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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."
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.
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.
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
Yes, but
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
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.
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
May we never see th
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.
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.