Advertising on a Free Wireless Network?

Mischievous0ne asks: "I had an idea yesterday, and I wanted to run it past the Slashdotcommunity. Would you use a honeypot (free wireless access point) that covered a large downtown area (3-4 blocks of restaurants, coffee bars, an iceskating rink, a small park, and general hangout) if you had to have a framed banner ad at the top of every page you visited while on the network? Do advertisers still pay for banner ads? Are banner ads, effective? I live in a college town in Indiana, and I know there are wireless users here, but the campus wireless network is severly limited. I'm also not sure how people would react to the banner ad space in exchange for free access."

Comments

that's not a honeypot

[g4dget]

A honeypot is a machine that looks suspectible to break-in but is monitored. It's used by sys admins and security "experts" to find out what techniques people use to break into machines.

Re:is this a joke?

[alienmole]

"5. profit" was the business plan, based on somehow figuring out what step #4 should be.

Some companies thought it was "4. Spend IPO money and worthless inflated stock on acquiring other companies with loser business plans, and hope beyond all rational expectation that one of them will succeed and save our butts (and stock options)."

As one would expect, "5. go bankrupt" was the result.

Idle speculation

[pete-classic]

1. Prepare for a constant arms race. They will block your ads.

2. You might get some love on local ads, from businesses that normally wouldn't use internet ads. Like a local sub shop or bookstore. Your one advantage will be genuine geotargeting. (Sorry, OSDN.)

3. Figure out some reasonable way to do traffic shaping first or some yahoo will put you out of business by sucking up all your bandwidth. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing but maybe withholding TCP ACKs from abusers as a throttle would help.

4. Let us know how it works out!

-Peter

You can't make money this way

[floppy ears]

Do advertisers still pay for banner ads?

Yes, but ...

• The going rate is less than $1 per 1000 impressions.
• Most advertisers only like to buy from sites that have a lot of inventory. We're talking hundreds of thousands of impressions per month, generally.
• Advertisers want to know about the demographics of the people who will be visiting the site. It would be difficult (although not impossible) to develop this information for a honeypot.

Re:You can't make money this way

[letxa2000]

The going rate is less than $1 per 1000 impressions.

That depends a lot on the audience and the site where you are advertising. For general advertising over a dozen random sites that have nothing to do with what you are advertising, you might be right.

I run a technical website that serves a niche market. Companies selling their products to that niche market are still paying about $10 per 1000. Granted, I have fewer advertisers than 2 years ago, but from what they've told me that was due to a general cut in advertising budget during the recession, not due to a decision to abandon banner ads.

Most advertisers only like to buy from sites that have a lot of inventory. We're talking hundreds of thousands of impressions per month, generally

You are right in that advertisers aren't going to care about some site that gets 10k hits per month. My site does about 350,000 per month and commands the ad revenue mentioned above.

But actually I would say that there is now relatively more interest in smaller sites (less than a million hits per month) than larger sites since the smaller sites generally are more focused on a specific topic. The visitors to those sites are predisposed to be potentially interested in what the advertisers are offering. My website sells ad space directly, none of those "banner exchange" deals. And we've only run ads that were related to our subject matter. You won't see silly "hit the monkey" banner ads on my site.

Our most successful advertiser achieved a 1 out of 25 click-thru rate, which was pretty impressive. Others achieve much less. But everyone that advertises builds brand recognition. It might not lead to a click or a sale today, but that doesn't mean the advertising budget was poorly spent. It is doubtful that for every dollar Pepsi spends on advertising they generated a dollar of new income the next day. But over time it keeps "Pepsi" on everyone's mind.

Yes, a honeypot is a trap.

[alienmole]

A Google search brings up plenty of references, like Honeypots, or What is a honeypot and how is it used?.

What happened here is that the submitter read or heard something about a wireless honeypot being used to trap wardriving/walking etc. activity, and thought that the term just meant a free access point. He's confused.

Local Wireless Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

I am planning on doing the exact same thing in a town near me.

There are several differences between this model, and that of NetZero.

First of all, I plan to get the businesses that are in the cloud to pay a nominal fee for access. So this won't be free. (it is going to be free to users though). The second idea is to charge for LOCAL advertising. I.E. In town. You need to also consider the fact that the increased traffic to the area in the wireless cloud brings value that is worth paying for.

Re:Honeypot??

[Jahf]

It is not implausible that they would force all :80 traffic out through their web proxy and intercept the HTML code and possibly email to insert ads.

In essence, it would be the opposite of alot of client-side proxys that intercept HTML and -remove- ads. I would expect the system to add text and graphics, possibly even Java aps to try and make sure you see them.

Not polite, but hey, it's their network. Not completely enfoceable (since someone will surely write a client-side proxy to remove the ads), but neither is any other form of advertising.

Unless you're in a tech saturated market I don't expect you'll see this for a long time. The guy standing on the corner with a sign is much more effective.

Misuse of terms

[0x0d0a]

A honeypot is certainly not a free wireless access point. Well, a free wireless access point could in *theory* be a honeypot.

Normally, a honeypot is an apparently vunerable system or network that you deliberately leave around to catch the eye of hackers, usually to monitor them or to grab lists of IPs to block.

Re:If its free..

[ElementCDN]

That's just the problem. I used to work support for a couple of the free ISP's. We did not suffer from a lack of users the problem was the advertising market dried up.
Can you imagine how much it cost to give support to users who didn't want to pay for internet access.
My favourite memory is taking a call from an irate customer who threatened to cancel his free account. :-)

Repeat after me...

[catfood]

...the Web is not the Internet. The Internet is not the Web. An IP client is not necessarily a web browser. Etc., etc., etc.

How do you propose to get this to work? You'd have to force port 80 connections to a proxy server, wouldn't you? Oy... some Internet access you got there.

Re:Local ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Localized ads a great idea. Also, consider giving the stores the option of showing specific ads during specific hours of the day. There are cgi scripts that enable you to start and stop specific ads at specific times, and even ones that enable your clients to upload, start, and stop their own campaigns.

I've seen one hugely successful example of a timed, localized ad in the brick-and-mortar world: the Krispy Kreme donut shop "Hot Now" sign. When a fresh batch comes out of the oven, they turn on the neon sign and people head over to the store en masse for warm glazed donuts. Imagine similar ads for the stores in a three-black radius around your wireless access point. "Newsflash: Hot chocolate chips just out of the oven at Sue's Bakery! Get them while they're gooey! Varnick Street between 3rd and 4th Ave." etc.

I suggest that the ads be half-height banners at most. Laptop and handheld screens are smaller, and an intrusive ad may cause enough annoyanceto turn people off, no matter how tempting the offer.

I also suggest that the ad not require people to click to use it. As many posters have said, no one clicks through banner ads anymore. Besides, the advertisers don't want clicks, they want live customers.

Good luck in your endeavor.