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.
So now instead of annoying consumers, let's just restrict what we show them. Is that the jist of it?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Banner ads compelling? To whom?
...is because pop-ups are more visible (read as: annoying) and they don't mess up the site's page layout.
So when I hear "Ask Jeeves is eschewing banners for paid listings" I cynically suspect they left out "and a heaping crapload of pop-ups."
It's all a moot point, though, because who in their right mind uses Ask Jeeves in the first place?
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
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
kind of a next evolution of the yellow pages
Really? I swear my dead-tree yellow pages does the same thing...
I don't have a problem with paid listings, as long as they don't mess with the search order based on how much the companies pay. The Yellow Pages don't put the highest paying customers all in the front of the book with no regard to what you're looking for.
Let them have a nice little relevant ad in the search results, but keep the search results in proper order.
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!
It's still good to see that a site that has been around a while has chosen to do this. If foo.com/random/users/~bob/suff/site decided to do this, no one would care. Ask Jeeves is at least visible and known. I say that as long as the paid links are clearly marked (they appear to be in the top section as "sponsored results") like google's, they I say good. Hopefully other sites will follow this model. Unfortunately, this model doesn't really work for places like salon.com or non-search engine sites.
rarr rarr rarr ask jeeves sucks rarr rarr rarr use google rarr rarr rarr
But what happens when Google has a monopoly?
I believe popup-banners and all the pop-unders etc.. have played a large part in poluting the internet AD industry, and made most all of us bitter and ad-unfriendly.
At one time banner ads thrived, you could sell them on a popular site and make thousands, or you could spend a little and get a lot elsewhere.
Now in 2003, banner ads are looked down at. Most of us either ignore the ads and don't even pay attention to them, or we block them with certain tools.
TextAds are not to shabby tho, providing basic detail in a non-pictorial format just to let us know what it is and a link to learn more about it.
Google, by providing Textads and not huge 468x60 banners, has kept their site clean and no cluttered.
Sites like Slashdot, Yahoo, and many more are slowly realizing banners are not producing enough UNF to pay the bills, and are resorting to subscriber based services like Yahoo Personals, or Slashdot's subscriptions.
Another prime example would be Salon.com.
The dotcom boom is long over, and will never be the same again... Look at how we view TV commercials!
Companies spend TONS of money on magazine ads, billboards, newspaper ads..etc. And you can't track how many views or sales leads they generate the way you can on the web.
I bet those billboards and newspaper ads create less web page views than web banners.
Yet companies still spend money on those types of advertising.. Why? Because advertising is all about familiarity. Getting the name and image out and making it stick in people's heads. Banners are an effective way of doing that.
Nobody expects someone to read a newspaper ad and run to the store to buy something, so why do people expect that kind of behaviour on the web??
I wasn't even aware that Ask Jeeves was still around! Is someone still giving them capital to burn?!?!?
This space available.
Ostiguy said he thinks ask jeeves has also seen its day. Although, he isn't sure if they even really actually had one. When you are trailing google, you *cannot* make decisions that will put you further behind. Making your search engine results more suspect is not a winning strategy.
ostiguy
It's like combining the yellow pages with the library.
Q: Where can I find information about the library?
AskJeeves: Who needs a library when you have AMAZON.COM?
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!"
Jeeves is a character from a series of extremely fun P.G. Wodehouse books (example) who continually makes up for his master's bumblings in upper-class England.
Weird News
It doesn't answer the question, or provide any answer at all. The search engine summarizer, Copernic Agent has an ask question feature that actually works. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Ask Jeeves sucks! Worst search engine ever. Don't waste your time with Ask Jeeves.
How ya like dat?
Slashdot.com annouced they will drop banner advertising in favor of articles shilling products for a fee. "What the hell," said Rob Malda, "we have been doing it for a year now, and we are still getting first posts and tons of trolls."
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
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!
to use your enemy's own money and resources against them when your own resources are considerably less.
It's an Aikido thing.
KFG
Sure, it's certainly nothing compared to google, but if you're asking a common question it serves up the answer much faster than google will. Also, google's great for techies like us, but some people can be confused by the way it just rattles off a bunch of sites and it's easier for them to just get an answer strait from Jeeves. Jeeves also gives you a list of other related searches on the right-hand side of the screen that I find very usefull when I'm trying to get just the right word combination in order to get some good results.
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.
Nice, I also maintain one here for those interested:
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
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
that kind of behaviour on the web??"
Beats the hell out of me. From my perspective the "failure" of banner ads has come from the advertisers themselves not having a very clear idea of their own business. This is less uncommon than many people think.
For a perspective on this read "Ogilvy on Advertising." Why this book isn't on every executive's desk is beyond me.
Most companies don't have a clear idea on the difference between advertising and promotion either. I recall seeing an interview with A-B's NASCAR rep. He explicitly stated that the 50 million or so they spend in Budweiser sponsorship, so far as they knew, didn't result in one *single* can of beer being sold, and that they didn't care. That wasn't what they were spending that money for in the first place.
Please note that Budweiser is the number one selling beer in America by a goodly margin. These people have taken a ride on the clue train. Why others don't observe and learn is a wonder and a mystery.
Porsche sold every 959 at a loss. Estimates of how *much* of a loss range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands . . . *per unit.* No one but Porsche knows for sure.
Decades later Porsche still considers this some of the best money they've ever spent. Hmmmmmmmm, maybe another clue?
Banner ads work. It isn't the fault of the *ads* if the *advertisers* don't understand the definition of "works."
KFG
does this mean that nobody surfing gives two craps about banner ads and never did anyway?
umm, yes sir, think it does. this isn't even news, i think a few of us use google, who seem to make money without banners. hell, i think anyone who knows enough to read this site, knew that banners weren't all that even when the rest of the world was fooled.
what a sarcastic day for me . . . no reason to stop now!
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
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 ?
I've often wondered why companies and websites have insisted on using _banner_ ads as their preferred medium of profiling a product. It seems that everyone can spot such an advertisement a mile off. A much more subtle "trick" is to use advertise in a simple text link. That way the user has a harder time differentiating the commercialised crap and actual content. Oh well, I suppose I should be grateful. On another note, I like how Google clearly marks their text ads with a yellowish frame.
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
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.
Those victoria secrets billboard ads and enwspaper ads certainly got my 100% attention :9.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In three or four years I would not be surprised if site access fees amount ot roughly the same as people pay for cable and/or cell phone services on a monthly basis.
Also, once access to content is charged, crawlers like Google can forget about mirroring sites for free, unless the webmaster sees it in their best interest, which it won't be for the biggest players who don't like their competition mirroring their content.
Over time that will change. As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content. Look at Google News. Really, how long can they expect their crawler to be allowed to copy content? In this sense all Google is doing is stealing content someone somewhere paid for, Reuters feeds aren't free folks. For now thats fine, the stakes are low. As soon as Google News actually competes as a news site, their crawler won't be allowed in.
I would not be surprised to see major content owners to charge access to crawlers in the future. Why not? If users are charged, so should crawlers. In fact the crawler should be charged more, as they are basically getting a copy to redistribute it to many users, not just to be viewed by one.
In the next few years, as ownership and access to content become critical issues for the bottom line, Google may find itself facing a toll both instead of a robots.txt file.
I think it's unfair for advertisers to give up on banner ads just because they get closer to the ugly truth on how directly effective ads are.
I mean, aren't most TV ads just a convenient time to:
1) Go to the toilet.
2) Get/make a nice snack/drink
3) Study - 50% show, 50% study (some ad breaks can be rather long).
4) Do minor housekeeping, etc.
Print ads? I often don't even _see_ big newspaper ads. Especially those which are mainly big pictures. Because I'm usually "browsing with images off" - my eyes automatically look for columns of small text. e.g. "Full page ad? What full page ad? I don't see no stinkin'... Oh you mean this one taking up the whole left page facing the article I'm reading? Ah *sheepish grin*". Advertorials often have better luck with my eyeballs...
Most of us have other things to do in our lives. Heck if we're really busy we may not even talk to people we know if we see them on the street - just give them a wave. So what do they expect from ads? If I visit a site, it's for the site's main content, not the ads. Doh. Go figure.
To all advertisers, I'll look for you when I need you, make sure I know how to spell and recognise your name, and that your name appears when I do a search for your sort of stuff and last but not least make sure most of your customers like you and your product.
*[src*='ads.'],, * ='us.a1.yimg.com'],y : none !important;
*[src*='/ad/'],
*[src*='/ads/']
*[src*='/Ads/'],
*[src*='doubleclick'],
*[src
*[src*='advertis'],{
displa
}
etc
The thing about Mozilla is between its popup blocking, control of javascript, and user css I really really don't understand why anyone would surf without it. Its just liberating not to have to deal with crappy banners and not to have to deal with a proxy.
I just wanted to point this out to the 90% of visitors to Slashdot that use IE. There are good alternatives out there.(No I'm not joking the vast majority of vistors here use IE)
BTW Go 49ers!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Banner ads are still done wrong on a lot of sites. The problem is they are too often arranged to be paid based on the number of times clicked, and ignore payment based on impression. Impression is how ads work in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. But on the web, many advertisers saw the possibility of interactive clicking and just assumed a consumer would click on the ad whenever they wanted to find out more. Just notice how many ads don't really tell you in the ad what company or even what product/service is involved.
Unlike most of the other media, web users often tend to be motivated for other goals at the moment the ad is impressed. For example when visiting a portal like Ask Jeeves, they have something on their mind they are looking for. The ad is just a diversion and they are unlikely to go there.
But ... ad impressions still work. They just have a latent psychological effect that builds up over time. Seeing the ad once, if its something you are really interested in, might get you over to that site ... later on today. Or it might even get you to buy that product ... later on this week. And if it's something you have no interest in at all, when you see that ad (best if it's not intrusive which would make it negative) many many times, you build up "brand awareness". Later, maybe many months later, when you do have a need for that product or service, or happen to be talking with someone who does, then the brand name comes up. When shopping for that kind of product and you see several choices on the store shelves, you're more inclined to pick the brand that was more advertised just because it now seems to be the more familiar brand ... and you never even visited their web site.
If you like fast food and McDonalds adds a new product to their lineup which you might like, the banner ad for it might clue you in to this wonderful new treat. But are you likely to visit their web site? A few people might. Most won't. Are you likely to pull in the next time you're driving down the street while hungry on your lunch break? Very likely.
Too many web site operators think they have to be paid for advertising based on click throughs. That's just wrong, and it needs to change for web advertising to survive (the interactivity goals based on ads was never a realistic concept).
Too many businesses in product areas, especially consumer, where there is no real value of a web site to their product (fast food, small appliances, groceries, clothing, etc) are just not advertising on the web at all because they know people won't click on the ads to visit their site (no obvious value to it). What they are missing is that the impression model still works ... or that they are afraid of advertising based on impressions because of some difficulties in accounting and auditing (mostly because its still too click-through oriented and these problems are not yet well solved).
Impression ads, of course, have to be cheaper per impression than a click-through. And this won't rule out still having click-through ads. While writing this comment the Think Geek ad for Bawls is blinking away at me. I'm not going to be visiting because I have no interest today. But if next month I happen to have an interest in it, I know where to go get it. That's latent response impression advertising. But it only works when the ad makes it clear where to go (domain names help if it's an online place to go). And it only works if the web site is going to get paid even if no one ever clicks on the ad.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Well between mozilla's pop-up blocking capabilities and the Bannerblind addon. I've been browsing banner-free for quite some time.
Why do you want to block /. 's ads? They aren't intrusive and they don't have annoying animations.
...but I've long sinced changed to the "ALL ads/banners blocked, in the case they could be annoying" policy. And I'll install any general filter that'll do it better, even if useful and friendly ads get blocked as collateral damage. Btw, slashdot seems kinda divided on the entire issue, it's not very different from skipping TV commercials (on free TV, to not get into the "I pay for TV already discussion).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content
But hang on, Google News only takes the headline and first paragraph -- it doesn't copy entire stories. And the main web index already allows you to specifically exclude your pages from Google's cache if that's what you'd prefer.
However, by allowing Google to spider your site and exerpt a paragraph or two the result is a three-way value exchange:
1. Google gets to build a great index that it can leverage to generate revenue
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
3. The average Net user gets a nicely organized index to help them track down the latest news or information.
So long as this balance remains, everybody wins.
When I started out in the online News aggregation business five years ago I encountered some resistance from a few news sites (such as Nando.net) that actually wanted to charge me for carrying their headlines and providing links to their stories.
Just 18 months later (when my aggregation network was being accessed over a million times a day), many of those same news sites were begging to be included in the index because they wanted the traffic.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
Just look at the Google model -- one of the main reasons that it is at the top of the pile is because it continues to offer a good value exchange to visitors.
Unlike many of its peers, Google doesn't assault you with endless banners and pop-ups or insult you with paid listing that are made to look like genuine search results. As a user, I get good value out of Google so I keep going back.
If someone chooses not to be included in Google's index because they demand payment then it's their loss, not mine (nor Google's).
No. Firstly, because I don't think Google even qualifies as a monopoly.
Secondly, Google didn't con and cheat it's way to the top. People use it because they prefer to use it. They simply have a better product/service.
Lets say you run TheFooBarTimes.com. You publish stories that are linked in Google news. Over time your users start using Google News instead of logging in to TheFooBarTimes.com top page. You are no longer in control of the browsing experience - in fact your browsing in mixed in with every other news site and managed by Google.
Added to which, the ad space on your index page/top page is now worthless as no one goes there anymore. Ad space on the top page of Google News continues to sell briskly, thanks to your hard work in generating all of the free content which they copy and control.
And in the long run people will return to Google News, not the news site. Thus rendering the ad space on the news site's top page worthless, and enriching the ad space on Google News's top page. Trust me, people are going to come around to this.
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
As I said in my first post, for small publishers this makes sense. For someone like AOL, that does not need distribution, brand name enhancement, or exposure for sites like SportsIllustrated.com and Time.com, it is a losing proposition, as they compete with Google for ad dollars. Over time content the web will be centralized, and those megacorps will not be sending big bucks on acquisitions just to share and share alike.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
So the WSJ will fail? So Consumer Reports will fail? Basically you are saying that anyone who charges for content is doomed, yet the numbers show that the sites that charge access are among those that have respectable profitability.
I mean, lets not be naive, content on the web is not getting more free over time. Many major content owners like AOL and Knight Ridder are getting ready to put a price tag on access as soon as they think they can get away with it. If they charge for a magazine or newspaper, why would they not eventually do the same with web content?
Having interned at a media buying company whose clients often advertised on a wide variety of search engines (this was about two years ago, before Google had really started to dominate) I'm a little confused. Your comment seems very well thought out and reasonable, but in my experience it also seems a lot like how things are already done, at least in the case of the search engines I worked with.
Click-thru rate is astonishingly small--something like one in a thousand. So the buyer pays for impressions first and foremost, so many dollars (or cents) for so many thousands of times the ad is seen. Click-thrus are also kept track of and earn a higher rate and a cookie is set to keep track of whether the viewer actually buys a product from the web site. If there is a click-thru purchase, the web site gets paid much more for that than an individual impression, of course. The cookie also works so that the buyer can look at the banner ad but not click on it--if he just sees the ad and ends up placing an order a week later without having ever clicked on it the search engine still gets paid for it, though usually not as much as a straight click-thru purchase.
So impressions, click-thrus, and purchases are kept track of and charged accorindingly. In fact, during my high school internship my job was to format the reports of number of views, clicks, purchases, et al. for the client. As far as I know, the impression-based advertising model is in place online on most search engines, and has been for a while.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
need to use more than fingers to count the number of girls
Hehehe.... let me guess... you've had both hands amputated haven't you?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
I agree on stop moving ads. It is the reason I removed Macromedia from my system. It was bad enough when you had to right click the ad to get a menu to uncheck play and loop. When a right click only gave "About Macromedia" with no control, that was the straw that convinced me to extract it completely. Macromedia forgot who the end users are. It is not the advertisers they sell the tools to. You can't sell to the advertisers if you offend enough end users who remove the client.
Anybody at Macromedia care to comment?
A simple "play this animation" button would be a nice feature. Then I could then again visit flash sites. Right now it's an all or nothing choice. Abuse by advertisers convinced me to drop flash. Value of flash only sites did not outweigh the detraction of unstoppable flash ads.
If a flash AD was revelant to what I was interested in, A play button may get a click. Always leave me a stop button. Even better would be a play button.
So far I haven't removed banner ads because the ESC key stops the animated GIF's. Otherwise they would have been blocked long ago.
The truth shall set you free!
...but that's precisely what your readers want! Google does a better job of doing what the user wants than you ever could.
No web site is irreplacable.
DNA just wants to be free...