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

it all depends on

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:it all depends on

[doublem]

This brings up a good point.

As wireless networks become more and more common, how long will it be before we have a lawsuit involving the content on those networks?

Can't you imagine some litigation happy jerk finding porn on a shared drive and suing for distributing the content?

"We must protect the children! My son say porn on my neighbor's hard drive over the wireless network!"

is this a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

were you entirely asleep during the dot-com boom and meltdown? how does this crapola get on slashdot?

1. give something valuable out for free.
2. (nevermind technical, legal, and other liability issues)
3. (something involving banner ads.)
4. ???
5. profit!

Re:is this a joke?

[Jacer]

i thought it was 5. go bankrupt

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.

Re:is this a joke?

[ergo98]

1. give something valuable out for free.
4. ???
5. profit!

Actually, that's pretty much exactly what network television does, and they're rolling in the dough.

In fact, this is a great idea (if it weren't for the technical problems with it) because it solves the primary problem with internet advertisement: A lack of ability to target advertisements to a paricular group of consumers. In this case because it's a wireless network, you know that they are within a small geographical area, and hence it's a gold mine for stores and businesses in the area.

In any case, while we need to learn from history, history doesn't dictate with certainty: When the first airplane failed to get off the ground, they didn't give up and forget about it. History is full of examples where there are countless failures, followed by success.

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.

Honeypot??

[casio282]

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...

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.

Depends on annoyanced level

[Subcarrier]

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.

Do Banners == Revenue?

[daoine]

Looking at the latest trends, one thing seems to be very clear. Online business models which rely on advertising as their sole source of income generally fail. The sites/portals/whatever you want to call them that succeed tend to do one of three things:

1. Have a parent company which is willing to fund them at a loss to maintain web presence (like NFL.com)
2. Have multiple sources of income (a la Yahoo!)
3. 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.

Local ads?

[tsangc]

What if you spoke to local businesses like a bakery, bookstore, supermarket, etc, and bought location specific ads? You wouldn't need to pay for an online ad brokerage house or use their rates, and you could give geographically targetted ads that people who happen to be surfing while having a coffee might actually be interested in since they're right next door. It's unlikely anyone would be interested in the usual online banner ads, but you never know with something that's right down the street and associated with the area.

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

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

[ergo98]

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.

Re:You can't make money this way

[marick]

* 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!"

Re:You can't make money this way

[Dan Crash]

Hey, you may have just hit on something there. Obviously, the closer you are to the business, the better the banner ad works, but I think this would have some appeal for businesses across town. Your banner ad could even offer directions to the store from the viewer's general location.

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.

Re:honeypot?

[God! Awful]

No. honeypot != free wireless access point

Nah, this'd be great. Setup a honeypot server that offers free wireless web access. Then when someone tries to hack you and you go after them, you're guaranteed to find them within a 3 block radius.

-a

Are banner ads effective?

[jukal]

No.

"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."

Say hello to Junkbuster

[Wee]

Sure, I would use your network. And I'd filter your ads, too, so I didn't have to be distracted by the annoying flashing. (I paid for Opera -- on both Linux and Windows -- so that I could toggle off the "Show animated GIFs" and "Use plugins" options, and not have to see the built-in ads. I don't like flashing things when I'm trying to read.) I'd use your network and I wouldn't see your ads. I don't think the idea is a good one. You make more money papering the parking lots of large malls or putting out door hangers or something than you would through banner ads.

Slow news day?

-B

A better idea...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Step 1) In a major metropolitan area, set up a huge wifi network. Name it "GCN $50/mo 555-1212" where 555-1212 is your phone number and GCN is the name of your ISP.

Step 2) ...

Step 3) Profit!

That's what some folks are doing in Mendocino, and it seems like it'd be a great service. I opened up my laptop in a friends house, and saw I was getting wifi access. I'd have paid them $10 for the weekend, easily.

Subscribe to get rid of the ads, and GPS use?

[Brian Stretch]

Offer paid subscribers the option of turning off the ads. That way, the cheapskate users can't complain too much.

Neat GPS tie-in: click on an ad for a nearby coffee shop, send them your GPS coordinates with your order (paid by credit card or PayPal), and they'll deliver for a fee based on your distance from the shop.

OK, maybe that's a bit too geeky...

Wouldn't Work

[The Raven]

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.

Sure, but...

[Tom7]

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

Maximize Shareholder Value

[the red pen]

It sounds like you have the out of the box thinking to be a next-generation player. You need to skate where the puck is going to be and I have to say, it's going to be harder than nailing Jell-O the the wall.

Above all, you need to maximize synergies to develop a strategic go-forward plan to be first to market in the opportunity space. Focus on synthesizing a world-class, robust, scalable solution using best-of-breed technologies. You need to capture eyeballs if you're going to drive revenue generation; you need to get the public to drink the Kool-Aid.

Develop a leveraged business model and have a fully-realized exit strategy.

Re:Maximize Shareholder Value

[mttlg]

Develop a leveraged business model and have a fully-realized exit strategy.

Whoa there, don't get so far ahead of yourself that you move the goal posts out of the ballpark and lose sight of the big picture. There's a whole knowledge base of lessons learned out there to use for value-added synergy, so there's no need to risk getting left out of the loop by thinking too far outside the box.

The bottom line is this: for your core business, you'll need a results-driven, client-focused game plan if you want to take the fast track to a win-win situation. You must have it in your mindset to push the envelope and be proactive in the pursuit of a total quality 100% solution that goes the extra mile in customer satisfaction. However, even with a best practice center of excellence, you'll still have to play hardball at the end of the day if you want to keep up with the movers and shakers.

I think I'm getting a little off-track here, let's take this offline; I'll touch base with you later to pencil in a time when we can revisit this issue and put this one to bed.

Internet != WWW

[Xtifr]

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.)

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:Repeat after me...

[ryanvm]

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.

Re:What utility software?

[morgajel]

2 questions
1) do you remember alladvantage?
2) where are they now?

people don't give a shit about web banners... however there was one critical factor they forgot-

local ads.

people are way more receptive to hungry howies pizza down the street than than lowermybills.com

if you advertise local stuff, local companies would be willing to pay.
go outside the area tho and you'll shoot yourself in the foot.

don't force advertisements either. show people what they're willing to see.

Re:If its free..

[Xaoswolf]

But those were done on a much larger scope than what is being tried here. The funds generated from the banner ads weren't enough to back the cost of multitude of users. Now a wireless network with fewer users in a local area won't need the same kind of monitary backing. I think that if he gets local people to advertise, and perhaps a few larger corporations to advertise, then there is a rather good chance that it will work.