Slashdot Mirror
Ask Jeeves Gives Up On Banner Ads
WhatBusinessModel? writes "In another blow to online banner advertising, Ask Jeeves is announcing that it will stop running banner ads on its website in favor of more paid listings. Says Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves Web Properties, 'I think banners have seen their day. They're not as compelling as they once were.' In contrast, he describes paid listings as 'kind of a next evolution of the yellow pages.'" Probably a change that will become more and more prominent in the search engine world.
Ask who? Oh, you mean that thing that's not anywhere near as useful as Google, which by the way also eschews banner ads in favor of paid listings? Yeah, I'm real broken up about this.
I write in my journal
Speaking of banner ads, I am curious as to how much slashdot gets from having MICROSOFT BANNER ADS.
I mean, it's like greenpeace being sponsored by exxon.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Monopolies are only bad when they're abusive monopolies. If google was the only search engine around and wasnt making any kind of improvements to itself that might be justified, but past experience has shown that google is constantly trying to improve itself and come up with new innovative search techniques and features. So I dont think we have much to worry about :)
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
According to a few reports on the Internet, Google is profitable, whereas, ASKJ is still in the red. Although they decreased net loss by 95% they're still doing bad. I guess the CEO of ASKJ had a thought similar to: "What income sources does Google have? Are there any we could imitate? Well, let's do so and hope we'll join the ranks of profitable dotcom's!"
A very different approach to Google - from this months Wired:
Apparently the sponsored link sites aren't even allowed to use popups.
-- Mike
I'd like to know how successful advertising banners turned out for the slashdot team. I'm currently considering to build a community site myself and would like to be compensated through descreet banners - then again, I don't even register those things anymore. Maybe traffic should really be directed to sites by articles and comments such as the ones right here on /.
The other side of the coin really is the growing question of the effectiveness of online (and offline/real life) advertising . A lot of companys have established a multifaceted approach to getting their products and services into the public's mind; but I sometimes wonder if they might overestimate their effectiveness, despite all recent criticism. Now, this might spell true for banner ads, billboards, TV commercials, printed ads, etc.. altogether, but the issue of advertising as an effective selling tool is a much bigger discussion. I prefer the community/word of mouth approach anyday!
There are plently of people here who use MS products. I'd bet the vast majority surfing this site are running IE on some flavor of windows.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
It wasn't so long ago that people were touting text ads as a bandwidth-friendly and clean solution to the banners mess. A lot of major sites (Google...) and other popular sites (fuckedcompany, blogger) adopted them. What happened?
---- scrm
It's Amazing how many people on this site worship Google through the roof and laugh at sites that are honestly trying to compete. Does monopoly laws not apply to search engines ?
Text ads work well in google because
a) they're placed close to what someone is searching for.
b) their keyword relevance is selected by the user. As we all know, there's much more power and accuracy as users provide more information (compare dmoz & yahoo for example).
Slashdot could easily do the same - put some contexctually based pay per click ads close to the stories. This would help all of us.
For example, see a story about MySQL? Put a list on the side of the story comprised of text based PPC ads. The advertisers who want to be associated with that product will know how much its worth for them to be listed at the top.
a monopoly is when a company is so big that it can sell its products at lower prices becuase it has tons of money, and undercut its competitors.
--or--
In the case microsoft, a monopoly also creates products that are only compatable with its own products, and specifacally creates products witch prevent competitors products from being installed. But thats a whole different argument.
Google is a free service. So are all search engines. Google makes its money by being a better search engine, getting lots of people to use it. Then it can go and do things like the occasional add, or banner, or the little paid advertaisment related to your search.
Lets say google was infinitely huge, that everyone used it, and that it was by far better then any of its competition. It still doesn't have a monoply. Nothing is preventing competition.
On the other hand, if windows came installed with the google bar, and didn't allow a simalar product to be installed for any other search engine. Then that might be a different story.
--pardon the bad spelling--
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Actually, it's in the Art of War by Sun Tzu.
9. Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy. Thus the army will have food enough for its needs.
15. Hence a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy's provisions is equivalent to twenty of one's own, and likewise a single picul of his provender is equivalent to twenty from one's own store.
Both excerpts are from Part II: Waging War
There's a problem with that, though (at least as far as I can tell). The banner ads at Slashdot, for example, are from images.slashdot.org. If I block those, I lose all of the icons on the page, which I don't want to do. Mozilla needs a finer-grained image filter, based on the image name and/or path (e.g., block stuff with "banner" or "ad" in the path).
/. 's ads? They aren't intrusive and they don't have annoying animations. Sites *do* have to pay for server and bandwidth costs, you know that, right? I believe ads should only be blocked if they are intrusive. (ie, annoying animated gifs, flash, popups, very large banners)
Why do you want to block
In phoenix, I block popups, have Java turned off, and don't have flash. Even when they aren't used in intrusive ads, 98% of the time java and flash are just crutches for poor web design.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Google news links take you directly to the news provider's page (unlike Yahoo, which co-brands almost everything).
If I had, say, a newspaper, I would very much like to be well-placed on Google news, since I'm giving them very little (a summary, a small photo) and getting a great listing in return; and I have control in the end, since somebody is coming to my site to read the story. As far as I can tell they only require you to be a serious news source and to allow people to read the linked story with no hijinks (like popups, registration etc).
In fact, if I had a special-interest paper or magazine, I would even consider paying Google news, a-la AdWords, for right-column listings. For example, the Wall Street Journal would presumably love to show up on all Google news searches for "NASDAQ."
And in the case of the WSJ online, which is not free, it would be smart of them to have a free section just for Google news, where full articles (linked from Google) are free but there are plenty of hints about how much more you get if you pay. But I digress...
I think your comment is perhaps more applicable to Yahoo. Whatever they pay a newspaper for the feed (or Reuters etc), the content provider isn't getting anything else, except maybe a byline and a logo.
This Like That - fun with words!