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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."
Who cares what they think about banners.. They will use it regardless..
what kind of advertisements you put up. For instance, if you were to advertise goatse, I'm sure the neighborhood would object to it. However, advertisements for rummage sales or town meetings might be greeted with arms wide open.
1. give something valuable out for free.
2. (nevermind technical, legal, and other liability issues)
3. (something involving banner ads.)
4. ???
5. profit!
Netzero and other similar companies failed after many strong and repeated attempts to offer the same service, except through dial up. The idea sounds nice except for a couple of problems: no one ever clicks on banner ads (except the great slashdot ads, of course), and people will just find a way to keep the banner ad from displaying on the screen. I would love for your idea to work, but I just don't see that happening, given the past history of free internet access. Today, I don't think there is a single free ISP left (could be mistaken), and this is mostly due to a poor revenue model.
Wait, isn't a "honeypot" a dummy system used to trap malicious crackers? Whatis.com seems to think so too.
Does the word "honeypot" now also mean a "free wireless access point?" Nobody tells me these things...
:wq
If the banner said things "Would you like another coffee?" and the waitress would bring it within a couple of minutes I might even like it.
Otherwise I'd probably just ignore the banner.
If the adverts were too intrusive to ignore I'd stop using the service.
Locally relevant advertising, that's the thing.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
- Have a parent company which is willing to fund them at a loss to maintain web presence (like NFL.com)
- Have multiple sources of income (a la Yahoo!)
- Have such specialized services/content, people are willing to pay for it(like an ISP)
I can't think of a single site/service which is based on advertising alone and is actually *making* money. Banner ads just don't cut it anymore.There would be a lot of work involved-such as proving the ads actually worked, but it would be fun to start such a small enterprise up. Try something like arranging to offer a coupon from a local store on the banner ad itself, and see how many people come in with your coupon to determine the retention and usefulness of the service. Then you could turn it around and use that information to sell more ads to local shopowners.
Calum
"In the early days of online advertising in the mid-1990s, click through for banner ads might have been any where from 5 percent to 6 percent. But Denise Garcia, a media analyst for GarnterG2, a market research firm in Stamford, Conn., says that click through for banners have fallen to roughly two-tenths of a percent. "It's amazing that it's fallen so dramatically," says Garcia."
free wireless (like 802.11b 11MB/sec?, broadband?) would be well received with banners as long as they aren't annoying (popups, etc). static banners would be fine. free banner-based dialup wasn't successful but free wireless is a new idea and would probably be successful at leat in the beginning. try it out and see how it goes!
I really think the people that would use it would be 50/50. For example, I know that I would not. Advertising just bothers me that much, and I would not want to be limited in any way from my browing experience. I am willing to pay to have a decent connection. However, my brother would love to use it. If it's free, then that's $20 a month he can spend on food or a date.
To conquer death, you only have to die
As some poster mentioned, it doesnt seem he is trying to figure out if this would make him rich or support a /corporation/. It sounded as if he was currious as the feasability of funding the bandwidth through adds for at least local places and maybe some larger vendors. Nothing major. Seems to me the biggest problem would be creating a piece of software...cross platform, of course....that would allow for this with no easy run arrounds.....of course since its for a small area...with a relatively close community....you might be able to rely on the honor system....i.e "just dont get arround the banner adds in the software because this is a free not for profit operation for yours and everyone elses benefit kind of thing..so be cool and let the banners be". Which I dont think is an entirely unheard of thing. that said, it might not be too hard to get local shops restaurants to participate now that so many are becoming web/net savy. give them a way to offer up to date specials on the spur of the momment("Till 9pm tonight, one free beer with purchase of Chicken Dinner. At Joe's Chicken Shack!" or "$.50 Kamikazee shots for the next hour @ The Lounge !"). If you get time donated from some of the college geeks for maintenence, and get really lucky some how on a couple of AP's and antenna's....then it seems a few hundred dollars a month is all you would have to generate to cover the bandwidth. Seems like a pretty neat project for a couple of CS students to tackle.
.02
Dunno, just my
Dimes
Banner Ads will not cover the cost of equipment and bandwidth. And even if they do NOW, they won't SOON... this Alertbox article by respected Internet Usability guy Jacob Neilson talks about why web advertising does not work. The article was writtin in 1997, but it has comments at the bottom keeping it up to date.
Banner ads are slowly dying. Basing a long term business model on them is a bad idea.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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.
In this case they would automatically have a tremendously valuable demographic, which is "people in a certain area". Of course your advertisers wouldn't be Coca Cola (well...unless they had a coke machine near where you are...), but rather local restaurants, book stores, geek hangouts, coffee shops, retailers, computer stores, etc.
I'd use this (supposing that my laptop battery worked and my school didn't already have wireless), but:
- I would probably be spending most of my time over ssh, not the web
- I would filter out the banners
- Getting banner sponsors, is really, really hard
Would you use a free wireless access point [...] if you had to have a framed banner ad at the top of every page you visited while on the network?
Sure, as long as you don't mind that I use the access for checking my email, logging in to machines at work or home, apt-get updating my system, chatting/IM'ing with friends and colleagues, playing online games, and other activities that don't involve "visiting" any "pages". (And that's if I'm a nice guy, and don't use junkbuster or mozilla's image-blocking features.)
* 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.
Ok, how about a guarantee of location. I.e. "Hey, you're just 2 blocks from Bob's Coffee Shop. Mention this ad and get 10 cents off a mocha!"
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.
Uh - he'd probably use NAT. Which, unless you need a world-visible IP address, is as good as genuine Internet access.
(my login doesn't work, ID embedded).
My computer security company Melior, Inc. is sponsoring a completely free, high quality (native IP, no NAT, so VPNs work) wireless 802.11b network at a coffeeshop in Dallas (Crossroads Market @ 3930 Cedar Springs Road, see www.meliorinc.com), and it is very popular. I track new machines with Arpwatch, and without any advertisement the sign-on rate for new machines is about 1 per day.
I had hoped to get at least some referrals out of this, but there was absolutely nothing. Based on my experience, I doubt that it would pay to solicit advertisement revenue.
Just my 2c...
Thomas
Thomas J. Ackermann
CEO
Melior, Inc.
Internet Security & Infrastructure Architects
www.meliorinc.com
Melior Inc offers 802.11 infrastructure and security services, including war driving, AirSnort'ing, etc (for pay!) - check www.secure.sh for details if interested.