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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."
Why not? Let's have tons of banners. Why, there'll be a banner in the browser (opera), a banner in the web page, and then your special banner. Sounds fine with me. Try to make it so that the text of web pages flow around the banners too like a lot of keen articles are doing now-adays. Nothing like those intrusive "middle of the page" ads. Make them HUGE too. You never did mention how big they'd be. I suggest at least 600x 600 pixels.
Effective? If ads were effective then everyone who visits slashdot would be using Visual C# and harnessing the power of source forge.
--Don't hate me because I'm an AC
Have multiple sources of income (a la Yahoo!)
This is how Slashdot stay afloat, they accept money in exchange for "Slashvertisements", as announced earlier this year.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Martha Njoki jumped when she heard a thud on the corrugated iron roof of her shack. Seconds later, she was confronted with a familiar sight.
`I heard a bang on the roof, and when I went outside to look, I saw it was a plastic bag full of human waste,' she said, gesturing toward her dwelling in the slums of Nairobi. `You might just be relaxing in your house, then you hear a noise on your roof and someone has thrown a bag of sewage up there,' said Njoki, 27, wrinkling her nose with disgust.
There are only five toilets for the more than 2,000 people living in the slum known as Ghetto - a fetid labyrinth of claustrophobic dirt lanes and streams of stinking effluent.
For most people here, the flying toilets are the only way of answering nature's call: you simply use a plastic bag, then fling it as far out of sight as possible.
Walk into Ghetto, or any one of scores of slum settlements housing two million people in the Kenyan capital, and the scale of the task for one African city alone seems staggering. At almost every turn, a sickly sweet stench of urine wafts from between the huts. Barefoot children play by trenches frothing with scum. The edges are strewn with telltale bags.
`First thing in the morning, the flying toilets are rampant,' said Njoki, as a gaggle of other women in a courtyard nodded in agreement. `Sometimes you are walking down the path and you see human waste, people have just thrown it there.'
Consider that Njoki and her neighbors are just a handful of 2.4 billion people worldwide who lack access to decent sanitation, and the scale seems even more mind-boggling.
In Njoki's neighborhood, the only sign of hope comes not from the government - who consider much of the slums a virtual no-go zone - but from residents determined to help themselves. On the edge of the sea of rusting iron roofs stands the only public toilet around. Four women got together to build the facility three years ago - paying off their investment with the two shillings ($0.02) a time paid by 50 or so visitors each day. On Sundays, when the toilet attendants say many residents decide to treat themselves, the number of users rises to 100."