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Advertising on a Free Wireless Network?

Posted by Cliff on from the anything-to-grab-those-eyeballs dept.

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."

4 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Idle speculation by pete-classic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. You can't make money this way by floppy+ears · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    --

    "If I could live to be several hundred
    I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
  3. Yes, a honeypot is a trap. by alienmole · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  4. Misuse of terms by 0x0d0a · · Score: 5, Informative

    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