and I don't really know why) people tune into.
A site I frequent is WorldNetDaily.com, and they have ads for stuff sprinkled all over there front page implying sometimes that they are news items, when really they're just another advertisement for the newest book they're selling on their site. It's definitely not a new scheme, but certainly annoying when done the wrong way. Some of Yahoo's advertisements have gotten really annoying. There's no way to 'block' flash ads in Mozilla yet, and Yahoo keeps throwing up this damn huge Oracle/IBM ad on the my.yahoo.com page I have. Pretty annoying because it makes me unable to see any pertinent info until halfway down the page, and my.yahoo.com is quite important to me for quick snapshots of stock quotes, weather, and world news. :(
I like the BBC and the Independant Media Center.
I have 5 mod points. Anyone want to paypal me some money in exchange for depositing them on comments of their choice?
I don't think the ads are from Yahoo... If you follow the news links, most go to external sites. Some of those external sites have pop-up ads, not yahoo. Simple.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I quit watching TV as a teen because I was tired of the brainwashing. These days if I'm visiting someone who has it on I will watch with them so as to not be a snob. Recently I caught a little bit of Good Morning America. I was amazed by how much of the show is blatant advertising for products. My friend said most other "information" shows on TV are the same way. Every outlet in our culture is being geared towards the Consumerist movement.
So now the "News" sites on the Internet are doing the same thing. It's sad to see the progression of the Internet from a bastion of equal speech to yet another Consumerism-in-overdrive medium.
If slashdot starts redirecting the "Reply" button to ad sites, I'll post all my karma-capped UIDs/passwords on a first-come, first-served basis. The advertisers will win, and so will the trolls.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
No problem here. The supplied link goes to the business section.
Of course, I'm browsing without Javascript. Maybe that makes a difference. Perhaps they're those damn click-through ads, and you need Javascript to run them?
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
I may be missing something here but what exactly will the headlines say? For example, will I read a headline that says "Horror Author Steven King Dead at " (tounge firmly implanted into cheek), and when I click on it, an ad will pop up?
I guess what I'm getting at is that a person may not find a story interesting enough to read but could take the headline at face value. If the headline said something that sounded really important, it could potentially lead to mass hysteria. Either way, Yahoo just lost a lot of points in my book.
DAMMIT.. forgot the "post anonymous" thingy.. DAMN
lost 2 freakin karma on that one..
so i'll make you waste a mod point!!!!
It's similar to when you visit something like moviepost and there is a link to Teen Sux and Fux and it's really a link to another pr0n portal site.
I think the difference though is two-fold. Movie post stopped doing this. Picpost, it's sister site also started labeling these types of links as another 'Gallery'. Secondly, this is pr0n site and you expect some underhandedness.
Yahoo[!] is a site that people expect some level of professionalism. I've gotten so many of our family members to use Yahoo as a portal because it's still somewhat lightweight, and easy to use. Yahoo also goes back a long way... to when I was 15 ['95-'96?] and I figured they weren't into this sort of thing.
I guess I should point my family members [read: Newbies] to Google for more than searches... I hope their directory gets better.
Get your Unix fortune now!
As far as I can tell, it's complaining about the white box on the right side of the page that says "ADVERTISEMENT" at the top. inside this box are some ads that instead of showing an obnoxious flashing image (like the one at the top of the page i'm typing into right now) show text links like "A floor lamp that spreads sunshine all over a room" that links to a site selling a lamp.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH THIS!
(except that ad-filters have a harder time filtering out text)
I followed the link and the "news" stories are clearly marked as an advertisement. Perhaps not blazingly marked, but the section that they're all in has the word Advertisement over it. It is also on the right side of the page where there is typically a advertisement banner, so if you have decent location memory (read: consistent page design)for ad placements, it should be noticeable as such.
It looks like all of the things in the "Technoscout" section are simply advertisements/product offerings displayed as news-like articles or press releases.
None of the articles in the main sections had any advertisements mixed in with them.
Today a Slashdot reader posted a story about Yahoo! blending advertisements into their news headlines. After Yahoo! was /.'d by other Slashdot readers in response to the post, the other readers came back and posted "wtf are you talking about?" and went back to their daily routines.
Hmm, so this got posted, yet my ask slashdot piece about Tux address labels went ignored. humfph
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Do I smell SPAM!? I bet they got poisoned by spamol. Or maybe is just "Diureja".. and they needed to take a "dUMP".
Next time I find a typo on the Internet, I think I'll be running to /.
BTW http://ads.x10.com/yahoo2/yahoo_bun.htm
http://www.askthevoid.com
Linux linux, linux linux linux linux. Linux linux linux; linux LINUX linux linux. Linux linux linux. Linux linux, linux linux linux.
Also Microsoft is bad.
Not that blurring the line between news and advertising is a good thing, but I do sympathize with Yahoo's position. Money must be tight over there, and every ad they link to as "news" means less time paying writers to rewrite coporate advertising into "pseudo-news"!
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
all the more reason to use the 15 billion other news sites on the internet
Ave Molech Setting
Yahoo isn't putting ad banners as news. One or more of the ads in their advertising banner cycle just happens to look like a column of news links. The one I saw was from 'TechnoScout'.
The ad itself is clearly separated from the legitimate news stories and even has an 'ADVERTISEMENT' caption above it to make it clear that you're looking at an ad.
Hardly newsworthy... I've seen things like this in print media for years now.
The mixing of news features and advertising is nothing new, although I must say the New York Times Tolkein Archives "Sponsored Feature" is a much classier treatment than Yahoo's use of banners as news stories particularly in the way it handled two other movies, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter, which was worse than misleading -- it was ugly and devoid of interesting content.
The nice thing about the NYT Sponsored Feature, by contrast, is that they have a great deal of good content in their archives, and presumably the sponsorship goes into getting the stuff off microfilm and out of file drawers and onto their web pages.
Don't forget that lots of portal companies depend on ad revenues to support their business. Yahoo gives an awful lot away, it stands to reason that they'd try everything they can to get some revenue coming in.
This really isn't anything new, though. I regularly see advertisements (in particular on TechTV) that are done well enough that, if I'm not really paying attention at first, I have to do a double-take and look for the "Paid Advertisement" text to make sure it's not an actual show of some sort. Anything to expose those products to viewers' eyeballs.
Really, though, who's surprised by this given the recent collapse of banner ad revenue on the web?
My sigs always suck.
"The IMAC is just so cool!"
Fuck you Ted Turner and go back to making money on the Afghan 'war'!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Not good news, or well-reported news, or objective news, but I didn't see any full page X10 ads either.
That could have something to do with The Proxomition, though.
--
--
E_NOSIG
Ok, I dutifully followed the link. Here's the list of news stories on the page. Someone tell me which one is the stinker.
News Stories
- Santomero Sees Room for More Rate Cuts - Reuters (Jan 10, 2002)
- Recession wiped out '02 surplus, report says - USA Today (Jan 10, 2002)
- Last-Minute Shoppers Save Retailers - AP (Jan 10, 2002)
- Recession top cause of deficit - USA Today (Jan 10, 2002)
- Debts, recession make bankruptcies surge - Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Jan 10, 2002)
- Rates Remain High. Blame Bush Budget or Big Expectations? - NY Times (registration req'd) (Jan 9, 2002)
- New debt may stall recovery - Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Jan 9, 2002)
- President keeps hammering on his tax-cut proposal - San Francisco Chronicle (Jan 8, 2002)
- Fed Officials Differ on Rebound Timing - Reuters (Jan 8, 2002)
- Recession's grip begins to loosen - Chicago Tribune (Jan 8, 2002)
- Santomero: Data Provide Hope for Recovery - Reuters (Jan 8, 2002)
- Factory Orders Down in November - Reuters (Jan 8, 2002)
- Chain Store Sales Dip in Jan 5 Week - Reuters (Jan 8, 2002)
- Factory Orders Drop 3.3 Percent - AP (Jan 8, 2002)
- Bush Says He May Not Seek Balanced Budget This Year - NY Times (registration req'd) (Jan 8, 2002)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Is it possible he clicked on the link to a New York Times article and saw the registration page? Unless you are registered and logged in it can look like an advertisement for NY Times.
I sent an e-mail to X10 a few days ago when I'd finally had enough. Complaining about the existence of the ads? No -- that's sure to fall in their category of "necessary evil", i.e. marketing dollars, and I knew that if I was to have any chance of not being deleted (vicariously through my e-mail), I'd better not trip down that lane.
No, what I objected to was the content of the ads. Now, call me a prude if you must, but frankly I am turned off by a company who will insist on popping up ads which feature shots of cameras panning over scantily-clad females and lingering on the cleavage whilst accompanied by a tag line reading "see what you're missing" or "who knows what you'll see?". Okay, so I'm an adult -- what about those parents who (rightly or wrongly) wish to be able to have their children surf the Net through a supposedly safe medium such as Yahoo and not be inundated with sleazy ads?
We all know that children aren't safe from the spammers or the mistyped domain names that have been pounced upon by the porn people; but they're up-front (yes, ha-ha, no pun intended) about their intentions. X10, on the other hand, is just being tacky, and overloading at least this particular consumer with their tackiness.
By the way, I also pointed out to them that, for what it was worth, I am probably in one of their prized target demographics -- early 30s and technically astute with a reasonable amount of disposable cash.
No reply from X10 customer service so far. There's a surprise.
Who is actually buying these X-10 cameras? This company must have an obscene amount of money for advertising?
The news article says last updated at 2:05 PM, this was posted at 2:54 PM. /. story is obviously incorrect now... at 3:00 EST... So does this mean that it was a goof on Yahoo's part? Does that mean that /. needs to appologize for criticizing Yahoo for selling out?
This
I would just love to know what all is going on with this... a mistake (or two) were made.The mistake could have been somebody not checking up on the story before posting it, the webmaster on yahoo making a mistake, or us for believing it that Yahoo is above this and that they covered their tracks when they were caught.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
This doesn't suprise me one bit. At the risk of repeating the tired old mantra, concentration of big media will lead to lapses in journalistic integrity driven by the bottom line. I noticed the following recently: MSNBC did a piece last week about how well the X-box was selling (depite the fact that the PS2 out sold it 2:1 during the holiday season). Disclaimer: I have a PS2. The piece was done by a reporter who gave his two sons (14 and 17 I think) a X-box and see if they liked it. Suprise: they did. Thumbs up for the X-box. No disclaimer at the end of the story that Microsoft owns X% of MSNBC. You have to be a smart cookie today to see through the bullsh*t.
My 2 cents.
Slashdot sinks to a new low in the sinking-to-a-new-low dept. by failing to check the validity of a story. Again! MPEG at 11.
1. Click on link...
2. Refresh page until right side banner shows Techno Scout with links below it...
You may notice a single word disclaimer above the banner that says, "Advertisement"
A reasonable person should easily be able to tell the difference...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
In an insidious trend, Yahoo and Slashdot began leveraging what is commonly known as the "Slashdot Effect" to generate revenue-producing pageviews on the popular directory service. An anonymous source, who we will call Cmdr Tapas commented; "It's really very easy - we post an inflammatory article about Yahoo on our service, our readers flock over there with torches and pitchforks, and Yahoo pockets the pageviews. Then I get a fat check sent to my home a month later."
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
My girlfriend used to work in the advertising department of a reasonably big website.
They went out of their way to make their advertising and their news blend together to the point that it was tough to tell one from the other. Little advertising snippets complete with links would be written up as though they were headlines on the news page. When you clicked on the links, you either went through to the manufacturer, or you went to some rah-rah fluff an internal copy writer had sketched up.
I was originally going to mention the site she worked at, but by the end of this post, I thought better. Never makes sense to burn any bridges...
:-)
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
I can see it now - "DoubleClick - now we're a NEWS company".
Under 'doze, can't you just nuke the DLL? Or make it "prompt/unknown" for the relevant MIME-type? (I did both years ago under Nutscrape and never missed anything.)
Are we sure they're really doing this? At least on the page I got when I clicked the link, I didn't see any such thing. Perhaps it was a *gasp* minor error or mistake. Like that never happens here at Slashdot... ;-P
Even though I did not see anything unusual at Yahoo. This sounds exactly like the ads in every computer magazine I subscribe to. There are multi page articles that look like news stories except in small print at the top of the page it says "Special advertising supplement" or other such crap.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
AOL seems to have a clear policy against this at this page but since I don't "do" AOL I couldn't swear to it. Yahoo appears to have no such restrictions.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The only Ad links I see are on the right side of the page in an ad shaped box under text that clearly says ADVERTISEMENT.
It think it's slimy of the advertiser, but I wouldn't blame Yahoo for it. I got caught by it once before, but since then mentally block it out.
If we are talking about the skyscraper ad along the side with the "fake news", it's marked ADVERTISMENT right on top! It's the same concept as those "Windows Error : Click to speed up your downloads!" ads from a few years back... I sincerely doubt anyone but the bottom 1% of society will think it's real news links- especially given the disclaimer.
/. for this to be posted, either that or someone is a little over-sensitive... Or there is some ad I can't find on the site.
Must be a slow day at
Or does it not appear (at least to me) that the banner ad itself has been slashdotted. I can see the article just fine... but the banner just times out.
I wish this would happen more often.
Ok well now what is the big deal, you ask? By denying http connections, making STANDARD connect SSL, they deny proxied connections (plus most free as in speech browsers). That means that you can't read Yahoo Mail with the Junkbuster anymore, can't use an anonymizing proxy. So they have basically banned anonymous mail reading and sending ... and all freemail services followed suit. So now anon email has been effectively outlawed (cuz CODE IS LAW), so now only OUTLAWS (not us normal citizens who just care about free speech, but the BAD GUYS) can only send anonymous email.
Pls. mod up if this info was useful to you.
...and with X10, no less. There was a "news" story about the X10 $6 firecracker kit a few years ago, that kept getting suspiciously reposted for a few days.
The following is from the MacQuarie dictionary. I found it quite amusing.
yahoo
noun 1. a rough, coarse or uncouth person. --interjection 2. an exclamation expressing enthusiasm or delight. --phrase 3. yahoo around, to act in a rough, loutish manner. [from Yahoo, one of a race of brutes having the form of human beings and embodying all the degrading passions of humanity, in Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift]
Number three seems to descibe their new business model to a tee.
Well, slashdot has been doing this for quite some time. I'll admit that the majority of the "news stories" on here that are basically advertisements are cooler than your average marketroid stuff.
Moderators, before the slashdot advertising executives/editors moderate this to hell take a good look at the stories posted on any given day. How many of them are advertisements?
Not to mention that the first time I loaded the page, it actually had an X10 ad on it. Mixing up a legitimate news link with an ad link would be a trivial scripting error.
Nothing to see here, folks.
Truthfully, which do you feel is the bigger waste of time??? The approximately two seconds it requires to click on the "back" button of your browser after following the bogus headline link to an advertisement OR the two hours we will spend complaining about this on /. !!!
/.) actively advertise in one manner or another... IMHO, the fact that a "news" site such as Yahoo News was a bit deceptive in presenting said advertisements should be all but expected...
Ultimately, this act of deception does little more than secure the fact that Yahoo News is, has been, and always will be a part of part of "Big Corporate America".
Beyond that point, everyone knows that being bombarded with advertising is a part of surfing the net! Most web sites (including our beloved
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
We can all look foward to articles with the heading "Enlarge Your Penis Now!"
How Are You Gentlemen!?
This is a perfect article for all the tin-foil-hat-wearers and the completely deranged to start yelling "D00d the Man is out to get us! Aiii corporate evil people microsoft crypto Linux BSD Monopoly yammer yammer yammer!"
BULLSHIT. Many people on here, including me, are saying, "WTF? The only 'news' thing on there that's really an advertisement is clearly marked. It's obvious that it's not news."
Look before you leap, people. This is a hairy, evil, and obnoxious TROLL.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
I didn't see an X10 link or any other advertising link on the page I got when I followed the hyperlink from Slashdot article. I looked at a few other Yahoo! News pages and didn't see anything like what this story describes. Perhaps it was an error?
This is why you should not drink the bong water.... ;9
I will bend your mind with my spoon
You (or whoever wrote that) is a very talented writer. That talent is wasted on Slashdot, however. You (or whoever) should develope it, or at least use it to pass a few english classes and get your ass out of high school and find something to do with your life besides trolling Slashdot.
"than", you illiterate boob.
I wonder how long it will be before these types of redirects are moved onto the server side, with non-obvious redirects, to force you to click onto the ad site.
Because, the worst I see is that damn X10 ad.
Has anyone else seen this? If not, I think that this AC readr should win Troll of the Year for 2002. Way to fool the editors...
If only Victoria's Secret did as much in your face advertising as X10. No one would mind pop up ads then.
Go to the page and hit reload a bunch of times. You'll get a few different banners on the right side, under the word ADVERTISEMENT. Sometime these ads look like story links. People are having trouble seeing what the big deal is because they are probably only getting the picture ads, not the link based ones. Anyway, as it has been adequately pointed out, it IS indicated that they are ads.
After following the link in the above article to the Yahoo! site, I browsed the story posted there and through several of the "News Stories" listed below it and was unable to come across the ad. As a caveat, I browse with JavaScript turn off, since there are too many web sites out there that misuse it.
If we look at the source to the news page, you'll notice that the X-10 ad is appended to references and there's probably some scripting that refreshes and reloads to get them to pop up every now and again as you click on various stories.
As I go through each of the links to the other stories, it doesn't look to me that Yahoo! has done anything sinister since many of them lead off-site. I'm guessing that it's just a scripting trick and if you don't want the stupid ads, just turn off JavaScript. *shrug*
jeez--talk about paranoia.
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I was searching for information via www.hotbot.com, and in my search I put -sex -porn, which filtered the sexual adult content BUT the ad system the hotbot used still displayed ads for adult content that could easily be called "lude". I sent them an email with a nice complaint basically saying that there advertising for thing some explicitly doesn't want to see, and they should probably display something else.
I ran the same search everyday, for a week, when it stopped doing that. They never did reply to my eMail. Imagine my surprise.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eventually, as companies keep coming up with better and better tricks to fool the technically inclined into looking at something we probably wouldn't buy, its going to turn the general public off. In their eyes, it will be a spamnet, no content, just advertisements.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Really he should check his sources (even when it includes himself) if he wants to be taken seriously in this business.
Anyone see a retraction coming?
Wow! What a great idea! Here are some more sure fire tips off the top of my head relating to advertisment revenue:
Mix up the headlines, so when you click on a legitimate headline, it takes you to some random advertisement site instead, preferably one selling an x10 camera or helping you find your old classmates.
If you want to make even more advertising revenue, try sending the user to 10 or so advertising sites, more sites = more $$$.
Have advertisments that fly around the screen in front of what they are trying to do. They will be impressed by this technical feat.
Use lots of blinking. Nevermind that someone will probably get a seizure and sue you, blinking lights make people want to buy things.
Use really big animations and lots of them so the page will take a long time to load. Many people are impressed by lengthy download times.
I'm sure there are many others.
It sounds like Yahoo is well on their way to tricking users, er, generating more advertisment revenue.
I Heart Sorting Networks
I couldn't find the ads either but one thing that might be happenening is if "on occasion it sticks an ad page between the page and the news page (i.e. click link -> see ad page -> auto-forwarded to news) and you have something turned off like javascript it may not autoforward you to the next page. Just a possibility... dunno though.
thanks for the compliments. but i'm long gone from high school and the two english courses in college i had to take are long gone too...
i do this to take breaks from projects. what would you suggest, afa writing for something worthwhile goes? think it's something i could show to rotten.com or a similar web site?
-txr
This has been the case in news since. . . since forever.
Pretty much any corporate "press release" is really an advertisement. isn't that about 90% of so-called "business news"?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
lately? I'm so tired of the advertising blitz you get when you go to use a search engine these days. Especially the pop ups. Thank goodness for google.
Ultimately these types of advertising tactics will not prevail, as people simply will use something else. And there will always be some new site waiting to take market share away from companies who do this.
I Heart Sorting Networks
LOL
Contrast that to members of the American Society of Magazine Editors who must follow strict guidlines about the inclusion and identification of advertising content (in both paper and online publications). Their ethical standards (Here) include:
Neither links nor other references to special advertising sections, or "advertorials," shall appear in the table of contents, directory of contents, or in any listing of editorial content of an online publication.
and
The layout, design and type face of advertising pages should be distinctly different from the publication's normal layout, design and type faces.
Does anyone know if Yahoo or any other portals have been pressured to accept such codes of ethics?
It seems like the ads you're referring to are appearing all over yahoo, not just in the news section. I noticed them this morning (annoying the hell out of me) while I was playing chess to pass class time. Just because they are ALSO in news does not mean they are meant to be news specifically. They are basically the same old LOSE 20 POUNDS IN 4 DAYS crap, but, since they are in the news section, people are looking at them as news?
Oh, and hasn't anyone ever noticed the EXACT same thing on tv? News segments about the telezapper, aerobic machines, and everything else. These are nothing but infomercials. Since they deal in 'factual' information (or so they claimed) they can still be looked at as news, no matter how much they're paying the tv folks to deceive you. It may have once been contested, but it was ingrained into the news for longer than I've been around. It is common practice, and they aren't going to have a segment on tv about how they're screwing you over and I wouldn't be the newspaper guy to piss them off. Not that they're any less guilty, are they?
If you click on any of the Techno-Scout links (banner of right side of page) it looks like they might be news stories although it does say advertisment at the top. If you click on a link it goes to techno-scout's website which presents their products in a news-story fashion. This is probably what is being referred to. It's not that big a deal.
As someone mentioned, it's the Technoscout ad. How is this differnt from something like health magazines masquerading supplement ads as news? Infomercials can be considered the same thing.
This isn't exactly groundbreaking news here, devious maybe if you're too dumb to be able to distinguish between what is real and what is bullshit.
squid-redir lets you block anything from anywhere, based on the URL. This rule, for instance, blocks all Flash at the Motley Fool:
It substitutes a 1x1 transparent GIF for the Flash. Something similar would work elsewhere...if you want to cut off all Flash from all sites, you can do that:
It works on any system that can run Squid and Perl, and it'll work with any browser (I usually use IE, though I also have Lynx, Konqueror, and iCab available). More info and the block list I'm currently using are available here. Here are the Yahoo-related rules I'm currently using:
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Right click on any image... say ones produced by ads.x10.com -- or maybe us.a1.yimg.com -- or everyone's favorite ads.doubleclick.net... and then you're presented with a nice option to "Block Images From This Server". Thanks Mozilla!
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
I mean... there are sites that advertise nothing BUT X10. Those crappy little cameras must be selling like hotcakes, or they're getting that adspace dirt cheap. Is it just good marketing? I know the product sucks, so they can't be relying on the business of repeat customers. X10 makes some nice products, but that camera isn't one of them. Yet its the only thing they advertise.
Maybe I should get into the business of selling garbage by advertising it via annoying ads. It certainly seems to be working well for X10. Hmmmm.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
60% of Slashdot's 'stories'
I couldn't find a single ad amongst the links. I did get an X10 pop-under, but all the news links were completely legitimate. I'm betting on a script error that threw the ad to the main window instead of a popunder, but that's not my point.
If you can't replicate a situation, it cannot be taken as fact. Since the link in question wasn't included, it's impossible to say what really happened. However, (prefaced with IANAL) this kind of "news" reporting treads dangerous ground, as you're saying something that's potentially defaming a corporation and there's no viable proof. Editors, be more careful next time. I don't want to see this site die in a cyberspace libel suit (or something similar).
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
...and I'm no prude. In fact, the content of the ads doesn't get the least bit of rise out of me in any way; it's way too tame for that.
BUT... I do object to having companies in general resort to using the absolutely most base and crass material in order to sell their product. It's ugly, it doesn't add to anyone's experience, it shows a lack of intelligence on their part, and (perhaps most importantly) they imply that their customers and customers-to-be can't think rationally and make all our purchasing decisions with our genitalia.
So, yes, I do object. They can do much better.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Yahoo is putting up "interstitials" - ads between link and story. So what?
sulli
RTFJ.
A couple years ago, before this golden era of Java Script, they used to have simple GIF ads on teh sides of pages, in particular on ZDNET. Anyhow, the ads featured girls from porn magazines, and did not show anything, but were suggestive. What I objected to was not the suggestive nature of the picture, but the fact that they were using someone else's images, presumably without consent.
Like you, I emailed X-10 and got no response. So, I emailed the VP of marketing at ZDNET at the time. And surprise, a week later the ads no longer featured the stolen images.
On a side note, I bought a camera kit from X-10, a couple years ago. They took a MONTH to ship, and customer service was completely unhelpful. They told me on numberous occasions that my order would ship "in a couple days." Well, screw X-10 to hell.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
I went and poked around in Yahoo's "Full Coverage" section and didn't see ANY ads like he was talking about. Next time you see something like this: TAKE A SCREENSHOT OF IT FIRST !!!!
Has anyone considered that if an ad did appear in the "news" section that maybe it was a simple mistake? It has been known to happen occasionally on the web (especially on Slashdot!). I went to a Yahoo page the other day and saw a call to the database printed on the page. Maybe someone put some code in the wrong spot?
Jesus! Talk about making mountains out of molehills....
A simple browse through the X-10 Website will reveal this page, which details their advertising policies.
They even allow you to run a cookie which will completely disable X-10 Ads. All you have to do is click here and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.
It isn't that hard folks....theres no need to bitch about it, just fix it!
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
I don't see any misleading links. This is news?
Whatever...
Well, I *finally* found it, after refreshing the page several times. Right in that banner ad-shaped box and underneath the text that said "Advertisement". Incidentally, the link was also underneath the box that said "Technoscout" (the online retailer). Yeah, I can see how Yahoo really tried to slip this one past me.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I cannot, otherwise, find any references to this practice.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
In a clearly seperate box, even labeled "Advertisement". Tell me again who's trying to be sneaky or underhanded?
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net doubleclick.net gravitydirect.net
127.0.0.1 www.gravitydirect.net www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com www.x10.com x10.com
.
.
.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I saw this, too, and I thought it was an error someone made. It looks like it's gone now.
Since Rob (cmdrtaco) is making such a big deal about Yahoo advertisements that are incidently clearly marked as advertisements, I wonder what his reaction will be when Slashdot itself begins much more aggressive advertising.
For those who missed it, about two months ago Rob posted an article here explaining that Slashdot was seriously considering running large ads (kinda like CNet, etc) and possibly pop-ups, etc sometime in the first quarter of 2002 (ie. about now) too since standard banner ads aren't getting enough click-throughs.
Oh boy, it's going to be interesting to see the backlash from readers here when the BIG ANNOYING Yahoo like ads showup here on Slashdot - then perhaps Rob's article was just a red herring to test the waters so to speak to test reader reaction to Yahoo like advertising so Slashdot can see how aggressive they can be with their own advertising. Enjoy the final days of relatively ad-free Slashdot...
I had a really long, thought out post typed out. But then slashdot went belly up. Not sure exactly what happened, but for a forum which kicks microsoft in the head each time they fubar, i find it quite ironic that at least once a day i come to find that 1: im not logged in, 2: i can't post anything, and 3: a few posts disappear into a black hole, from which they never return.
Anyways.. to recap my post.. Advertising is not a sin to me - we've had to deal with misleading adverisiments in printed press for a long time. I think the group personality here lends itself to sensationalism way too easy. Me, i'd rather see 5 banner ads on CNN than have to pay for CNN. Its not 1992 anymore, and websites carry a LOT more data than before. The internet has become a part of our economy - not a novelty relegated to just a few fortunate souls in acadamia and dialup ISP patrons browsing websites served on T1's. This is the multimedia internet, and while you or I may or may not like the barrage of images and sounds, i'd be willing to bet Joe America uses it - or else it wouldnt exist. 'Tis the nature of capitalism.
I've posted a proposed end-users bill of rights in my journal. I'd love to hear more thoughts about it. I asked slashdot about it, and, somehow, the entire post was marked as "Rejected" as soon as the submit page came back up. Interesting, eh?
It's probably just a matter of time until slashdot posters are doing the same thing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The "News":
Would you like to regain your youthful vigor?
Workout technology that provides safe, easy-to-change resistance
The gym that clips to your hips...
Space program research creates "smart bed" sleep surface
Unique formulation combats oxygen deficiencies without chemicals
Burn fat at home with an elliptical machine--the no impact health club sensation!
View all New Releases...
I quit reading salon.com after they insisted on displaying flash adds in place of what you expect is the article. If you click "back" when you see the add you will be taken to the article, but I don't like being tricked into viewing something, especially useless adverts.
For that matter, Time Magazine's cover story about the iMac is as gratuitous an example of advertising disguised as news as I've seen lately.
with the whole to err is human afterwards.
Unless one of you can tell me where this devious ad trickery is (assuming you aren't talking about the clearly labeled ad section on the right) I have to assume to a whole lot of you are idiots, including the person who posted the news story to begin with. I sat here and read all these posts about how Yahoo has sold out, and how its common, and all these big social economical comments on the state of news sites and such, but not one post clarifies where this hidden ad is. I have to think that A. No one feels like sharing, or B. Most of the posters here didn't even look at Yahoo before jumping all them. So, is there really something stinky at Yahoo or is this just a bunch of bs over the clearly labeled ad bar?
How did this article make it on Slashdot? Do the powers at be even research the submitted stories?
This is nothing new. Yahoo's related stories links are in fact links to other websites. Those websites, some of them, have pop up ads that show up when you go there. It's not Yahoo's doing.
As for a new story link that didn't show a story, only an ad, I couldn't find one.
~ now you know
Yahoo are losing more and more visits to google and they are getting desperate. Viva la Google!
This is a real stretch.
For anybody still trying to figure out what the heck they are talking about, these are just textual banner ads. These banners are in a BORDERED BOX with a heading above them that says "Advertising".
Some of these banner ads have links in them. So what? They are not intermingled with news stories, nor does Yahoo make any claim that these are news stories.
Here is the text of some of these links:
* Burn fat at home with an elliptical machine -- the no impact health club sensation!
* Subscribe to USA TODAY and get a FREE 3x5 foot American Flag
* Get 50% Off Delivery of The New York Times!
Are you really telling me that you are going to mistake a clearly-identified BANNER AD with text like that for a news story?
Born yesterday, were we?
Yahoo has to pay the bills somehow. I'd rather an HTML-based banner than a flashing GIF, an annoying flash sequence or those X10 ads that litter my desktop...
Nothing to see here people, move along.
Sorry, I assumed you were one of those 15 year old lamer-trolls.
More like somethingawful.com than rotten.com (the former has actual content, the latter just has disgusting pictures). But I really meant that you should write more short fiction, and perhaps try to get it published.
It's possible that I don't know what I am talking about here, but it is clear you are smarter than the average troll.
PS: I noticed the date you chose was April 19, and immediatly thought that Eddie was going to go kill a few dozen people at school. Did you choose it for that reason or just at random?
What, you mean the links in the little box clearly labeled "Advertisement?"
Come on people. Get a grip.
If people are too stupid to not realize that, below the big capital letters spelling the word ADVERTISEMENT is, believe it or not, an advertisement, then tough shit for them.
Does anyone know if Yahoo! has ever been Slashdotted?
I remember a few years back when a "hacker" performed a DOS attack on Yahoo which was moderately successful, but I'd like to know if it's ever been brought down by "innocent" traffic.
~ now you know
I use Google's news headlines to read my news. Each topic has a link to several different sites with the story.
Yup...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Hell. Make a web site about how much slashdot sucks. I don't know of any of those besides this one (although I have not searched exhaustively for them.)
Naturally this is the high ideal, and almost no newspaper can live up to it 100%, but anyway, history shows that sometimes some guidelines can be established and even followed, by and large.
The Web is different from paper media, of course, and different situations require different rules, but to me the it seems like we are repeating one old and well-known problem here, and could learn from the way it was solved in the past. Maybe some well informed slashdotter would care to fill in the details for all of us to learn from?
In Murphy We Turst
A bit off-topic, but I noticed quite a few Slashdot readers were commenting on the X-10 pop-under ads. You can go here and click one of the links to either kill their ads for the next 1,000 days or until the year 2015. Whichever you prefer. I did it months ago and haven't seen an X-10 ad (until I booted into Mac OS X and realized I need to activate that cookie there as well). :)
i want to be published, but since i'm onlone all day and it's a big part of my life in general (working on the internet, not Slashdot) I want to try to get something like a column on a humor site... one where i can do pretty much what i am doing now. i don't care if i get paid.
a reason, but not the columbine things... it worked out nicely it happened to be the date i moved, i just used that because i needed some time inthe future. first thing to pop into my head.
-txr
I work in the online news business and this is nothing new. I'd say most news stories are based on press releases, which in turn are a way for companies to advertise new products and services without actually paying for ad space. And in the slightly-more-insidious zone, there are stories called "advertisals" that are totally advertisements, reported on by the newspaper and looking just like independent reports that are paid for as a form of advertising.
It's been done by the Times, done all the time by the Post, and for many papers is the most lucrative form of advertising. Every hear of a shopper?
What you need to remember here is that newspapers are now, and have been for a while, simply vehicles for the advertisements that make the paper money. The nickle you pay covers most of the $.27 worth of paper you're buying and is just to elevate the paper above the sleazy shoppers and coupon mags in your imagination and justify a higher ad rate. When you lay out a newspaper, you lay the ads out first...content, stories and comics and columns, are just there to fill in the dead space. It's sort of cynical to think about it this way, and it's this sort of business that leads to a reluctance to make waves with articles or opinions, for fear of losing advertisers (and not readership, which isn't as important to the immediate business of the newspaper).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It says, in huge letters at the top, "ADVERTISEMENT".
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Big whoop.
Slashdot's been posting garbage commentary by CmdTaco and Hemos for years and trying to pass it off as news.
Or it just has some logic that says:
if ($FORM{DAY} > 30) {
$CookieLifetime = 30;
} else {
$CookieLifetime = $FORM{DAY};
}
Cross Yahoo! off my list of web sites I'll ever visit.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The conspiracy must be uncovered!
Paul Harvey
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
This is no different from multipage ad inserts that frequently crop up in Newsweek, Time, and a variety of other "news" publications. You'll see several pages near the center of the magazine, organized in the same columnar layout, the same style of headlines and photo captions, and sometimes even the same fonts as the rest of the magazine, but they'll be stories about the Horrors of an Unclean Bowl or the Heartbreak of Psoriasis or the like, instead of real news like Clinton's new three-breasted intern. And in small type, somewhere on each page, will be the word "ADVERTISEMENT," in order to allow the reader to differentiate it from all the "real" news on the rest of the rag's full-color pages.
So this is nothing really new.
Anyway, the text ad thing is also being pushed on Google and on metafilter. I hope they replace banner ads because they load so much faster and don't blink, and they're probably more effective for advertisers because the brain doesn't block them out (most users don't even glance at banner ads) and ad blockers can't block them either.
I don't mind as long as it's clearly marked as an advertisment.
This is nothing new! People have been creating ad graphics that try to masquerade as a legitimate part of a web page for a long time. Whether it be an ad that looks like a windows dialog box, or an ad that looks like news headlines, as budgets get tighter, companies like yahoo have become more cavilier. They are intruding further into the "user-experience" with their advertising.
As if these and the pop-under ads weren't bad enough, there are the "interstitial ads" that Yahoo's been employing for the last month or so on yahoogroups. You can encounter one of these in the wild when browsing the messages section of one of their groups. More times than not, when you click on a message subject to view the message, you'll be sent to a page that has a huge ad in the main content portion of the page. You're forced to look at the ad to find a small text link that will take you through to the actual message. I feel bad for those users that aren't on high bandwidth connection that have to wait for the huge graphic to download. Pure nastiness. Time to fire up the good-ol ad proxy.
Paul Harvey has been doing the same thing for years.
In any event, Yahoo provides some good services - if this keeps them from charging me for them, I don't see how it's much different than TV or print news (which is mostly 'advertorial' anyway).
The New York Times has had those TechnoScout ads for quite awhile. As others have said, the word 'Advertisement' usually tips most people off. I think both the poster and the editor need to get out more and visit some websites every once and while, you might see more of what's going on in the world.
I've got moderation points, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to mod the original post as "-1 Moronic".
Help!
The first time Yahoo popped up an X10 ad, I did the following:
1. search for a different internet portal (unfortunately none were to my liking)
2. search for a popup advertisement blocker
I found one, and DAMN it kicks butt.. www.adsubtract.com. No more popups, banners, background music, etc.
Or if you want to take the "cheap" way.. use the latest nightlies of mozilla! It allows you to disallow Javascript popups. Doesn't block all of the other crap, but definitely useful anyways!
I'll never subject myself to another X10 ad again! woohoo!
. . .but definetely not new.
Magazines and newspapers have adds like these all the time. Every so often I come across an interesting headline, but about three paragraphs I start to wonder. Sure enough, there's a tiny "advertisement" on the bottom of the page.
Some of the slicker ads on tv could pass themselves of as regular tv. Anyone see the adds for blimpie sandwhiches which looked like CNN segments?
Even on radio, at least locally, there are bits that sound like "man at the field" reports, but are in fact paid ads for a car dealer or grocer.
Just my opinion here, but I thought the slashdot crowd was by definition smart enough to know when to call a spade a spade. Geeks and nerds are also supposed to be savy to pop culture, but the crowd here is so sensitive to ads as to be quite incredible. Please get a grip everyone.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Here is the "article" yahoo linked to, although it plainly says "advertisement" right above the link. For those of you unwilling to support the ad, the article appears to be a normal review of the X-10 Camera and gives you information at the bottom to find out how to buy it.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Here's a screen shot of the ad. Notice, it does say "advertisement" above the ad.
screen shot
danec. http://www.carlsoncarlson.com/dane/
and they all led to legitimate news stories
Since Excite (the portal, Excite.com) got bought, their Technology news has had a very similar phenomenon occurring, without the word "Advertisement."
News story on a page with adverts on it. Well every link generally leads to the info you need .. *with* advertisments. It's like saying that Yahoo have started putting ads right at the top of the page just above the news stories - you might think it's the headline!!!!
So, I'm looking at this page on Yahoo and I realised that the only site genuinely posting a link (as a news story) which leads to a page (with adverts) is Slashdot.
Malda's given me the the same ability now with his own journaling system.
even as he creates more and more troll deterrents (the Zoo) he comes closer to being overtaken...
-txr
Newspapers do this all the time.
This is small potatoes compared to the true infiltration of corporate advertising into news through product placement, editorial bias, slanted story selection, etc.
In case you missed the ad on Yahoo, see Here:
ABC News Story.
I believe this ad is displayed with each story. Though, like others, I do not see the deception --- the text 'news stories' are labelled as an advertisement at the time.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
this is the reason why the bbc website is good, no adverts ever, so there's certainly no chance of confusing ads with headlines. BBC News
And no it's not just for the UK, they have plenty news for the rest of the world too, American for example.
You aren't the only one who wants a /. general forum. At other newsgroups I've frequented there have been subject specific and "general community" forums, all to the benefit of the people going to the sight. It allows the offtopic posts like this one to go to the general forum, and gives people a place to keep in touch. It's just a nice thing to have.
Well, any place but here is good, IMO. Somethingawful sounds like a good bet though. It is exactly their kind of humor.
Do any of you synchronize the New York Times with AvantGo? If so, check out the first 1-3 articles. They are usually reviews of shows, product discussions, etc. Call me paranoid, but they always promotes something - even headline stories usually appear only as the second or third article. Coincidence? I don't think so. A fair price for a "free" service? Maybe so, but it's sleezy not to tell the user up front.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
They had a segment about that on the Daily Show. It showed a commercial with BNN, a fake news channel standing for Business News Network, advertising Blimpie stock. It was probably just made up, but they talk about how they try to make you trust them by making th commercial seem like news.
.. too much time on your hands? Or perhaps the morning coffee blurred the word 'ADVERTISEMENT' over the TechnoScout column?
-CraigJames "All I need is a little TLC: Thorazine, Lithium, & Compazine"
Why whine? So they're underhanded. Become underhanded yourself. Build a perlbot that strips the ads from the content and delivers it all locally to your cache folder. A quick and dirty bot takes 20 lines of perl. There's one in the Perl Cookbook. Your bot may not block every ad but it can easily strip 4 out of every 5. Traditionally people were good natured and made their bots comply with the robots.txt files on websites. But those days are over. So stop rocking your rocking chairs and talking about sad times and webmasters not respecting their elders and carrying your packets to the server by hand uphill through 2 foot high drifts of snow and liking it.
Okay, now I've seen everything. An advertiser, in a box labeled ADVERTISEMENT, is using marked up hypertext to get his message across! The horror!
Instead of the Flash ads that alternate with this ad, this sneaky individual is advertising with text and links. It's sneaky for advertisers to entice you with content.
Give me a break Slashdot. Pop-up ads are evil, banner ads are evil, Flash banner ads are evil. HTML is evil?
Personally, I think that exit-pops are wrong and should be illegal. If I choose to leave your site, you shouldn't be allowed to harass me. Pop-unders are questionable, as it sneaks the space under. Popups bother me less.
However, Slashdot is right, someone sending me 500 bytes of HTML is MUCH worse than a 30k Flash ad.
Slashdot, grow the fuck up!
Alex
Ever listened to Paul Harvey? Same thing--seemless blending of news and advertising!
It happens randomly (it's an ad, after all), in the fart^H right column, so here's a screen shot.
That does not appear to be an advertisement, even remotely.
...to see their book,
The Space Merchants coming to life in such interesting ways.
I enjoy "Art in Advertizing". I like commercials that catch my interest, that teach me something, or that are just plain funny.
"Advertizing in Art", is the logical and emotional opposite. Just like Yahoo hiding ads in "news", to subvert the emotional "idea space" that art occupies merely for the purpose of advertizing only makes me angry.
Much like the gun control organizations and mass media news who report each others "editorials" as if they're headlines, building the scam on a foundation of misrepresented opinion.
I still use the term "MokeCoke", decades after reading The Space Merchants. "Oh, don't worry, it's just a harmless alcoloid, and you could break yourself from the habit if you REALLY wanted to..."
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
How dumb do you have to be to not know that at least 25 percent of all 'news' segments/articles are overtly or at least partially written to influence your opinion one way or another.
n ce =0&from=7
n ce =0&from=7
How many planted stories are there to influence the voting public.
Consider the simple case of using 'right wing' to describe conservatives while never ever using 'left wing' to describe liberals.
Consider all of the times one or more news stories of national interst are not covered by any national media?
Didn't that used to be called bias/fabricating public opinion?
Some articles omitted from national news coverage:
Federal budget surples is projected for the next ten years: (not covered how opponents of Bush are falsely stating that there is a deficit)
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1944&seque
Funny how stories unfavorable to conservatives are always national news, but not stories unfavorable to liberals.
Federal reinsurance coverage for terrorist acts:
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=3087&seque
No one is covering wheither or not the government should be in the business of providing aid to victims of terrorism?
Haven't you seen an interstitial ad before?
MSNBC has had them for a long time, and Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com) has had them for a few days. You click on a link, but before going to that page it takes you to an ad page. Then after a few seconds it loads the page you actually want; or else you have to click on a "Continue..." link to get there. They only show up every so often; it's not that the ad was "pulled", it's just that you didn't get it the next time you clicked.
This world-wide-web thing sure is complicated, eh?
I've been seeing these interstitial ads for a few days on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com). I haven't been able to get one to show up on dailynews.yahoo.com in the last few minutes, so I'm assuming they work the same way there.
Let us not forget that in TV's early years, even the high and mighty bastions of Ethical News were not immune to the power of the Almighty Buck.
I refer, in part, to the ash tray with the lit Winston cigarette eternally burning on the front left of Walter Cronkite's desk during his readings of the evening news.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I'm not totally sure that link will work by the time you read this, but right now it appears to me as an ad for Yahoo Essentials or X10 cameras (changes when I refresh). If you click on "Continue to message" you'll get to the page I was actually trying to reach. It only happens about once every half-dozen clicks.
I'm also not totally sure that this is what C.T. was referring to, because I was only able to find an example on groups.yahoo.com, not dailynews.yahoo.com.
(Yeah, my hobby is hacking computer games.)
This was about a year ago. Fox News did a "story" about the Subway Diet, and how Jared lost 200 pounds eating at Subway. This was about a week before the Subway commercials featuring Jared started airing on Fox.
I think that was the day I stopped watching TV news for good.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
That sucks, what next, advertisement as reviews?
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.
hasn't Slashdot been posting some advertisements as news recently? :P
:)
at least yahoo had the advertisement header
was it from the goatse trolls?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
The Dutch railway company is blocking non-IE users. Check it out, pass it on, and send a complaint. Thanks.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
good work, stop wasting your time posting stuff like this here and write a book or something
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
It's 9:15 pm here and I just saw the ad that "was yanked" from the main link earlier. I refreshed a couple of times to get it again, and saw it. Anyone with me here, we need to "yank" the update off (no, that just doesn't sound right, no, I will stop).
Absolutely...it read like the writer was getting blown by an Apple intern or something. ;)
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
I thought that Yahoo! was run by a lab of super-intelligent monkeys.
[insert witty comment here]
At one point the company was changing its name and they kept it secret from the staff until the day before so they could get a free press release in the state's only daily newspaper. If it had leaked out to some of the national dailies then the local one wouldn't have run it.
When the regular marketing twit went on holiday and up-and-coming marketing person doing unpaid work experience got vastly more press releases in the paper than her. This was the beginning of the end for the poor intern -- who was religated to secretary for the almost a year she was a paid staff member.
whats with everyone bashing on yahoo for doing what the porn industry has been doing for years.. I hate it when I'm looking at porn and the next thing I know I'm hit with ads for more porns sites instead of the tasty jpgs the thumbnails lead me to believe I'd encounter..
Could it be they are feeding ads into their redirection system?
All of those rd.yahoo links all go through a redirector (in case you hadn't noticed that they now track everything you click on) which they could also build ads off.
Click a search result and get an ad..
I agree totally. It may be slightly misleading, perhaps even more misleading than one could reasonably justify. But the space to the right is not only fairly clearly labelled as an advertisement, but it's also the same space that ads always appear on Yahoo and many other sites. The only difference here is that the ad doesn't clash horribly with the rest of the site (aside from the nasty unseriffed font). It's very common practice. If you do so little reading of news on the web that you don't realize it, you need to spend some more time hardening yourself to online advertising. It's just a friggin' game at this point; every few months, you've just got to learn to filter out a new kind of ad.
Steven N. Severinghaus
That's not the ad they are talking about it was an X10 link that was taken off soon after. It was mixed in with the real news and not clearly marked.
OMG!!! An advertisement that tries to fit in with it's environment by making it look as if it were part of it!! I have never seen that before!!! I know how to solve the problem and prevent innocent web browsers from clicking on the ad! I will bitch about it to slashdot!
Yahoo does it to increase their click through ratio with the company who is paying for ad space.
Yahoo is as bad as AOL....can you say LAME?
If I want to read the news I usually go to CNN...or USATODAY...
If I want to search...I've been going to Google...
I like Googles simple yet effective fast loading site, w/out all of those damn banner ads, and other advertisments that litter other search engine sites...
Just my 2 cents...
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
at least on stile you get pr0n
CNN has inserted ads disguised as news for ages, mostly advertising for support of Jewish apartheid in Israel.
The other day I was reading a news page at MSN, and when I clicked a link to view a story I was presented with the following:
The news story came up on the screen and was displayed for a few seconds (just long enough for me to get two or three sentences read) and then the entire window faded out and a full-window ad faded in to replace. There was a link in the ad page to take me back to the news story, and there was also a link to comment on the advertisement. I chose the comment link, and told them that it was the most fuck-brained advertising idea that I had ever seen, amongst other unflattering remarks.
The times, they are a changin'.
I have to wonder if anybody else feels this way. When I get "hit" by an ad that's particularly obnoxious, "stealth"-like, or anything of the sort, I make it my business *not* to buy the product. Advertising has its place in society, and I think few would dispute that (Well, few of us greedy capitalists, anyway), but I'd really prefer that it keep its distance. If x10 insists on being that wholly obnoxious with their advertisements--or if I see ANYTHING of the sort passed off as "news"--well, fine 'n dandy, but I'm sure not buying that product.
-D
POKEY!!1!YES!!!
You might also like to read Pokey Bootlegs. In honour (apparently) of the original masterpieces.
http://drachenfels.tees.ac.uk/pokey
Yeah, how much would cost to run an own story on slashdot? Now, I don't mean anything directly commercial like buy this and that, but something interesting you'd really want on slashdot?
/Wef
Many newspapers, especially business oriented ones, in the UK are ENTIRELY paid for ads pretending to be articles.
You get a few genuine news snippets and the rest is just 'this company is great' type news. Everyone knows it and reads them on that basis.
I assume its the same the world over with these papers?
I noticed on the day of the launch of the xbox, CNet had 8 or 10 stories about it. Sure a few seemed realistic, but 10 stories got me thnking about how they decide what to write stories about... hmmm.....
yahoo just wants to be like all the other media news outlets. I really don't see any difference.
Maybe Yahoo has been purchased by the Porno Kings/Queens. They are some similarities...;-)