Slashdot Mirror
Online Newspapers Turning a Profit
PCOL writes "The Asia Times reports that after years of losing money, online newspapers are starting to pay off. The New York Times has gone from losing $7.5M on their site in 2001 to an $8M profit in 2002. The new profitability is attributed to changes in the technology for delivering ads which make it possible to embed advertising in news stories and tie the ads to articles related to reader's interests without resorting to pop-ups and banners. As print newspaper readers age and die, no new readers are replacing them and one survey found that 46 percent of all journalists believe that within 15 years their publication will only be available online."
The New York Times has even figured out a way around the Mozilla popup blocker.
The NY Times uses a system (unique, I belive) designed to match appropraite ad content to any story. The system is called "N.Y.T.E.S.," (according to a buddy who does IT there) Basically, each ad has positive keywords, and negative keywords attached to it. Each story has keywords attached as well. The system selects randomly from ads which have a high corelation between their positive keywords, and no negative keyword matches. This makes it so an ad for Delta, for example, would appear next to a travela rticle but not if the artle were about plane crashes. Publishers are givin 20 free negative keywords, and then they pay for each positive keyword - fractions of a penny per impression etc
Anyway, I still prefer google's ads.
Spam Gourmet
Set the number of forwards to 3, say, and after your registration confirmation e-mail and a couple of others, Spam Gourmet eats everything else.
You can also customise the e-mail addy, with the name of the subscription site, and leave the number of forwards high, so you can see who the site you registered with is passing your address to.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I'm using Mozilla 1.3 in both Linux and XP with the popup blocker turned on and the scripts and plugins options set to don't allow apps to raise windows.
Mozilla does stop most of the popups in the New York Times by the way but definitely not all of them. For other sites it does appear to work 100 percent of the time.
I see the popups when going in the first time through my bookmarks or typing www.nytimes.com in the url area. Sometimes it happens when it hit the "New York Times" text in the upper left hand corner to get back to the home page. I just tested it in a tab window while entering this response and it happened again. It was the Orbitz add that they always run. I don't recall seeing any add except for Orbitz doing this.
They don't use javascript to raise this popup window. They use an image loading facility which mozilla apparently doesn't check for.
g if" onLoad="window.open('http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi /N2870.ny/B961809;sz=720x300;ord=2003.04.21.01.58. 39','MyWindow','toolbar=no,directories=no,status=y es,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=7 20,height=300, top=0');window.focus();" BORDER=0"
The code is as follows:
img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/ads/usga/blank.
Blocking doubleclick didn't stop it but produced a blank popup window. I was able to copy the page source listing and verify that removing this clause stopped the popup window.
Anybody have any ideas on how to turn this off with a mozilla macro ? I should email the mozilla team and see if they're aware of this.
I'm not against advertising by the way, just obnoxious stuff like unrequested popups.