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IAB Recommends Larger Web Advertising
Chicane-UK writes "Popups, flash adverts, full screen adverts and all the other methods of internet advertising that make our daily drag through the internet have been deemed not effective enough. The solution, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau is the new Universal Ad Package which comprises a new 'large advert' and three other in page advert templates. Read their press release here. I know I for one am sick of internet advertising of this type - banners were just about right for me." For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats. There's also a story on AdAge.
They fill up 90% of the screen sometimes as it is and they spawn several popups at a time.
;)
As far as I am concerned, Internet adverts are just like magazine adverts. I don't notice those ones either (unlike TV adverts).
Has anyone done a study to compare the various advertising models and their effectiveness?
Ok, now I'll go read the article
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Sure they did come up with smaller ad formats. Ever heard about google?
In other completely suprising news, Democrats recommend higher taxes!
There was a large box below the story.
A question for those of you who have not blocked advertising - Without looking - what was it for?
People learn to ignore these thing pretty quickly. Making them bigger isn't going to help. They need to find new ways to advertise. How do they do this? Here's an idea - Give some reason for the customers to click. Offer prizes. Pay for a promotional story. I'm sure people would have no objection to Slashdot having clearly labelled advertising articles written by the advertisers.
just use mozilla, and you won't have to worry about it ;P
You notice that the IAB site doesn't have so much as one ad on it.... not a single 'punch the monkey', not one 'natural viagra' and not even a faux windows error.
If they expect everyone to use their super obtrusive template, you would think that they would at lease bother to ugly up their own pages with that crap. How do they expect people to take them seriously?
It is *not* the Internet Architecture Board, it is the Internet Advertising Bureau. Could you imagine it being different?
Yeah, yeah, it's redundant. But that's what came to my mind when I read IAB on the title.
I suggest that all computers on the internet be required to have a miniature billboard monitor (2 or 3 feet wide will do) above the normal monitor that rotates various advertisements.
Or, require 24 hour full screen ads that are transparent so as not to completely interfere with normal usage.
Genius!
sig.
Marketing is where the people who are full of buzzwords, mission statements, slogans and an overinflated sense of self-importance always wind up collecting. They perpetuate these ridiculous ad schemes not because they work, but because it keeps them in a job. Do -you- know anybody that's based a major purchase off of a popup ad on the Internet? Everyone I know immediately -loses- interest in a given product when assaulted by popup ads for it. Those little wireless camera thingies, for example. In theory, they seem pretty cool and they have a lot of practical uses (other than the implied use of spying on JC Penny catalog models per their ads). But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy one because of their obnoxious advertising.. So who -is- buying them?
Do people or companies still believe in advertising on internet? I cannot image bigger banners will do ANY good, both to the public and the advertisers. I mean: giel: BIGGER BANNERS TO ME IS THE SAME AS SHOUTING IN A CHATBOX! In other words: bad habit.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Yet, however, companies continue to pour money into losing ventures against the almighty click-through because of the Internet's explosive growth and this mistaken belief that people will click them.
News flash: this isn't the case. Whereas ads on television have a 50-year history to draw from, and whereas ads on TV are expected, most Internet surfers would say they're an annoyance and a hindrance to them. Contrast ads on TV--slick, designed to pique the viewer's interest, versus a huge window flashing saying, 'THERE MAY BE PORN ON YOUR COMPUTER! YOU ARE BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS, SO YOU'RE VULNERABLE.'
Instead of focusing on more obtrusive, bigger pieces of real estate, perhaps Internet advertisements would work if they leveraged the unique nature of the medium to get their point across. Flash and/or Java ads that are visually interesting and interactive have a better chance of setting clicks than big, flashing banners.
I don't know if I'd expect the ad community to get the message, though. They want us to see theirs, but won't listen to their audience to see what works.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I've seen sites that say "you're blocking my ads, now go away, thieving bastard".
Somehow this article seems to only pertain to users of software produced by a certain monopoly. I use the mighty Mozilla and frankly it has been a damn long time since I have even seen a pop up ad.
Got Code?
I wish them well, never heard a better reason to use a better browser than Explorer.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats.
;)
Yet ironically in some contexts it is the smaller ads that are more effective. Google does far better with those tiny text-only ads at the top and right side of their search results than the other search engines did with the traditional banners at the top of the page.
Just to test my theory I wonder how this text link to The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship... buried in the text does compared to the banner at the top
"As far as I am concerned, Internet adverts are just like magazine adverts. I don't notice those ones either (unlike TV adverts)."
You notice the lost time, especially when you're connected through a slow modem and pay by the minute... It is a huge bandwidth wasteage!
'nuff said.
I don't care about the size of adverts. What I care about is where they are and what they show. /. ads, I don't care.
If the
text
has
to be
so
small to escape an advert it becomes unreadable. That I hate. If I have to scroll to read the text like with
The second thing I hate is adverts that are constantly flashing. My eyes are constantly attracted by the ad and I can't read the text of the web page. So, in my phoenix browser I have the ZAP EMBEDS bookmark to kill flash and I have the animated image setup to loop only once.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Of course I don't get this at home where I can control my browser, but at work using IE that site loads tons of ads.
The most interesting one though just pops up; filling a LARGE part of the screen. It's semi-transparent and looks as if it's loading a commercial. Although it looks interesting, I know I have no interest in buying anything so I click the convenient "close" button in the corner.
That's an ad that's both obtrusive and yet strangely fascinating. I do like that it is polite enough to give you the option to shut it down before it fully loads.
Jonathan
are advertisers. OK, so they did't come up with textads themselves, who cares, they accept and use this format.
The premium content is classified into categories: at the bottom the standard 15" monitor crowds get just one or two whole articles a week plus a constant pitch to upgrade the available real-state for adds. Only the people with monitors above 24" get the whole content.
Low-life visitors with 14" monitors get whole-page adds for the right of seeing the "free" content plus the premium headlines in their cheap monitors. And large pop-ups at every page views reminding them that 14" monitor support will be discontinued soon.
Glad that they thought of the consumer when they invented these new sizes.
[Please type your sig here.]
With all of the data you can gather on web interaction (duration on pages, path through a site, etc.) you would think that someone could determine the effectiveness of different types of advertising. Instead, marketing takes the 'use a bigger hammer' route and assume that it will work. Once again, "Dilbert" paints a tragically accurate picture of real life.
In the UK they have, and believe the most cost-effective was said to be radio advertising.
Think about it - you're driving along or doing some other task, and the radio's on in the background. You're unlikely to switch station just because an advert came on, since the radio is not your primary focus at that moment. On the TV or the net however, you're concentrating on the screen and so you're more likely to be annoyed by distractions to that focus.
Cheers,
Ian
Advertisers should stick with injecting the ads into the article text, even if they're large blocks that you have to scroll through until you get to the rest of it. Being forced through full page ads or Flash crap just makes me want to avoid a site.
I, for one, am glad that the IAB publishes these standard ad sizes. It lets me know what images my filters should throw away.
There are some that you have to wait for a set amount of time before you get a link to move on to the content..
So its not a 'blockable' thing in that case...
And they are annoying as hell and i always write the web-admin to protest..
Or they convert content to other formats that hide the ads so that blockers cant determine what is content and what is ad?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In response to this, the IAB is happy to provide four new formats for the new year, because the banner is actually well liked.
Also, what the hell ever happened to designing a page that was...oh...I don't know....simple? If I just have an image at the top, does it really matter how big it is? Why do I have to redesign my entire site?
"Larger ad units are far more alluring and impactful," Mr. Schroeder said. "Now that we offer skyscapers, big boxes and leaderboards, there is no question that the banner is less relevant. The leaderboard, for instance, occupies basically the same position on our pages as a banner, but is more than twice the size."
A dictionary doesn't even show a word for impactful. Those clever marketing people, so innovative. Of course, I think they're more moronicful. I also think they are suckful.
I like how they take normal words (skyscraper, leader board) and turn them into marketingesse. I'm just thankful that the pop-up, was met by something like mozilla with pop-up blocking, or what I propose we call guillotine
Personally, when ads are anoying the first thing on my mind is closing them. I generally dont bother even looking at what they are selling. The only effective ads ar ethe quiet ones, like the banners on slashdot or the crucial ram on gentoo. The only times I've ever clicked on banners or any ads has been on /. and gentoo, so this would be just another annoyance for me to get around. If I can disable it, I will even sacrifice some browser capabilities to disable it. Don't try to force ads on me! It wont work!
What happened to the good old days when the internet was only nerds and mathematicians?
Yes I'm annoyed by these ads too but I shouldn't complain. Every company wants to make money and advertising is just a way for them to do that. As long as the average John Doe clicks on them we will keep seeing 'm.
Another way of dealing with adds is using a text-based browser. For most sites lynx is quit an acceptable solution. Whenever I want speed I use that browser. When I've got some time on my hands I'll use a full-featured browser and just ignore as much of the ads as posible.
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
Do you really want them to? There are two types of "smaller" ads which I could see coming in the future, and both deal with the word "subliminal".
First, they could introduce ads inspired by the old SNL character -- Buy Coke -- Subliminal Man. This would be similar to the product placement model used in TV in the 50's (and making a comeback due to PVRs). There might even be some interesting science done to find out exactly where to place ads for the maximal -- Buy Pepsi -- effect.
Second, they could just go the full subliminal route: all pages done in Flash with every hundreth frame a full-screen ad saying "Buy ".
Do either of these sound like better options than the current (mostly) easily-blockable ads?
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
I don't know about you guys, but I know that once a site's ads surpass a certain level of annoyance (basically beyond a graphic either at the top, sides, or bottom), I start finding alternative places to visit. It's just not worth my time to "endure" 5 minutes of sparkly flash tidbits and other nit-wittery when visiting a page. If I can find what I need elsewhere, then I go there instead. I know I can't be alone on this. Has no one done a study to determine an average user's "ad tolerance?" I mean, if people avoid your page because of all the ads, then making more and bigger ads won't really do much for your "click-throughs," will it?
Why not just increase your screen resolution?
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
I noticed that there no annoying POP-UPs on the IAB Web Site
Looks like my pages will be lighter and whiter as my ad blocker stops more of this rubbish.
...they're going to realize that the game isn't to get people to click more ads. That's never going to happen no matter how big they make the ads.
Internet advertising will come into its own only when they realize that the best approach is to count eyeballs, just like magazines sell ads based on circulation and TV sells them based on viewership.
Unrealistic expectations are killing online advertising, along with the websites that depend on them. They need to just get over it and stop finding new ways of abusing us.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
Well, I recommend bigger fonts, larger web pages, and waaaaaaay higher resolution.... to compensate.
Arrghh! They don't need quantity! They neeed quality!
I really don't mind - I even sometimes enjoy - professional, witty, clean and clearly defined adverts in almost any medium.
Of course these ad's are ineffective. It's been that way since the invention of the banner ad, which is why most companies don't advertise with banners. Who wants to pay for ad space no one bothers with?
To make the ad successful it needs to be like a TV Commercial; Unavoidable, in your face and goes away after a time. Until that happens, pop ups, banners and all that other shit is going to be right next to useless. I may be mistaken, any pop up moguls can correct me if I am wrong.
~S
I really love this quote from the article: "Both the 300X250 and 180X150 ad units feature similar proportions to TV, enabling easier creative development." I guess someone has been smelling the convergence fumes too long.
As someone else pointed out, a lot of people won't be patient enough to want and wait for this sort of download times; so now take that and expand it to the point of downloading reduced, but complete, television commercials.... Oh yeah, we finally got the vast majority of people to realize that we don't want their page sounds on our machines. I really hated sites which shoved a music loop down on me. So now I'll have to deal with the sound interruptions caused by transferring TV commercials to web pages?
<sarcasm>I can't wait until some greedy bugger puts two or more of these on one page to maximize profit....</sarcasm>
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
"...have been deemed not effective enough."
I wonder if the effect of online-ads is really the problem, or maybe more the possibilities of measurement.
Imagine one could measure the effectiveness of newspaper-ads as well as the clickrate of online-ads. I'm sure this would drag the newspaper-ad-buisiness into a large crisis.
The 728x90, a newly created IAB ad size, provides an expansive horizontal lens through which consumers can view products and brands online.
Wow, these advertising people sure know how to sell a product, this almost makes it sound as if it was a good thing.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
If you are a Windows user then you probably have Flash installed and also a sound card. Advertisers think they not only have the right to float annoying animations over the text you are reading, but also to play annoying sound effects through your speakers.
Why don't advertisers realise this: First of all, make your adverts RELEVANT and INTERESTING. Piss me off and I will avoid whatever goods or services you are trying to sell me (I take the same approach with spammers).
Second, "normal" advertising (ie non-internet based) relies on the principle of the subliminal promotion of a brand name. When I drive to work I see adverts for Jaguar. When I watch TV I discover that Herbal Extracts skin cream is a more natural way to cleanse and moisturise [my] skin. When I open a magazine I discover that the local computer shop has a half price sale on, and I can pick up a printer and get a free lawnmower.
This is relevant, interesting and non-obtrusive advertising. Next time I'm at the supermarket I *may* buy Heinz beans over the store's-own brand because the advert put into my head the idea that Heinz beans are delicious and more nutritional (the validity of this is not relevant - advertising exists to sell products, not to be truthfull)
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
If you have Mozilla, I highly recommend you install Bannerblind. I've been using it for many months and it does a great job of removing adverts!
The way it works is that, when you finish downloading a web page, it goes through the downloaded page and removes images of a specific height & width (for both GIF and Flash ads). It works well since all ads are of a specific size.
In my experience, it rarely remove a non-advert and if it's a nuisance for a specific page, you can easily turn it off.
The actual removal of the image can either force your page to reformat or to leave it as it is, with the image space blank (I prefer the former).
Also, you can add/remove image sizes so it's easy to keep up with new formats.
Don't believe the ad worked? Before those ads came out, the sponsor was but a dim memory. Notice that you and I both know what camera ad you're talking about. That is exactly what a marketing department's job is - to get the company noticed.
Just because neither you nor I would care to be marketeers doesn't mean you need to diss them - they do serve a real function.
It's online slockwave gaming place. The way they advertize is they implement their logos and skins right in the games. They've done it just perfect and it doesn't desturb you while you playing games. Because it's a part of the game. There is no pup ups and no banners on candystand. Just the way it must be.
more ads- lagrer my hosts file will grow.!
When I go into a brick and mortar store, there are advertisements. They are advertising the prices of the goods on sale. Their are also ads trying to convince you of which product on sale is better. And there are ads trying to get you to buy things that you didn't come into the store to buy.
How come in an online store there are ads for, other stores? Do they really make more money off advertising than they would if I actually bought something? I think that's the big mistake of online stores with advertising.
I think we can also agree that the more annoying the ad the LESS likely we are to click on it. But the more likely we are to click on it, by accident.
Lastly I think the biggest problem with internet advertising is that you have a bunch of websites providing something for free. Webcomics being the best example. And the people who run those sites try to make money. Some people try to make enough money to live off of their webcomics. If I made a comic, or any other kind of site, I would pay for it myself from my JOB, or I would make just enough money off it to pay for hosting. Too many people are trying to make a profit off of websites that aren't providing a profitable service, but are popular. So they run ads, which don't work, so in desperation they get more and bigger and more annoying ads to make more money. I think more people should look at penny arcade as an example as to how to make money without making ads better. I think gabe talked about this the other day actually.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Furthermore, if you annoy your reader/viewer then they won't be inclined to find out more about the product you've got to sell. That's why animated ad, popups, flash ads, etc never, ever get clicked on. At least, not by me.
Gabe from Penny Arcade said in a recent rant/news bulliten something that sums it up nicely:
Here is another little behind the scenes look at the way advertising works on the internet. Game companies want animation. They want a fucking guy to parachute down from the top of your screen and land on the article you're trying to read. They want you to have to interact with their advertisement just so you can see the content you came for. Everyone who uses the internet knows that this kind of shit is just frustrating. Look at sites like IGN, Gamespot, or Gamespy. You can't read an article there without an animated bug crawling across your screen or some flash ad blaring shitty music. When we decided to do advertising we decided that we wouldn't ever run any kind of animated add. Some companies won't advertise with us because of it. Others, it's like pulling teeth to get a non animated ad out of them. They have this idea in their head that the only way their ads will be effective is if they are annoying as fuck.
Some of them are actually shocked when ads at PA out perform animated versions at other sites like IGN. Here we are just a little comic site and we kick their fucking ass. We tell them that if you don't insult people with shitty flash ads, they are much more likely to actually check out your game. I have never once clicked on a flash ad except to mute it or close it and I have a feeling you guys are pretty much the same. They just can't get it through their heads that people don't like to be annoyed by advertising.
Penny Arcade, those guys really are the source of all wisdom...
The more they annoy us, the more people will learn how to block their junk.
Advertisers will soon have to choose between fair and small ads that may get blocked only by 10% of their users, or big annoying banners that might give twice the profit but actually will be blocked by 9 users out of 10.
Nuf said. When everyone says that people won't pay
millicents for visiting websites, they were not asked about the advertising. Huge, obnoxious ads that get in the way of content and advertising policies that demand we sacrifice our personal privacy to get anywhere.
Compare to that crap, SPP looks like a godsend.
Looks like its time to work on those protocols
inside of Mozilla, Phoenix and Apache.
As the number of advertisements go up the quality of the website goes down. At least that what it does in my opinion, because if the advertising gets too annoying stop frequenting those sites (as i have done with television and radio). It would be nice to have a system similar to public radio or public television where a person can become a member to enjoy quality, advertisement free, web content. I know that option is currently available for individual sites but that is not quite as convenient as paying once for all of them. Hmm, there could be a public web portal that would allow you to link to member sites with their ad content removed for public web subscribers. I would defintely become a member
The reason why they never make smaller ad standards is that the pixels on the average monitor get smaller and smaller every year. They need to keep up with the technology. I remember that a couple of years ago I surfed with a 600 pixel wide browser on an 800x600 pixel Screen. Now my browser seems to be 924 pixels wide and screen resolution is at 1280x1024.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Its not the size of the ad that matters :P I block image ads period. I don't care if its 468x60 or 800x600.
How about some Dr Suse?
Do you like banner ads and spam?
I do not like them advertising man.
Do you like them big or small?
I do not liek them big or small i do not like ads at all.
Do you like them popped up or behind?
I do not like them popped up or behind i do not like any kind!
Do you prefer we send you spam?
I filter it out and blacklist it mam.
The 100% way to be sure i will NEVER buy your product is to popup/pop-behind, flash ad, or banner ad me. Whats the best form of advertising in my opinion? Recommendation within reviews perhaps, text ads and similar methods. ITS CALLED TARGETING, something that is beyond most ad companies.
I can understand the need for bigger banners and advertisements, as screensizes of people grow larger (banners look quite different in 640x480 than in my 1600xsomething). But to be honest, does the size of an ad matter. Ypu see I am not agains ad's. Quite contrary. I oppose only bad advertisements.
How then can a consumer affect on what kind of advertisement he gets. By feedback, boycot and most importantly by buying the products that have good advertisement campaigns. (ie. if you hate all ads buy the products that have no ads, simple). Many companies do actually react to customer feedback saying something on the lines of "I decided not to buy your peuducts, because I feel interned ads are...".
Sadly, as this sort of grasroots activity is the right answer, it is in a way a right aswer to wron problem. The problem of spam. Or in other words, the problem of stupid masses. For no matter how intelligent individuals are, is group of these people always stupid enough to fall into trap of spammers (advertisers in this case).
ps.
When in net, I tend block the most common depressive ads like those of doubleclick. And of the ads I see, most effective are the small gifs that say something like "made with gimp" or similar. If a product does not need bigger advertisement, it must be excelent IMO.
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
In other news, Slashdot never post Pro-Microsoft, Anti-Linux Articles. Meh, they are advertisers, they do what they deem right, and we go ahead and block 80% of them. I havent seen a pop-up in ages and block more than 50% of the image ads. Use mozilla, use a proxy ad-killer like proxomitron (if you're on windows), be happy. None of the two ads in the adAge article showed up for me in mozilla btw.
This sig was cut off by the sla
Ads within ads!
If you block popups, you're stealing...
Next, if you don't click through at percentage rate, you're stealing...
After that, if you don't read spam at percentage rate, and click through at percentage rate, you're stealing...
Obviously hardware DRM is not a sufficient answer. The real solution will include eyeball and ear metering devices installed shortly after birth, prior to leaving the hospital. Of course this leaves a 'theft gap' of a few days of newborn media consumption, but that loophole can be closed, later.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't like adverts either, but what's the alternative for companies offering free hosting? Are we saying that all hosting should be paying, either as part of ISP subscriptions or as a standalone service? If not, how do all the people posting about the evils of adverts think that that free hosting should be financed? Selling email addresses to spam merchants?
Web advertising does pay, otherwise people wouldn't do it. Sure, Looking at the sites that people use in my cybercafe, masses of hideous publicity dosn't seem to put a lot of people off.
Virtually serving coffee
Maybe I'm just crazy
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
The web page with content packed into a 728 x 90 strip!
You know what the rest will be.
Like buying crap scented air freshners for the bathroom. It already smells bad enough in there.
And any ads I've bothered to look at are usaully just stupid. Here's one I kept seeing while searching for google for something to buy. I was
a consumer with money, looking to spend it:
search for: discounted foo
And I'd get a bunch of ads pop up that said "We have discounted foo!"
So I go to the sites and do not find foo. I do a text search and find "discounted" but no foo.
Seems they just look for a handful of words, such as "discounted" and then attach it to anything that is remotely in context. so here I was going to all these sites and none of them had what I was loking for, they just happened to have some of the generic terms I put in the search and then created a "personalized" invitation that said they had just what I was looking for. Earth to stupid-motherfuckers, if you don't have what I'm looking for, tricking me into going to your site isn't going to make me want to buy whatever you have laying around.
And I kept running into that. Noone had what I wanted but everyone claimed they did, so I'd go to the site. After about an hour of that, it's about enough to drive a guy nuts.
A total waste of time. I'd have been just as productive in my search if I'd unplugged the computer and made verbal requests to the unpowered monitor.
The markters are getting so aggressive, what they're doing amounts to nothing more than poking sticks into the eyes of those who desire to spend money. they're trying too hard and destroying the usefulness of the medium.
I feel that since I already pay for the hardware to surf the net, and the expensive connection, I should not be subjected to intrusive advertising. Add that to the fact that some providers will start capping your data and it ammounts to just plain frustrating. Frankly, I dont care if most of the sites cant afford to stay in business without adds. There are too many sites that suck anyway, and too many lazy web masters trying to stay at home and get paid to write rants (see Something Awful). Find another model. (like membership plans, selling Tshirts, bake sales, I dont care) I mean, if you like the site, you'll support it.
Interesting you posted that sig in a thread about advertising right before Christmas.
I read it, thought to myself, damn, I DO want to fly a kite, I LIKE flying kites, and I haven't FLOWN a kite since I was dating my wife in college. If I had seen that sig two weeks ago, she'd be getting THIS for Christmas.
I don't think I've ever reacted that way to a banner ad.
Never confuse volume with power.
If flash is going to be used more and more for avertising, I'll have no other option than removing it.
:-)
http://nu.nl/news.jsp?n=87229&c=50 shows a shaking bottle thingy on the left enat will pop open when you mouse-over it.
it annois and distradts me everytime i want to read the news.
maybe i'm still from the HTML 1.0 age, but the web will be the same without flash, but the web will be even better without shouting ads
Privacy is terrorism.
True. No iNet ad I've seen ever made me WANT something from it. I look at the TV ads, and OOh look Pepsi Blue is at my local 7-11! I'll go get one! I go on the iNet and "Look at the stupid frickin X11 camera ad! The girl's ugly anyway!"
-Phil "Got Rice?"
The problem is not size. People refuse to click the ads because nobody wants all the funky Javascript and browser tricks that interfere with going back to the original page.
I expect all kinds of shenanigans if I click a banner, therefore I don't do it. Any ads that cannot be suppressed with a proxy filter will be ignored. Making the ads larger will not change anything.
These ads are getting bigger and bigger and more and more interactive. But what is 'globally seen' the goal of the advertiser, they want to reach something .. inform you, get you to buy a product, brand the company and so on.
The bigger the banners get, the more attention they're requesting the more annoyed the user will become .. and cause the user will remember the thing that is advertised for as a bad thing cause it has annoyed you! So what will happen? You will get a bad feeling about the advertising company or the thing what is advertised for.
If we are going on this way .. the tide will turn and advertising will not lead into new 'leads' but only into lost of customers and new leads.
Did anybody draw a chart of the impact that gigabytes of banners/silly flash animations/unsolicited email brochures and similar junk may have on paid per use high speed lines?
A convincing well prepared and colourful report might be set up to be shown to CEOs too.
"Hi boss, look at this. We have found a way to cut down our connection costs and speed up our corporate network too; we only have to install that free and trustworthy blocking software in our servers. 25 minutes required, almost no maintenance.".
What they do when you first load gamespot.com.
You get the ad before you get the ever moving homepage. They set a cookie so you don't see that ad again. It's a tad bothersome but for their good reviews it's worth it.
but we already have clay pigeons for skeet shooting..
You have an implicit point I think -- wouldn't it be nice if the size of the ad ran in inverse proportion to its obnoxiousness? I know large ads are automatically obnoxious, but the "punch the monkey" and sexual performance ads have nauseating impact far greater than their physical size.
The IAB site ironically doesn't need ads. It probably draws funding exclusively from its membership, so essentially they subscribe to its content.
The ad people should know that the more rigid their template the easier they'll be to block.
And I feel sorry for the otherwise decent sites who feel compelled to adopt these increasingly irritating novels. Pop-up ads are one of the worst. Beyond a certain point the site is not worth visiting unless you are bristling with anti-ad weaponry, what a waste.
on my browser the referenced web pages were an unreadable mess and required flash - which is not available for my combination of OS/HW/Browser.
Lousy adverts kill commerce
I can't wait until my screen is filled with bouncing, flashing animated gifs with that stupid monkey flying back and forth
This Open Source Developer has found the need to advertise his services. Is this wrong? The ad is always the first page to be seen on the site - no matter which page you go to. So it is intrusive - but can you blame him? I consider that we are often annoyed by ads because of where they come from, who is advertising. - but when it is worthy cause I say all power to the ads. I certainly don't object to the ads of Slashdot - another worthy cause.
I don't find ads on the internet nearly so obtrusive as ads on TV - and when the cause is worthwhile a good site - then I've no problems with them - no matter the size.
Makes it easier to write ad blocking software when the ad sizes are standardized. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The real solution? A clean layout that showcases the ad well, delivering your ad to an audience who is actually interested, and not insulting the viewer with cheap tricks like animating nausea-inducing flashing colors. Penny Arcade has done this with its layout, and even with a smaller reader base they outperform ads from sites like IGN. To quote:
Here is another little behind the scenes look at the way advertising works on the internet. Game companies want animation. They want a fucking guy to parachute down from the top of your screen and land on the article you're trying to read. They want you to have to interact with their advertisement just so you can see the content you came for. Everyone who uses the internet knows that this kind of shit is just frustrating. Look at sites like IGN, Gamespot, or Gamespy. You can't read an article there without an animated bug crawling across your screen or some flash ad blaring shitty music. When we decided to do advertising we decided that we wouldn't ever run any kind of animated add. Some companies won't advertise with us because of it. Others, it's like pulling teeth to get a non animated ad out of them. They have this idea in their head that the only way their ads will be effective is if they are annoying as fuck.
Some of them are actually shocked when ads at PA out perform animated versions at other sites like IGN. Here we are just a little comic site and we kick their fucking ass. We tell them that if you don't insult people with shitty flash ads, they are much more likely to actually check out your game. I have never once clicked on a flash ad except to mute it or close it and I have a feeling you guys are pretty much the same. They just can't get it through their heads that people don't like to be annoyed by advertising.
I feel like we have a pretty good relationship you and I. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like we treat you guys pretty well and I think that's why you treat us so well in return. You click on our ads and buy our stuff at an unbelievable rate. Those new Wang Fu shirts sold out in one fucking day. I mean that is some crazy shit. Tycho and I just want to say thanks. We have the best job in the world and we have it because of you guys. It seems like we should hug or something now.
End quote
To me, at least, it seems like current ad companies are ramming their head against this big wall of how to make effective advertising, and their solution seems to be to just ram their head harder against that same wall.
slashdot!=valid HTML
The advertising sales dept at a previous job told me about one of their most lucrative and effective (for the advertisers) forms of advertising. Apparently, sponsorship of our newsletter - effectively a one or two line text ad in an opt-in news email - was very effective. Also, the site made a fair bit of money through selling relevant books, job listings, etc. This was over a year ago now - how long will it take marketers to get a clue? Don't they understand that the way to get results is to make advertising relevant and useful, rather than increasingly intrusive? I like the ads on Google because sometimes they actually help me with what I'm trying to do. Also, didn't we just hear that Amazon's affiliate program is one of its most cost-effective marketing tools? All the IAB proposal will do is increase the usage of ad-filtering software. I filter (most) ads and have no compunction about doing so, because I already know that I don't want to punch the fucking monkey. I understand that branding ads are a different animal from direct sales pitches. If they're done entertainingly (e.g. the Absolut ads on the Onion), then I don't have a problem with them. The people complaining about "leeching" pop-up blockers, and demanding bigger formats, are the ones advertising on the principle of throwing garish shit at millions of eyeballs in the hope that some of it sticks. These are the companies selling overhyped security products, online gambling, cyberstalking software etc. Sites accepting this kind of stuff are only harming themselves in the long term. If you think your site's survival depends on this sort of thing, you're doomed - explore other possibilities!
When I read the headline, I was shocked: The IAB recommends advertising? ("IAB" expands to "Internet Architecture Board", at least in Internet context.)
People keep saying that web advertising must work otherwise people wouldn't do it.
:)
Well, maybe it doesn't, but until a company tries, it doesn't know - and there are plenty of companies yet to try!
I have a theory that one day, Yahoo! will go out of business because everybody who could advertise with them has tried - and found it doesn't work!
The minimum ad spend on Yahoo! is $5k per month, so they can juice money out of plenty of companies that haven't tried yet on the premise that it might work, knowing full well that it probably won't....!
Come to think of it, as long as new companies come along at a frequency big enough to sustain Yahoo! then they might not go out of business.
I'm not being entirely serious.
Internet Advertising:
If you don't try it, you'll never know....
Ralph Wiggum once said the immortal lines "What's a battle?". Seeing stuff like this makes me say "What's a banner ad?".
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Apparently, sponsorship of our newsletter - effectively a one or two line text ad in an opt-in news email - was very effective.
Also, the site made a fair bit of money through selling relevant books, job listings, etc.
This was over a year ago now - how long will it take marketers to get a clue? Don't they understand that the way to get results is to make advertising relevant and useful, rather than increasingly intrusive? I like the ads on Google because sometimes they actually help me with what I'm trying to do.
Also, didn't we just hear that Amazon's affiliate program is one of its most cost-effective marketing tools?
All the IAB proposal will do is increase the usage of ad-filtering software. I filter (most) ads and have no compunction about doing so, because I already know that I don't want to punch the fucking monkey.
I understand that branding ads are a different animal from direct sales pitches. If they're done entertainingly (e.g. the Absolut ads on the Onion), then I don't have a problem with them.
The people complaining about "leeching" pop-up blockers, and demanding bigger formats, are the ones advertising on the principle of throwing garish shit at millions of eyeballs in the hope that some of it sticks. These are the companies selling overhyped security products, online gambling, cyberstalking software etc. Sites accepting this kind of stuff are only harming themselves in the long term. If you think your site's survival depends on this sort of thing, you're doomed - explore other possibilities!
This is when I wouldn't mind certain trusted stores being a little more intensive with what they do with my information they already have.
Example, Amazon.com has a reputation to protect, so I, perhaps ignorantly, trust them with LOTS of my information, including my credit card numbers and other data about myself. Foolish as it may be, I trust them because I believe I personally wouldn't mind at all if they went ahead and asked me when I bought something what it was for, letting me optionally tell them I was buying it for my wife for Christmas, or for my sister for her birthday.
In addition to the profile they build about me then, they could build useful profiles about who I interact with. I honestly wouldn't mind at ALL if they gave me some option of connecting Me Myname who lives at 123 Thisstreet USA with Mywife Myname at 123 Thisstreet USA, perhaps asking me first if, yes, they are the person I'm related to or friends with. Then, instead of randomly spamming book suggestions at me, they could say,
Special Day Alert You know, your wife's birthday is coming up, if you buy now we can ship it there in plenty of time, and by the way, you bought her alot of science fiction books before, but she buys mostly classic novels for herself, so we'd suggest getting something a little more romantic this time. Maybe these titles are more her taste:
I sure wouldn't mind a notice that such and such has already bought the book I'm about to ship to their address, maybe I'd like to pick another.
Of course, to give them that level of control I'd want an easy to navigate privacy agreement that specifies what happens if the company gets bought or folds. You'd also have to opt in on BOTH sides. (You can't tell the husband the wife has been browsing 'Divorce Made Easy' with her consent of course).
If your ads are part of your service, your customers will begin to love them.
Never confuse volume with power.
Posted earlier to slashdot, sorry I don't know who posted it... but here it is modified to include those new sizes... put it in your <profile>\chrome directory as userContent.css. For Windows 98 that is <windir>\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\<random.slt>\chrome; Win2k puts it under C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\etc.
7 ... */
u bleclick."] *,
[ width="468"][height="60"]," 600"],] [height="90"],d th="300"][height="250"],5 0"]
8 "]:hover,d th="120"][height="600"]:hover,g ht="60"]:hover,, " ][height="250"]:hover," ]:hover
Watch out for the slashcode bug that inserts an extra space on the 180x150 line... and on the 180x150:hover line.
---
/* makes ads almost invisible
* - taken from http://archivist.incutio.com/css-discuss/?id=1355
* slightly modified to include new banner sizes
[src*="ads."], [src*="ads/"],
[src*="doubleclick"],
[href*="do
[href*="rd.yahoo.com"] [src*="yimg.com"],
[width="60"][height="468"],
[width="120"][height=
[width="120"][height="60"],
[width="728"
[width="160"][height="600"],
[wi
[width="180"][height="1
{
-moz-outline: medium dotted red;
-moz-opacity: 10%;
}
/* returns ads to 40% opacity when the mouse hovers... */
[src*="ads."]:hover, [src*="ads/"]:hover,
[src*="doubleclick"]:hover,
[href*=".doubleclick."] *:hover,
[href*="rd.yahoo.com"] [src*="yimg.com"]:hover,
[width="60"][height="46
[width="468"][height="60"]:hover,
[wi
[width="120"][hei
[width="728"][height="90"]:hover
[width="160"][height="600"]:hover,
[width="300
[width="180"][height="150
{
-moz-outline: medium dashed red;
-moz-opacity: 40%;
}
7d9e63e9501751ff4bf9307989d5623d *SheepHead
The WWW is a great thing. Companies like Yahoo deliver a great number of services, nearly all of which are free to end users such as myself. But not really. Someone has to pay for these services, and someone is paying for these services: me and every other end user. How? Advertising. And it works; it really does.
How many people don't own a car more expensive than they need for transportation? How many people don't drink unhealthy, expensive soft drinks or eat fast food? How many people actually plan all their purchases and never fall victim to impulse purchasing? How many young married couples are there in which both people don't work just so that they'll make enough money to keep up with the Jones? Very few indeed, and it's because advertising works.
Yes, some people enjoy working a lot. They're called workaholics, and I seriously doubt they make up 10% of the population. Don't tell me that most people actually consciously enjoy working 40, 50, even 60 hours a week just so they can buy all sorts of self-destructive products. No, I'm not claiming that anything a person buys is necessarily bad, whether for your health or happiness, but I don't feel it's unsafe to say that a fairly large percentage of it is. So why do we continue pouring money into this stuff?
The United States has developed an amazing middle class over the last century. Finally, a majority that earns enough money to afford things like a house and decent medical coverage while still being able to save and plan for the future. But most of middle class working stiffs don't plan! Why? Because advertising works. We don't plan for the future; our lives are endless cycles of working more hours than we should so we can buy more stuff than we need. And most of the people that do such planning go to one of the giant broker houses like Merrill Lynch that screw the middle class people in order to help their bigger, important clients.
Once upon a time, in the early days of the U.S., many people (all be it, rich people) used to own newspapers because they enjoyed to process of publishing a paper. They didn't make much money at it, if any at all, but they enjoyed bringing writers together who would express opinions similar to their own, and hell, push an agenda or two. Nowadays, nobody communicates (and that includes the receiving end) without a financial purpose. Newspapers, TV, magazines -- same goes for the Web. People keep going to same big-business websites, and big-business websites don't care about their content as long as they turn a bigger profit each quarter.
This is crap. And the thing that is so frustrating is that the WWW is the perfect medium for people to take a small loss in order to publish their own works. It's the perfect medium to revert to older days when people cared about content and didn't mind paying to get it out. Yes, people are doing this, but we've all seen the numbers how more and more people spend more and more of their time at the same websites such as Yahoo and MSN.
I just can't help but think that we have so much ability today, and we're not taking advantage of it.
</RANT>
This sig is false.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
Every site that serves ads should have a single page with a list of all ads so someone who wants to go back and see an ad, even maybe a day or two later, can quickly find it and click through.
Real life recent example: I saw an ad on slashdot for some network camera that I later wanted to find out more info about. I haven't seen that damn ad since and I'm not going to keep hitting reload until it may pop up again.
Marketing people need a big 2x4 clue-stick fed-ex'ed to their forehead at times...
While I'm certain they didn't have a /. audience in mind when they posted
it, I couldn't help but notice the headline that asks "WHAT'S YOUR OPINION
ON THE UNIVERSAL AD PACKAGE?" with a link
to a survey where you can tell 'em what you really think.
tags. What's that? Yes, as a matter of fact, I *am* an assmonkey. Reposted properly below.
How about a new TLD (.noads?? :) in which websites could either be completely free or actually charge MONEY for their service?
:)
I know it would never work but it's a nice thought!
Isn't that the old saying? I see banner advertisements. I actually read them. Seeing them doesn't mean I'm going to click on them.
If there's a product I like, I'm happy to click on a banner. Truth be told, if I find the advertisement offensively large, I won't, out of principal. I'll go directly to the site bypassing the ad. I've done it before, and I'll continue to do it if ads continue to get larger and more annoying.
But that's just me.
before the days of popup ads I used to buy products from x10.com. I have my Linux embedded control run the xmas lights. Well I haven't bought
any more products from x10.com since they started with the popup ads. I found an alternate source for the products now. I'm building up a smart x10 watering system that does not water the grass if it
is raining outside.
Anyway I switched browsers too. I now use galeon to
block pop ups.
Offer prizes.
You're joking, right?
The state-run lottery ALWAYS pays off its winners, and thanks to the fairly transparent nature of its government management, I know that people actually win. I won't play that.
An ad banner telling me I can win if I click is assumed at its most honest to have the odds of a $100M lottery and the payout of the trinket crane at the arcade. At worst, nobody wins anything and the "contest" is just an excuse to harvest marketing info for spammers and to generate leads for fraudulent telemarketing.
TANSTAAFL. I know it and so does everybody else. Offering contests is a great way to cheapen a brand, not enhance it.
I'll never see them anyway. I use Mozilla.
:)
Temporarily, it will put more money in web sites' coffers through more advertising dollars, heavily subsidized by new and unsophisitcated users.
Long term, the preponderance of pop-ups will further motivate and/or educate IE and Netscape users to switch to Mozilla and use its cookie, image and popup blocking capabilities.
At some point, web sites will then have to learn a new way to make money other than pissing of thier users.
In the meantime, I'm unaffected.
Software Wars
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
I'd love nothing more than a return to the 460x68 banner ad.
Did you write them so they know that you're not buying their product and why? If a company has enough people telling them that their internet marketing firm is causing them to lose sales, they'll find a different marketing firm. Perhaps a less obnoxious and obtrusive one that might just go buy a google ad and then focus on making the company web page informative and useful.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It seems inevitable that this will lead to a technology arms race.
The advertisers get more obnoxious. Browsers and proxies get better at screening out ads. More features will appear to help the end user. And those features will become more sophisticated.
Here is a hypothetical example. [Disclaimer: this example is purely hypothetical. I have not done this myself, and am not trying to induce browser authors to commit a crime. Remember, a web site has to make money, and not watching ads is stealing!] Anyway, that said, suppose a browser (or proxy?) went through all the motions of running the ad. Executed the ad code, scripts, flash animations, etc. Dutifully simulated the popup windows, and executed their code. Dutifully requested all of the graphics, flash animations, and other inline content for the popup windows. This way the server really thinks that you see the ad. After all, your browser requested a flash that is only embedded in the popup. So you must not be a thief, because you are seeing the ad. The problem is, the authors of this browser or proxy have induced their users into stealing because the browser or proxy doesn't actually display the ads or popup windows. It still consumes the bandwidth, but these evil crooks (i.e. users) don't care.
This technique will prevent the advertisers from knowing that you've seen the ad. From their perspective, your browser has executed all the right code and requested all the right content from the server that should be associated with viewing this page.
Seen from the perspective I've described it here (advertiser friendly, and users as thieves) could the above hypothetical example be construed as a circumvention device? "Our content is protected by Anti-Leech, and these evil hackers have circumvented it. That's as bad as spray painting ad billboards!"
In the end, we'll have heads up displays in cars, with ad billboards constantly popping up in our face while driving. This will be seen as enormously beneficial in eliminating the visual clutter of billboards on buildings and roadways.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
I don't pay attention to most ads. Many annoy me. Almost all are irrelevant to me.
From my perspective what ad comanies need are to make them:
In other words, make the ads something useful to me that I'm interested in. Make it a service, make me GLAD to have them (or at least not against them).
What place has the ads I pay attention to the most? Slashdot.org. The ads fit my interests and the interests of the site.
Some good targeting and restrained, intelligent design will do wonders. Trying to dominate my screen and get in my face is only going to make me not want to buy said product.
This is just more proof the ad people are existing in their own dreamworld.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Whether or not you can remember what the ad was about is not a good test for whether it worked. Advertising is designed to affect your behaviour. The advertiser could give a rat's ass about your conscious memory. Actually, they'd prefer you not remember why you made a particular decision down the road. Let's say I'm selling a commodity product in retail stores. My product is out there, and I know when you go the store you're going to see it. I don't want you to think "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif" when you go to the store. I don't want your wife to tell you to get "Jif" when she sends you there. What I want is for her to tell you "We're out of peanut butter". Then when you get to the store, I want you to perceive "Jif" as the best brand. You don't know why and you don't care. You just buy that one and feel good that you've gotten the best product for your lovely wife and kids. What I want to do as an advertiser is to creat emotional "keys" between my product and good feelings. I don't want to present cognitive arguments; those take way too much work for you (my customer) to deal with. And people really do not operate that way on a daily basis. Think of the thousands of decisions you make each day. Do you really analyze every one of then in a conscious cognitive manner? If you examine a decision you made an hour ago, you could "justify" (come up with a rational explanation after the fact of why you did what you did). But that's not how you made that decision. As an advertiser, I'd much prefer you--a person who believes he makes informed, intelligent, deliberate decisions for himself--to have an emotional association between my product and something good. And have no conscious awareness of how that association got there. Then when your wife asks you why you bought "Jif", you'll say "Because I love you". (If you're smart, that is ;).
And thus progogateth the meme.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I for one wouldn't mind seeing ads targeted a little bit more to what I actually want to buy. I'm not for collecting marketing info on anyone, but I'm sure they've captured enough already to pull this one off.
I just block tons of ad servers very easily without any software.h ey maintain a list of known ad servers and you can just drop there list on your hosts file and all ads look like a big white square on the page. :) (Any ads that do slip through, you just add to your hosts file.)
http://ssmedia.com/utilities/hosts/
T
Just thought I'd share that.
How many internet applications do you know that actually ask you what kind of ads you'd like to see? Ad supported Oprah does. Anything else? It seems like advertisers and application vendors just don't seem to get that the intenet goes both ways.
Further to that, what if they asked you if you wanted to see ads on a day to day basis? When I'm not shopping, all ads do is annoy me and fill up a bit of dark fiber. However, when I am thinking of purchasing, I really don't mind seeing ads for (e.g.) GeForce 4 Ti cards from UK retaillers. What I don't want to see - and what I'm never, ever going to respond to - is an ad for a Maibatsu Monstrosity from a US dealer.
Would it really be anathema for (e.g.) IE to ask you what ads you wanted to see today? Not profiling, not sneaky data mining, just an honest question: are you interested in buying anything, and if so, what?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
michael wrote "For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats."
Just because 'the advertisers' come up with these new formats doesn't mean you have to use them. GET CREATIVE. How about clearly marked slashdot articles that are actually advertisements? Hell, some of the ones you run now sure sound like them already, might as well get paid and make it legitimate with an 'Advertisement' label. Don't let non-paying slashdot members block that category, either. Let the advertiser decide whether or not to allow comments on the product. Hell, give the advertiser infinite mod points for that article, they're paying for it. (Just as long as you let everyone know.)
Google innovated with their ads. They're making money and not pissing us off with bigger ads.
All that having been said, I find it amusing that slashdot is using HUGE banner ads only on the reply pages. It's like you're punishing the one group of people that add content to your site. Kinda lame, but I guess you'd rather just "blame it on the advertisers."
"And like that
The register has evil flash pop-over adverts, that expand over the page your reading if your mouse happens to drift in the direction of the add.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats"
Ad and marketing companies/consultants make more money by designing larger advertisements for their clients (the company that is advertised). Also, if someone is selling advertising space, that person can charge more for the extra space the larger advertisement takes up. From that perspective, it makes no business sense to design something new that will generate less profit for you than your current product. That is why ads will only get bigger. The only exception to this is making a smaller ad that utilizes advertising real estate that could not be previously used (i.e. the scroll ads you see at the bottom of TV programs nowadays.)
Contrary to most theory here, things are not free. Running a web site, especially one that can withstand the slashdot effect costs a good deal of money.
If ads are evil, greedy, wrong, blah, blah. How do you all propose that the sites you like to visit are funded?
I stopped visiting that particular website altogether - I'm not taking that crap just to get to some daily news.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
If IAB wants ads to be effective, then this isn't the right way to go. Having standardized sizes for ads is never going to be very effective. After seeing a few banner adds at the top of the screen, we learn to ignore them. After seeing whatever new size they come up with a few times, we'll ignore those, too. Advertisers have to stop being so damn lazy! Every add needs to have its own distict layout so that we don't become so easily trained to ignore them.
OK, I understand that this is incompatible with the way ads are served. Guess what, if you want ads to be effective, come up with a new way.
How about just making ads part of the page, rather than hosted by an ad server? Ads will be much more effective because 1) as I said above, we won't get trained to ignore them, 2) they can't be filtered, and 3) if I want to go back to an ad, it'll still be there. Magazine ads have all these properties, and guess what- they work! (Yes, serving ads this way is harder, but see my point about being lazy).
I'm quite fascinated by how initially, the internet was considered our playground. Then it was considered the worlds playground. Now, it's considered the worlds advertising medium, except for the L337, to whom, it is still a playground.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Here's an idea - Give some reason for the customers to click. Offer prizes.
You mean like "Punch the monkey and win!"? I think it's been proven that doesn't work.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
...people are offended by their God damned intrusiveness. When I hit a web page, I want the key information on that page to hit me between the eyes as soon as the page loads-- but on many pages there are so many friggin' ads at the top of the page that I have to scroll down to see any more than an article headline.
ZDNet, with their disappearing, content-shifting, HUGE-ASS, in-page popup particularly draws my ire. That stupid thing never vanishes and makes the content move until I'm about to click on a link to a story I want to read-- then of course, the link is no longer under my cursor and the click either doesn't register or brings up a different page that I don't want to read. This is almost as bright an idea as Microsoft's 'disappearing unused menu items'.
If the IAB's conclusion is that bigger = more effective, then the IAB must be made up entirely of people who think that foreigners will suddenly understand English if you speak it slowly and loudly enough while talking to them. Idiots.
~Philly
Let's face it, we hate ads period. Just as there's huge business in pushing ads, there's a decent buck to be made providing ad blocking tools.
When I go to a web site, I don't have time to click on some ad. I know what I want to get, I go get it, and I get out. While being a geek I'm certainly going to be more focused on what I'm doing than the average person, I still believe even they will be fairly well focused on what they are doing, for the most part. Of course there are people who are just online to blow some time. Basically my point is, I don't click on web ads very much at all. I ignore them.
Or so I thought.
I thought I even ignored TV ads. I was in the grocery store a few weeks back and trying to think of what it was I wanted to get (I never write a list), I suddenly thought of a TV ad I saw a few times for a food product, and thought it might be worth trying (turns out I liked it). I've had similar things happen with ads I've seen on web sites, including Slashdot. I didn't click, but I though of it later and just went there.
I'm sure the advertisers saw the web as a wonderful way to really get an accurate measure of who responded to ads, under the assumption that people would always click on them. Back when clickety-click was a new thing, that might have been the case. That lasted about 3 weeks and got boring.
Traditional ads work using a concept called impression. The ad makes an impression in the viewer's/listener's mind. They act on that later. Some tricks enhance that, such as jingles that people just can't get out of their head. People are usually not making buying decisions while seeing/hearing ads, but they are affected later on, like I was in the grocery store.
The problem, I think, with web ads is that people still behave in very similar ways to ads on the web much as they do to TV, radio, newspaper, or magazine ads. That behaviour is that it impresses the mind and emerges later on to influence a buying decision when that time comes (and the ad isn't around. either ... except for those stupid floor stick-ons in the grocery store than make me dizzy). Advertisers have always wanted better or more accurate demographics and responsiveness data. And they believed that with all the programming and computers involved in the web, here was that chance because they believed people would respond instantly to ads but now with the web, they can actually do something in that response. With TV, etc, they were not in the place to do that. But I think this was the big mistake, because people don't really work that way for the most part.
But impression ads work, at least if they are designed as impression ads.
I've seen some ads on Slashdot which had no identity of the advertiser whatsoever. That's a mistake. That's a missed opportunity to leave an impression. I was busy at the time and didn't have time to click, and after the next refresh it was gone and another had replaced it. I wasn't going to buy anything, or visit some other web site right then, but I might have later on. Well, I didn't get to. Sure, Slashdot didn't get a paid click-through, either. But they weren't going to get one because I was busy, as I usually am when I come here.
Basically, the business model for web advertising is wrong. Many advertisers are still trying to do something new on the web, and it still isn't working all that well because that's not how people usually behave (there are exceptions). And due to this model, many kinds of products and services for which click through makes no sense at all are not advertising at all, or at least not very much, on the web. Consider for example McDonalds, or Wendy's, or Burger King. maybe they have a new food product you might like. If you see it enough times on TV, or hear it often enough on the radio, the next time you are hungry or near those places, you might give it a try. And you might like it. But seriously, if you saw it on the web, would you click on it? No. But several impressions of even just a web banner ad touting a new sandwich that you might like, could get you into the store to try one. The sad thing is, those ads just aren't here on Slashdot, or the other places people of various interests do come to on the web.
I think the advertising business needs to get back to the old traditional impression advertising model that has been well proven on other media, and use that on the web, too, and bring in all the more traditional advertisers who before would not have thought of doing web advertising. And I do think if that is done, smaller, but more scattered, ads will work, and work well ... to make an impression!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
A couple of months ago, I read something simlar. TV advertisers were bemoaning the fact that individual TV ads no longer have the effect they once did. Viewers are tuning out-- wether by fast-forwarding, or just by not really paying attention. Some of them went on to say that the problem partly was saturation. The fraction of the hour that has ads on a typical TV broadcast has grown, to the point that there are so many ads that no one ad stands out very much any more.
(My reaction to this, and to the surprise that came through in the article about this, was: well, duh!)
Then they go on to suggest the solution: in-programming advertising. Popups, effectively, in TV programs, more obvious and blatant than product placement.
So, the logic is: advertising has become so prevalent and overwhelming that the common consumer is starting to get desensitized to it. To solve this "problem", we need to make advertising even more prevalent and overwhelming.
Hello?
We're so in love with our marketing-driven society that we've become incapable of thinking any other way.
I predict that "popup-ads" during TV shows whould just drive more and more people away from broadcast TV and to watching either premium channels, renting movies, or (horrors) reading books. Broadcast TV will be shooting itself in the foot.
Similarly for web sites that don't think their ads are annoying enough right now. If they think that the solution is to make them more annoying, then users will either avoid their sites, or just use browsers that, in the increasing arms race, filter out the annoying ads. (Until the Fed. government outlaws those browsers, at which point the laws will become irrelevant since they are in conflict with what most of the population wants and does. Maybe eventually they will realize the short-sightedness of their current campaign finance model.)
I just shake my head when people seem to think that the solution to oversaturation of advertising is more in-your-face advertising. Don't they get it? Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising? Yeah, sure, Google is the #1 destination on the site, so they have it easy. Perhaps, though, nobody has considered that part of the reason Google is the #1 destination may be that their advertising is very minimally annoying....
-Rob
Economics plays cruel jokes on us all at times.
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
I'm hoping someone will add the ability to selectively turn off Flash in Mozilla... Just an idea for some enterprising soul.
Advertising is not marketing - that is why ads are annoying.
Advertising is making people aware of your product or services. You do that by normal ads, by being listed in the appropriate indexes (search engines, the Yellow Pages, trade journals), and by physical presense at appropriate shows. If somebody needs your product or service, they will find you, compare your product to others, and make a decision.
Marketing is making people want your product, even if they didn't before the interaction started. I've heard a quote of a marketing exec that "If you go to the store, and you only buy what you set out to buy, then I've failed." Marketing is about making you decide you really DO need that fur sink, the electric dog polisher, and the hulagirl lamp.
Advertising works best when it is unobtrusive - when I need to find a vendor of VPN solutions, I go to Google and look for one. The only advantage overt advertising gives me is that I will have the names I've seen in passing embedded in my brain, and will likely go to Cisco et. al. as part of the process.
Marketing is best when it is annoying as hell - that way you will remember the name of the company involve. Marketers count on you forgetting WHY you remember their name.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Right now I don't allow popups and I block any banner ad servers that I can. Soon, sophisticated regular expression based blocking, will allow me to block ads which are served from the the same server as the site's non-ad images.
Do I feel bad about this? Not any worse than I feel when I get up to get a beer during a television commercial or when I drive by billboards without looking at them.
Bannerblind has kept me banner free with no problems for a few months now.
The American Association of Advertising Agencies Response Group (AAAARG)
What Would Satan Do?
Here is something I've been thinking for a while, and I think it could help open source: What about optional ad-ware in open source? I mean, you open mozilla, and before it loads the homepage, it loads some kind of banner, and that gives money to mozilla developers. When you are sick of the bloody banner, just go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advertising, and turn it off. So this advert is optional. I think lots of people will leave it on voluntarily, and that's money for open source.
What about each time KDE/Gnome starts up it shows a banner taken from the net?
The more people using open source, the more support for them. I think it's such a good idea.
So what do you think?
Cheers.
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
I for one am *sick* of seeing .asp pages on the net. MICROSOFT WINDOWS IS NOT A SERVER GRADE OPERATING SYSTEM AND DOES NOT BELONG IN A SERVER ROOM. Period.
Run Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX/HPUX/Tru64 fine, but not mother&*($#& windows.
Just to know what we're talking about, check this. To be honest, that 728x90 banner looks pretty familiar to me....
They can be as big as mutli folded and as beautiful as they want, the move to close them will be all the same !
n-e
Maybe we all need to start clicking on the smallest, quietest, static and relevant advertisements we can find and change their clickthrough rates. Support the tiny ad... even if you're not really interested! If all they do is measure clickthrough, maybe we'll see results.
Personally I avoid anything noisy, popup/under, or flashy. I've found that those who resort to such annoying tactics are the first to bomb your computer with popups, sell your information and first-born to any quasi-legitimate marketing sleaze, etc.
Yes, I write complaint letters when a better-known company resorts to such tactics.
WEBSITE'S DON'T PAY FOR THEMSELVES!
No revenue = No content, end of story.
to consider that we just don't want to buy the crap they're selling?
I mean really. When did it become the *advertising's* fault that your product is an undesirable piece of shit?
It's the basic premise of capitalist exchange people. I have money. You want it.
*You have to offer me something I wish to possess more than my money.*
Christ almighty on a shingle, the marketroids are actually starting to believe their dumb ads "make" us buy stuff and that if they run the ad we're somehow obligated to purchase.
Hey, you over there, in the suit. Yeah, you. Get a clue or get a real job, ok?
KFG
I'd rather click a banner than a fullscreen ad.
There's a simple logic behind this: which dog would you pet - the one that rubs itself against your feet in a cute way or the one that jumps in your face and tries to bite your neck?
I thought so...
Privoxy.
http://www.privoxy.org/
I used to hate banner ads. Now I appreciate them in comparison to the annoyance of pop-up ads, making me want to use the internet less and less each time. And never buy whatever it is they are "pushing".
Here's an idea that would work for a week at most:
Have the browser refrain from displaying any image that matches the sizes suggested by these IAB punks.
Flash will never be displayed on the browser I use for day to day work. There is absolutely NO CONTENT ANYWHERE that is so compelling I will install the Flash plugin to view it. The ads that use that technology are simply TOO intrusive, TOO annoying and TO destabilizing to the already unstable creature that is the web browser for me to introduce to my machine.
The only thing I ever see is a box with a broken puzzle piece.
One case where a nice normal banner would be more effective.
In the RARE case where a site uses flash for content that I can't feasibly ignore, I fire up another machine, do what needs to be done, and re-image that machine when I'm done. There is no legitimate reason for a website to be completely dependant on FLASH for navigation...use HTML, that's what its for.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
While I normally block ads using Proxomitron, sometimes i disable it just to see which M$ ads /. is showing when I see people talking about how hypocritical it is of /. to run them in the first place. The ads are frigging huge and on the larger end of the ads I've seen.
/. thinks of people like me using Proxomitron to view their pages ad free without a subscription. Does /. consider that stealing?
On another interesting note, I wonder what
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I was getting worried there for a moment... I couldn't figure what the Internet Architecture Board was doing wanting to INCREASE Internet advertising. Maybe making a recommendation for the IETF to investigate a protocol enhancement to be able to easily identify ads for blocking... but definately not increase them!
Okay, I should have picked a site without pop-ups.
I guess the lesson here is its a trust thing. If all advertising was honest about what it was selling, as well as unobtrusive, it would work a lot better. Well, I learned something here.
My current theses is that we're actually suffering from a type of hyper inflation of online advertising. They get more pushy, and people get more resistant.
... i'm glad i can just disable unrequested popups and block most of the major ad sites.
I think i'd go insane if i had to deal with anymore bs advertising. Almost any number of clicks a site gets are totally accidental, I really don't believe people enjoy or buy anything from popups.
Shadus
Silly IAB,
everyone knows that nipples = clicks on ads, regardless of what is being sold!
Heh....this sort of reminds me of all of those DAMN commercials from di(ck)tech.com. You know the ones, REFINANCE YOUR MORTGAGE NOW!! They usually have some sort of flashing background and cheap sounding bells or buzzers going off.....kinda pathetic if you think about it....
Marketers are hailing new legislation that was just signed by President Albert Gore that was sponsored by Senator Hollings that adds to the DMCA that makes it illegal to circumvent Internet advertising. In addition, ISP's are required to include wording in their contracts that
"since you signed the contract to get on the network, you are required to spend time looking at all advertisements whether on the web, IRC, and e-mail. Circumventing ads are considered theft and will not be tolerated.".
This law goes into effect immediately. Circumventing Internet advertising whether it is turning off javascript or using e-mail filters to circumvent e-mail advertising (known as SPAM) is illegal and punishable by a 5 year prison and/or $250,000 fine.
Alan Ralsky came from Michigan to the signing ceremony in addition to Sanford Wallace, formerly President of Cyberpromotions, Michael Eisner of Disney, and Jamie Kellner, CEO of Time Warner/Turner, Inc.. Representatives of the Direct Marketing Association were there as well.
Senator Hollings mentioned that he isn't finished and plans to sponsor legislation to apply this innovative law to Television and Radio as well. He wants to make it illegal to ignore the commercial message whether by changing the channel, going to the bathroom or getting something to eat. Full attention to the commercial ad would be required. He also mentiones that he will also sponsor legislation to require motorits to stop on the highway to look at billboards. Critics warn that it would lengthen a driving trip by 10 fold. Senator Hollings dismisses the criticism by saying that people should think of Society's views when it comes to advertising and not be so selfish by ignoring the commercial ads that are prevalent in Society.
...based on keywords that the advertiser chooses, I believe. I think they check them to make sure they're relevant, in a basic way, but not much beyond that.
Basically, you give them possible words, they tell you approximately how many hits those words get, you pick the ones you want to buy.
From the press release:
Well, hm... how about being acceptable to viewers?
How can people sell something to others if they never try to look through the buyers' glasses?
- 728x90
- 160x600
- 180x150
- 300x250
So just block images with sizes corresponding to these, and of type gif/jpeg/flash and you should be mostly home free.In this case, companies adhering to the new standards will be a good thing for all of us running through our apache proxies.
There is an email address in the contact on the bottom of the IAB web site article... anyone thinking what I am thinking...
Yep, a cheap $92.99 (shipping and tax not included) starter stunt kite.
From the website : Prism Fanatic is a great "starter" kite. This 6 foot is an all-around freestyle kite that your not likely to out-grow. This kite is framed with a durable carbon frame that is tough enough for first-time flyers, but can perform tricks when your ready.
This kite is sold as a Ready to Fly package, which includes everything you need to start flying: 80ft of 150lbs Sport kiteline, winder, sport straps, CD-Rom, and a Field Card.
Imagine if advertisements prevented you from viewing the website every 10 minutes for 2 or 3 minutes.
:)
Imagine if (gasp!) your whole screen was interupted by an ad.
Those heathen! The ones that advertise and pay for your content!!
God, I'd be so happy without advertising on telly!
Wait... thats called cable and I pay to view the programs. Never mind... what was I talking about again?
Additionally, after the bust, not only did the dot coms stop advertising (obviously), but so did a lot of legitimate companies, when the internet got a bad name, and when it was assumed that internet advertising wasn't working (a partially flase assumption - that *isn't* why the internet companies went under, as we know now). They were replaced by the viagra-HGH-penis enlargement crowd. THe main difference between these two industries is the clientele - ie, not many people click on the type of ads that tend to proliferate these days, and those companies make it on low clickthru rates. The result is that overall clickthru rates have probably dropped.
Unfortunately, as you say, marketing types aren't that bright. The result is that internet ads are thought to not be working when really the click rates are down largely because of the type of advertisers they now attract.
Solution? Of course, they don't work to attract more reputable advertisers, even with loss leaders at first - no, they just conclude the ads need to be bigger! Of course! Expect this trend to continue - the more the ad insustry convinces itself that net ads don't work, the cheaper they become, and the more affordable they become for penis enhancement ads, further reducing click-thru rates, depressing ad revenue....you get the idea.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
people like this are buying them
i sell illegal drugs
IBM's current TV campaign is something I enjoy. The whole ad is an absurd joke, with no hard sell. I even learned the punch lines. "There is no magic performance dust." "There is no business time machine." Their ad agency should get an award. Normally computer TV ads drive me nuts, like the current campaigns of Apple and Dell and every campaign ever from MS.
I have but one thing to say, Privoxy.
Most modern browsers use memory cache + Disk cache to avoid having to retreive new information from over the nework.
Currently I am looking at a "logic works" add.
If I hit Back I KNOW I will be looking at an "IBM PLAYBOOK" add.
If I hit back again a "linux.com" add.
Me thinks you need to get a better browser
may I suggest Mozilla, or Phoenix.
--meh--
"EVIL! Pure and simple, from the Fifth Dimension"!
"Although research has proven the banner works, we are tired of it being referred to as the 'much-maligned' banner," said Greg Stuart...
Sounds rather petty. Translation: "We know the existing advertising format works, but people are calling us names. Well, fine. Now they'll learn the true meaning of 'much maligned'!"
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How can companies expect to be rewarded by annoying their customers?
"Has it ever occured to them to consider that we just don't want to buy the crap they're selling?"
I'm a "leech" and proud of it. I filter ads on the net, change the station on the radio when ads come on, and record tv shows onto CD with my linux box and fast-forward over the ad breaks.
Why do I do it?
Even if I would want to buy an advertised product, I do not want to know about it. Let me explain:
I am more happy before than after seeing any advertisement. If I don't want it, I'm annoyed at the waste of 30 seconds of my precious life. If I do want it, I will subsequently desire an object that I do not have, which will make me less happy until I possess it.
I could buy the object, but I know from experience that (1) New Stuff does not keep you happy for more than a week, then it occupies space and uses up your time and (2) You can buy tech goods cheaper if you wait a month or two.
I may miss the next big product that I can't live without, but, until I see the advertisement, I am happy to remain ignorant of it's existence. If I need something, I will look for it and buy it if I find it.
Sure I'm selfish, but that's the Capitalist Lesson, isn't it?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
I know it's a bit off topic, but I saw the best banner ad on a humor site recently. It said "If this banner is flashing, you are a winner!" And it WASN'T FLASHING!
This has always pissed me off. People talk about the effectiveness of internet advertising. How is this measured? I think it's measured by click-throughs and purchases. How do they measure the effectiveness of print advertising? There's really no way, IMO. You can look at sales revenues, but chances are that advertising isn't the only reason for fluctuations in these numbers.
So, I've always felt that saying internet advertising doesn't work cannot be proven. If I read something, but just choose to not click it, it's still hit a targeted user, and I might make some purchases in the future based on this knowledge. How many people see a commercial on TV and then run out right that second to go buy whatever?!
You can argue about bandwidth costs and such, but there's money that goes into print advertising, as well. It's just a different medium.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy [one of those obnoxiouly advertised cameras] because of their obnoxious advertising. So who -is- buying them?
I always wondered that, myself. Like you, I see the geek appeal, but their advertising turns me completely off (though I have considered buying one to disassemble and refit for wardriving!).
Then, I went to pick up my daughter at a friend's house. Several of her friends are at the "AOL" level of computer proficiency -- that is, they use it like a microwave, turn it on and push the pretty buttons.
So I go up and knock on the door. What did I see looking down at me from the corner of the porch? An X-10 wireless camera.
Went to pick up my other daughter at another friend's house. There it was... tucked behind a hole in the house's vinyl siding was the telltale lens of the X-10.
I didn't make the connection until your post, but now I know who is buying the X-10s... the same people that think that AOL is "the internet", and are probably responsible for all those Snowhite and Klez emails.
What would a wardriver find in my neighborhood?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Subject: Another Lycos Product
Type of Abuse: Fraud
Service: Report Abuse
Comments:
Congratulations!!!!!
You have managed to place the single most annoying banner ad in the history of the Internet on HotBot. The flashing "Congratulations!" banner ad for The Useful has single-handedly ensured that I will never again visit HotBot or any other TerraLycos site. I realize that you need advertising revenue, but in putting such an annoying ad on a search site, you've rendered the site itself useless because the add is so distracting and homicide-inducing.
As a side note, since it's required that I fill in my email address on this form, why don't you mention that BEFORE I get a pop up alert telling me I need to fill it in?
I didn't really think anything would come of it, and of course nothing may. But this reply made me think that if enough people, even a small percentage of total site users, complained about specific ads or ad formats, TerraLycos might change their advertising policies.
From: Hotbot Support
Date: Wed Dec 11, 2002 1:17:21 PM US/Pacific
Subject: Re: Another Lycos Product: Fraud (KMM16622000V40280L0KM)
Reply-To: Hotbot Support
Hello,
Thank you for writing in about the ad banners that appear when you use Hotbot. HotBot tries its best to maintain a balance between cutting edge advertising and good taste. However, this is sometimes a very gray area until we hear from our users who clarify this area for us. Ad banners in the past have been altered or removed because of user concerns. The HotBot team believes that user feedback is a necessity for an effective and successful product. We appreciate the time you took to write in with your comments and we'll be taking your feedback into consideration for our next Hotbot release. Thank you for understanding.
Farah
Lycos Customer Service
----------------------
Lycos.com - Part of the Lycos Network
http://www.lycos.com
(additional Lycos text advertising deleted to protect the innocent)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you don't like the ads, don't visit the sites. Yesterday a /. story pointed to some site that kept asking me if I wanted to download their browser enhancer control or something. I didn't want to, and after saying No 3 times I just went somewhere else. The content was kind of interesting, but if their business model demands that they annoy me away from their site, oh well...
"nerds tend to fixate on things and want to tell everyone how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, even if the other people really might not be all that interested. "
:)
If you didn't notice it yet, a lot of people will throw objectivity out the window and stand behind something 100% just because they happened to buy it. People who love Windows, for example. They love it because they bought it with their PC, and don't want to feel like they've lost out (in most cases).
I'm not saying all nerds and geeks who boost something are people who are trying to justify their monetary or personal investment in that same something, but you should realize that is the major motivation for a lot of people.
I just try and keep skeptical about everything I buy until it's proven its worth. The proof is in the pudding
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This will probably drive more people to use browsers or other software that suppress ads and popups. (I hear that Netscape 7.01 has re-addedd popup suppression, which has been in Mozilla and Galeon forever.) I routinely browse with all images disabled and all popups suppressed (when I'm on machine where I control the browser). If your webpage doesn't work in that mode, (eg you did something stupid like using images for all your buttons, or usiing javascript to open a new window when a link would have done just as well), I typically won't be back.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Would someone please post the new "standard sizes" for ads, so WebWasher can be set to block them by size? Thanks.
The way to make advertising work is to make it simple, clean, and most important of all... INFORMATIVE.
:)
I don't mind a non-obtrusive banner or similar inline advertisement if I can glance at it, know what it means and what it's for in a second, and then either look more closely if it's interesting or ignore it if it isn't.
Animated gif ads fail because the odds of you happening to glance during the frame where it tells you what it actually is are small. If I look at a banner and it says "The next biggest thing...", I automatically dismiss it, even though the next frame might have something cool.
Anything flashing, beeping, playing music just gets filtered automatically, regardless. If I wanted flashing/moving/beeping things I'd play a video game.
Keep it simple, people might buy something if they knew what the hell it was, and it didn't piss them off while trying to get something else done.
TV advertisers need to learn this too... if they start putting popups in the corner, I stop watching that station. If they do it across the board, I'll only watch rented DVD's or pay channels that don't do it. If DVD's start getting that, I'll pirate movies from the internet since I know people out there will find a way to remove them or obtain versions before they were added.
Advertisers are only one step above spammers, and thus will only end up in the 8th level of hell.
Did you write them so they know that you're not buying their product and why?
I didn't, and I won't. It's not worth my time.
If a company has enough people telling them that their internet marketing firm is causing them to lose sales, they'll find a different marketing firm.
But the point is, I don't think they are losing sales. They don't care about the few of us who conciously choose to avoid their products, but rather the many who probably are purchasing these cameras.
Sure it pisses people off (what doesn't?) but in the end the bottom line is all that matters to these companies.
Perhaps a less obnoxious and obtrusive one that might just go buy a google ad and then focus on making the company web page informative and useful.
Hm. Everyone I know who uses the Internet knows who X10 is (they make those neat little cameras!). Most of them (non-geeks) have never heard of Google. Obviously the path they chose got their name in front of a lot of people (possibly *all* of the people who use the 'net)...
Sad thing is, most of the non-geeks, while they do know who X10 is and what those little cameras are, they don't usually remember where they heard about them. IOW they don't remember the annoying popup ads at all, and the fact that it interrupted their web surfing countless times will have no bearing on any purchasing decision.
So the popup ads -- while very annoying to you and I -- were highly effective.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I think you've hit it with: " And there are ads trying to get you to buy things that you didn't come into the store to buy. How come in an online store there are ads for, other stores?"
If you go to a video game store like EB, there are some paid for sections near the door. These have new releases that you might not know about. Also posted (and also mentioned by the sales staff) are things like December discounts. They educate the consumer about the products and prices, because an educated consumer will make a good purchase that they will be satisfied with (no return + restock costs).
Online webstores don't have this. Sometimes you get, "people who bought X also bought Y" links, which can be helpful. But you don't get the, "this is on special!" notices in a nice way. If they're in a banner, I'm blind to them already (Privoxy or not). Why? Because of advertisers who think that attention is the only thing important. They want your attention, even if you won't change your purchase decisions at all. Even if it'll build up a negative purchase reaction.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Hey. For what it's worth, I don't carry ads or any other "gimme, gimme, gimme!" devices on my site since I figure it will just piss off site visitors and hurt me in the long run. Besides, 1000s of sites have advertising, would it be so bad if one didn't?
I do make some nice money from providing banned books info with affiliate-paid linked Amazon reviews, and from pointing out really good independent artists at CDBaby that I also make an affiliate free from if you purchase something. That said, if you want your web site to make money from something besides affiliate fees and ad fees, you need to provide enough value to your clients or the public to be worth charging for. Otherwise forget it, IMO.
Chuck
I notice they exist only if i have to use IE ( under 5 % of surfing time). In Chimera (Mozilla, Omniweb etc) there are no such things as unrequested pop-ups, banners etc. Just say no to Explorer. =)
"Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising?"
The actual advertisements on the website, I'm sure, only manage to cover costs of hardware failures in their internet search cluster. They only use it to refine their engine technology and as a test set. Other sites, like Monster.com, Yahoo, etc, in turn will licence that technology for their own search problems because it scales way better than something like ht://dig, and is proven to be very effective because people use them as an internet search engine. The purpose of Google's search site is to publicize their engine, and help refine it. It doesn't make enough money by itself for their staff.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats.
So when I pulled up the whole story, to read the comments on slashdot, what did I see right away? A HUGE OSDN ad, right below the story text.
Perhaps Michael should take his complaints about large adverts down the hall to his boss.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I have just created the next "thing" in advertising. Its a distributed computing solution for advertisers. Users install the distributed software from the sites they browse. No ads appear during browsing or on actual websites but the websites do get to upload their ads to you (thinks really loud animated/sound screen savers here) and when your systems screen saver kicks in, it rotates irritating ads. The inital install is extreemly small and unnoticeable because the ads build up over time. The best part is, the software retakes control of your screen saver everytime the user visits an affiliate site and sets the screen saver timeout to 1 minute. The "Screead@Home Screead Saver" (TM) is interactive so users can click the screen and launch a site related to the product or service. Future versions of my ad system will install P2P software and turn users systems into nodes which will share ad tracking information. When like users machines are detected, the machines will share targeted ads with eachother. Rollup reports of such ad activity is also reported to the central Screead server for my targeted advertising mail lists (as stated by the implied agreement when users download the Screead Saver). Yes, this is a joke...
...of why advertising stinks try this: http://forums.digiguide.com/topic.asp?id=9719.
It's a write up explaining why ad sponsorship is bad and why the web site is switching to subscription. Shame everyone can't be just as honest about the whole thing.
It looks like the truth is out about the emperors new clothes!
I've encountered this a couple of times, and agree with you completely. It seems like a disservice to the advertisers NOT to have them listed somewhere on your site. Most trade mags will have an advertisers index in the back for just this purpose. Need to find that 1/4 page ad on the Endless Pool? Look on page 18. Seems so simple, yet nobody on the web does it in an easy, logical way, AFAIK.
Now that I have broadband, I'm not as angry at ads, since they don't make the pages take (noticably) longer to load. The least sites can do is let me find the advertisers I want to get to.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You sir, are what your ancestors would have recognized as "wise."
Going to the bathroom during commercial breaks is not stealing. Blocking popup ads is not stealing.
Stealing is the *unlawful* taking away from someone that which is *rightfully* theirs.
For starters, I don't know how to break it to the "blocking ads is stealing" folks, but-there's no bloody law against it. Nor does the advertiser own or otherwise have a *right* your attention.
They have to *induce* your participation of your own free will.
Advertising is a *speculative* behaviour on the part of the advertisers. They pay to place ads in the *hope* that you will view it. You have made no contract with them. Not even an implied one by turning on your TV set. You don't have to read other people's Adidas T-shirts either.
In legal philosophy there is no essential difference between saying blocking ads is stealing than saying not buying the product is stealing. Simply because you have a product does not give you a *right* to my attention or money. You must *induce* me to participate in a *contractual* arrangement.
Yes, you're selfish. No, that isn't the capitalist lesson (sic).
A certain selfishness is inate to being a lifeform. Life lives on life. Someone, or something, has suffered and died so that you may continue to live. Amoeba are predators. Even plants which do not predate live off the bodies of dead plants and animals and compete with their own species for living space and resources. For the most part, without sufficient selfishness you will die.
Contrary to the apparent opinion of some, as a human being, you are also innately somewhat *socialistically* inclined. If this were not so there would be no civilization, and hence no capitalism. Humans are inherently family group/tribally oriented. We live together in vaguely cooperative groups for our mutual benifit. We could not even raise our own young without this social tendency. Capitalism is innately really nothing more than a score keeping system for moderating between the selfish and the social tendencies of both the individual and the group. It is a system of * fair exchange* based on *contractual* participationn of all parties. The free will of all must be engaged in the process.
It is *not* innately a system for "getting as much as you can however you can" or *forcing* behaviours out of others.
The term for that is "Rapacious Bastard"
A highway robber is rapacious. A highway robber is not a capitalist. A coporate robber is not a capitalist either, he's a robber just like the highwayman. Nothing more, nothing less.
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"Some rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen."
That's why we bother to have civil courts. Capitalism has *rules.* Break the rules suffciently and you'll end up in criminal court rather than civil. A theif is as a theif does.
If a company wants to *obligate* me to watch their ads, they must *contract* with me. Explicitly.
That's the rule.
KFG
"Designed to be acceptable to advertisers and agencies"
But certainly not we, the readers of said ad.
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Heres something I have been thinking of:
ISP based filters. How many of you would sign up for an ISP that says to sites "we block all ads to our customers except banner ads"
Is it even possible to have a proxy block pop-up ads? if not currently possible - is anyone working on this.
I know that I would sign up for an ISP that blocks stuff like this for me.
As it stands now - I recently get a full page ad when logging into a yahoo mail account from home because I have SBC DSL and a yahoo account that I use. They see the login coming from my SBC IP and then first redirect me to a Yahoo/SBC ad. utter BS.
what do you think? would an anti-ad ISP do well?
What about jpeg2000??? I mean, its 30-500% smaller than a jpg and that allows to show a decent banner for less bandwidth...
Proxomitron and
Guidescope
Personally, I prefer the Proxomitron because it allows you to do other things, like turn off Flash and certain Javascript annoyances (like sites that stuff moving text in the status bar).
Back at the start of online advertising, it was just a banner. But immediately, people got furious at these ads "eating up bandwidth". Of course, an ad is more data to download, so yes, it does use some of your bandwidth. But, especially in those days, this was absolutely dwarfed by the huge volume of largely unnecessary images on sites. I once did an informal study of web sites such as Yahoo, Excite UK, and the total size of the images was usually twice as big as the size of the banner ad.
Smaller sites such as my own survived solely on advertising revenues. I had no pop-ups, just one banner on each page. It hardly took up "90% of screen space" like one poster suggests.
Now, because people have got a very negative view of ad banners (with virtually no justification), the industry has virtually declined to nothing, and sites like mine are in serious financial difficulty. It is no wonder that companies are then increasingly trying desperate measures like pop-ups. Personally I have decided not to display pop-ups though. As for people pointing to the success of Google's text ads as an example, it's just not applicable to most sites. Google can display relevant ads, and as a person is using Google to find something, ads are more appropriate anyway. It simply wouldn't be economical for sites with more modest traffic to set up their own "AdWords" system.
Now I'm not sure if my site will survive. I'm sure many people will be thinking "Well, if it's good enough, people will pay!". That's true: but the site isn't really good enough. I know that sounds like a strange admission, but in other forms of media it's an acceptable business model. For instance, look at the free UK newspaper Metro (distributed on trains and buses usually). Would you pay for that? No. But you read it because it's free, and it's paid for by advertisers.
Before /.-ers condemn the entire online advertising industry so harshly, they should realise the implications--if the downturn in the market continues, a significant proportion of the web will vanish. You might not be bothered, but some people will be!
(Thanks for reading this massive post!)
Google's advertisement method is by far the best I've seen. I actually click on them sometimes.
Or is stupidity just something you've developed over time? Do you always post dumb comments on Slashdot? Do you think anyone cares?
the Leatherman e-commerce site is perhaps the best argument for the use of flash I could possibly think of. Note that it's not an advertisment. And I think re-imaging a machine just because you looked at a flash site with it is a tad paranoid and freaky, eh?
I don't *ever* go anywhere close to AOL, MSN, Yahoo! or anything related to CNet..
BFD, sez I..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I have a spare test box. I don't want Flash ads on the machine I actually use. no paranoia involved, I just don't want it. It's very rare that I would actually need to go to a flash enabled site. Because of what I do for a living, I have a method of actually doing so when necessary and sanitizing the machine later.
I don't actually HAVE to re-image immediately after going to a Flash site, btw. The machine is a general sandbox, for use whenever I don't trust an application, for whatever reason. It's just convenient that I can leave Flash off my main computer as a result
I'm sure the Leatherman site is pleasant to look at and very clever, but there is no reason it HAS to be done in Flash. Ecommerce can be done very successfully without the overhead. I'll take a look at it next time I'm using that rig though. Thanks for the heads up.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Nor have they, the "big boys", come up with any new scheme that actually *works*.
I have a good example: I run a pretty popular site that is supported by popup ads (boo! hiss!). But I get to see that stats of those ads. Of the ten thousand or so a day that are shown, an average of 5 are clicked a day. Not five thousand. just five.
5. Out of 10,000. And I'm willing to wager that those clicks were accidental. You'd think that the avertisers would realise that this is not very equitorial.
Contrast that to the text ads that I have (a popup ad is show to you once every 24 hours, but text ads are shown every time), where people buy them by the click (in lots of 50 clicks or so). These ads bought by the click as opposed to the popups which are bough by the impression, but thetext ads get an average of 20 clicks a day per text ad.
In the end it works out that the text ads, which cost ten bucks, are doing many times the business that the popups, which concievably cost the advertisers many thousands of dollars, are doing.
But wait, popup ads were popularized by Google a while ago and when they came out all the big advertising companies said there was no way that they would work. But they do, so whom do you trust?
Of course, far be it from me to complain if clueless companies want to throw money at me to buy popups that don't work. I won't tell.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I've been reading the comments about this, most of which I agree with. "Flasy this, animated that, the size is annoying" blah blah blah. Comments like "I might actually buy the product if the ad wasn't so big and annoying."
;-)
When you think about it it really all boils down to this:
It's not the size that matters. It's how you use it.
whee!
God Bless SquidGuard.
Is this a serious story submission, or just an excuse to try and slashdot IAB? :-)
Google's ads are the only ones I've voluntaraly considered and clicked on to see what the advert was about in months. Just about everyone elses get ignored. Ocassionally I'll glance at slashdot's, but thats it.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I thought 'IAB' stood for Institute for Applied Bogodynamics.
It seems to fit.
Rather than complaining to Slashdot, however, I popped open my email and sent off two very nasty letters, one to ESPN.com informing them that if they kept up the practice I would find my sports news elsewhere, and another to Cingular's customer service department. I told Cingular that I would never, ever purchase any product from them, directly as a result of their advertising practices.
Two things of note:
- Simply finding ESPN.com's service email took about half an hour of searching on their website, and I only received an automated "Thank you for your comment" email in reply.
- Cingular wrote back a very sincere apology for the ads, and since then I've never seen another ad like that from them.
Now, I'm not claiming to have changed Cingular's behavior single-handedly; I'm sure many other people wrote or called them as well. I'm simply reiterating the fact that these people are in business to earn our business, and that rather than whining or pompously proclaiming our superiority amongst ourselves, we can be much more effective by voting with our wallets and voicing our beliefs to the company/ies directly.ESPN.com, incidentally, has only run one other Flash ad that appeared over the content since then, in my experience. We have power, people. Let's use it more effectively!
You'd think at some point they would realize that if people aren't buying your crap, maybe it's because you don't need their crap, not because they aren't being obnoxious enough with the advertising. What the advertising should be doing is setting the seed in our minds for the day that we may need that exact bit of crap. Then we think, "Hey, I remember that witty, creative ad for *blah crap* that I saw a month or so back. Maybe I should look that up." Instead, they assume that they need to scream at us to buy it now, buy it now, regardless of whether we want it or not.
Do they really think pissing us off is going to make us want to buy their stuff any quicker?
Bite my yammer.
What's a pop-up? pop-under?
...a banner ad:
thinkgeek.com
The ad was small and un obtrusive. The one I clicked on actually advertised an *obvious product* (I think it was a mug or a tie). Just about every other add I've seen in my 8 years on the internet has been utter crap. If you're selling somthing, come out and say it. If I want it, I'll buy it. Otherwise fsck off!
You're right, though. Even if I saw the Coolest Thing in the World(tm) in a popup ad I would never buy it because it violates my sense of control over my environment (ie. computer).
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
A few months ago, I downloaded a program called the Pop-Up Stopper. It's free, and takes up almost no space. It also stops all regular pop-up ads. I admit that it doesn't catch all of them (some of the ones with unusual scripts running can fool it), but I'd guess it stops 9 out of every 10 ads. If you actually want a window to pop-up, all you have to do is hold down the Control key while you click on the link. It's very little hassle, and stops a lot of ads. Give it a shot!
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
Sites that are only eye candy meant to draw you in to see the ads do not work. However, if a site has information you want to see, ala slashdot, the ads tend to be targeted to the visitors. And, I would bet they even work some times.
Look at all the "internet companies" that are now gone. Their business model was:
1) attract people
2) sell adds
3) profit
Sites that are using ads as a way of supporting themselves but not as a way to make millions ARE succeeding.
comment directly in my journal
A suggestion was reported the other day that customers may consider paying 1c for each advertisement that was *not* transmitted to them over their video-on-demand cable channel. This is a smashing idea. I'll happily pay small beer for an advertising-free existence.
I'd like to see the same sort of thing for the web, except the cost per advert should be much lower (e.g. 0.01c/filtered ad.) My ISP would bill me $5/month or whatever, filter out the advertising, and distribute the micropayments to the sites whose advertising had been filtered (one can imagine also
placing a cap on the number of adverts a page might
try to fit in - I seriously doubt I'm interested in the content of a page that has a double-figure number of ad's.)
Links is a text based browser and hence imune ;)
Look at the Google explanation. If you're not getting high click-through rates, Google will charge you more for your rank in the advertising list.
And although I can't confirm this on the Google web site, I have read that if your click-through rate drops below 0.5%, the ad is automatically dropped.
Google still has by far the best advertising system I have ever seen on the Internet
Go Google!
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice
and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the
master calls a butterfly.
-- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
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