Slashdot Mirror
Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed?
friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."
Now with aspartame goodness!
Many times with newer rich media ads people are trying to close them when in reality they click through. This upsets the user who would probably close the site right away. Using such distracting ads such as rich media that goes over the whole site (think Yahoo and Weather.com) and pop-ups alienate your website visitors.
As for targeting, search engines are not the only application for targeting. All websites can implement targeting. If I have a site that's geared for collage students then the best ad would be for somebody targeting that demographic, it doesn't matter what form of advertising it is. This statement is very much like comparing apples and oranges.
Go calculate something
It's way better to have afs plaintext. Personally, I never click on huge flickering banners. First of all because they are *so* annoying, and second because 9 out of 10 times; if you click 1, you'll get a thousand popups after that trying to have you visit Bukakke-specials or Preteen teens or whatever 31337 pr0n those stupid websites have.
:-)
Can't we just ban them?
A.
http://www.spareprojects.nl
Ads have their place. When I'm looking for a commercial alternative to something, the google list on the right is very useful.
Plain text advertising works in print media so why shouldn't it work online too?
I don't need to see a picture of a memory module to be interested in an add offering to sell me 512MB RAM at a good price.
Remember, content is king.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I think "the next big thing" in advertising could be plain old hypertext links within writings. If an online magazine has an article about C++, wherever it says "C++ compiler" in the article it could be a link to a compiler vendor. Newsfactor does this to some extent in their articles, plus with descriptive icons so you know you're going to an ad. It would seem much more successful and useful to the user to go this route.
Developers: We can use your help.
Just like software "bloats" as CPU speeds increase, I think ads will "bloat" as users connection speeds increase. I think Mr Nielson is right - text ads are doomed.
had a pretty innovative ad for a week there. It showed something to the extent of :"No Ad here for a week, brought to you from MSN of Os X" and then dissapeared after 3-4 seconds, leaving you without flashing lights or anyway, which made the surfing quite enjoyable.
If you missed what the ad said you could hover on it and it gave you a hands-on on what MSN is and blah blah... I have to admit that was a slick ad!
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
As fonts get smaller, ASCII art in the adverts will pick up and pretty soon - we'll be back where we started.
Just a matter of time.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
On one of my websites, we switched to book-your-own text ads a few months ago. For the first month, the clickthru rates were astounding -- 5%-15% on some of them. Now, we're lucky to break 1%. The reason, of course, is obvious: they were new and interesting, and people noticed them because of that. Now, they are neither new nor interesting. They remain an amusing thing on the site, but they're not paying the bills, I'm afraid. All that we can do from here is continue to switch it up: move them around on the site, offer formats with bigger text, more words, etc. But that's not a solution, just a stall tactic.
-Waldo Jaquith
The next generation ads will be much more intrusive, but much less annoying. A good example is going to McDonald's in the game "The Sims".
Ads will start getting integrated right into what you are doing (especially games). This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing. It'll help keep the consumer costs down for the product, and aren't as annoying and attention-stealing as popups or banners.
Would this be considered a text ad? I'd say so, unless you want to classify it into a new class, like 'integrated ad.'
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I'd say that text *articles* are doomed as well. How many people actually click the link and read everything?
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a plain text ad on the side that's actually relevant to what I'm looking for, compared to a flashing banner which puts me at risk of a seizure, or something that floats in and covers the article I'm trying to read (I end up just closing the page, screw it).
...paid product placement links in the text itself, as in the Truman Show, except, well... online.
Posted by Hemophilia on 2003.04.30 12:55
from the the-end-of-another-posting-world dept.
scrambledegg writes "Readability expert Niel Jakobsen's latest alertbox examines the future of thought posting on Slashdot. Thought based posting has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Jon Katz's success with it. Jakobsen notes that posting works well on Slashdot because users visit them with the specific intent of reading them. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of thought posting wears off, and users develop "thought blindness" in addition to their current "post blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces posters to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."
madlib!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With all due respect to his message of "Simplify, simplify", Nielsen is too passionate about his mission to be practical in applying it.
Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.
If his message today is that text-only ads will be ignored just as colorful graphical ones already are, then he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.
don't mention this sarcastically outside of this post, or you will be deemed flaimbait.
On a lighter note I have already developed text blindness.... however it seems to have caused a rise in mispellings.
I use the ads that pop up in Google to find vendors for all sorts of things. I found my DirecTivo retailer in this fashion. I think that the ads are plainly marked with little intent to confuse the user. OK I sound like a Google fanboy but so what.
Taking that text-ads fail then I have to wonder what we will see next. THe chocices I see are just bigger more intrusive ads or pay-for-content. The content I can just about take but the popups would just be to much.
I found that on text ads I use for 65535.net that click through rates are low. The only way to get a decent clickthrough is to use the word Free
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
This article might be on to something...
If I'm going to be subjected to advertising, which seems unavoidable no matter where you go on the web, then at least text ads will have less of an impact on the loading speed of the page I'm interested in. Time will tell if people pay any more attention to them than they do to banner ads.
*This page intentionally left pointless*
Text advertising would never had worked!
Examples can be found here
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With that element an accepted fact of advertising (people block out billboards, use TV commercials to grab something from the other room, flip channels on the radio when the 9 minutes of ads come on, and flip the ad pages in magazines to get to the content) advertisers still continue. Why? For that one or two people out of a thousand who respond to the ad.
I've done it. I see an interesting ad and I actually watch it. Or I see a banner ad for something unique and I click on it. Text ads are the same way, except I am more likley to read them (usually contain more information) and less likely to be annoyed by them (rarely flash, "vibrate", or make noise.)
Are they dying? No, they are settling.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Here's a few rules for userContent.css to help block these. ;)
[ id^="spa"][class="ch"][onclick^="ga"],p a"][class="ch"][onclick^="ga"] {
/* freshmeat: text banners; used DOM Inspector for "expanded" style property */
div[style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); padding: 5px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"] { display: none !important }
/* freshmeat: text banners; googlesyndication.com */
iframe[src*="pagead."] { display: none !important }
Unfortunately I had problems with google's text banners. I can hide the content, but not the table itself. Anyone help?
/* google.com: sponsored links: top/side */
td[id^="taw"][class="ch"][onclick^="ga"],
td
td[id^="t
display: none !important
}
and this article caught my eye since it had the word 'ad' in it.
But the real reason I'm posting this is to find out why Linux guys are so damned sexy and gay?
I've been totally hot for multiple Linux geeks only to find out they were homosexuals!
Why, god, why?
Advertisers just need to go and pay congress to make laws requiring us to view ads. Problem solved.
The new law could be called the DMAA.
Text ads are good because they target your audience to only those that can read.
Best Windows Freeware
Advertising as it is praticed today is doomed.
It used to be that advertising was about making people aware of your product/service. Ideally, you did so the the most focused manner possible - if you were a lawn care service you went to people with lawns, etc.
You also did things like list yourself in the telephone book.
That form of advertising is useful to both the advertiser and the viewer, and so will persist. That is what getting your web site listed in Google under the appropriate indexes does.
However, now-a-days advertising is about "RAM THIS DOWN HIS THROAT AND MAKE HIM WANT IT NO MATTER WHAT!" I've heard it said that, to a marketer, it is a failure if you go into a store and buy only what you went in to buy.
That sort of advertising is doomed, because it a) does not generate good, high quality leads, and b) it pisses people off. That which pisses people off gets ignored.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Normally this guy is pretty on with these topics... Where did he go for the past year and clue out?
People already have "text box" blindness - if they're not interested, they're ignoring the boxes on the side. If they're actually LOOKING for something, however, those side boxes provide as good of information (sometimes better) than the PageRank Googlin' items that come up from a search.
They'll continue to work because they're advertisements assisting people instead of annoying the crapola out of the end user. For low impact, they're already ideally suited. And they work because they're focused on solving someone's problem, not just shoveling crap down their consumer throats.
As the summary says: "Text adds will only work if they are actually of interest to the consumer."
Sure, but doesn't this also go for other adds? I mean, will an off-topic pop-up flashing flash-add be more succesfull than an off-topic text add? I don't think so.
And anyway, it doesn't really matter. They key is to place the appropriate add at the appropriate time to the appropriate viewer?
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
When it comes to selling the latest top 10 hit to a 15 year old however, that's a different story. A noisy flash ad may be just what's being called for.
Context is very important though. I don't want to be fed noisy, flashy ads when I'm reading technical articles... Actually I don't want to be fed noisy flashy ads at all, but I'm probably just an exception if the number of flash ads is anything to go by :)
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Text Ads have one other advantage over banners: You can't filter them out with software. (At least not now, or rather, not that I've seen.)
Blocking banners and pop-ups is pretty trivial, but blocking text ads? That seems to be a more difficult problem to solve.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I think Nielsen's wrong here. I find that, for certain types of searches, I want to look at the ads. No, really! Here's an example. My wife and I have one of those WhirleyPop stovetop popcorn popping gizmos. It works reasonably well with regular popcorn and oil, but it's really, really spectacular if you get the pre-measured packets of popcorn, oil, and seasonings.
Right before last Thanksgiving, I went to Amazon.com and searched for WhirleyPop. I could buy more poppers, but not more supplies. So I went to Google. Google's search results (for "popcorn & WhirleyPop") were OK, but the ads were exactly what I was looking for -- vendors who could sell me something, fairly specialized, that's never available in any store I visit.
In this case, it was the ads, not the search results, that were interesting. All of those people were ready to sell me exactly what I wanted. Sometimes, ads are not ads, they are the results themselves.
Plain text banner-style ads might not do as well, especially long ones... but truly I appreciate them more than the annoying flash-type versions. Also, they show up much better than GIF's on links/lynx
An, as mentioned, effective short ads are very effective. For instance, when you're searching for "Digital Camera", and you get an immediate link on google to thinks like "prices on digital cameras on ebay/amazon" are still good forms of advertising. Not only are these ads short and sweet, but they're often actually relevant to what you're looking for, which flashy annoying banner-ads often are not.
I think it's not really a matter of getting ads that are flashy graphics or plain text-based, but more a matter of getting ads that are relevent (for graphic based, thinkgeek.com ads and many others on slashdot would be nicely targetted), In fact, when you think about it, there is a lot of advertising on slashdot, but most is relevant or from interested parties.
I bought $125.00 worth of truck parts due to a text ad on Google yesterday.
You mean students formed as a composition of various materials? ;)
'Banner Blindeness' is there because banners are not part of the content of the site. They are additions, and obtrusive additions at that. Adds like the ones on Google don't have that problem: they are relevent to the content on the site and they don't try to make you ignore the rest of the site. Therefore you don't have to ignore them to see the rest of the site, and they will get used.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
He's wrong, and it's obvious why. "Box blindness" would be like "text blindness". It's too basic to easily tell it's an ad. Further inspection is required. Too many sites use shaded or bordered boxes as design elements for users to learn to ignore all of them.
Neilson should know this. For a user to learn to ignore something the majority of times they come across similar items they must be something that the user wants to ignore. With really wide animated graphics at the top of the page this is the case: most of them are something the user would prefer to ignore.
But there are too many "good" boxes on the internet for the user to learn this. Look at slashdot: there are boxes down each side. If one happened to be an ad that otherwise looked the same as the others users would have very little chance of ignoring it.
Might explain why no one ever seems to read the article before posting... (-1 Offtopic)
or anyone else's comments... (-1 Redundant)
or their own comment for that matter... (-1 Troll)
The main reason ads don't work, is because they anger the user by disrupting his web experience. (Like the army ones that send helicopters flying across your broswer so you can't read what you're there for). If the text ads don't impede surfing, then they won't cause the disdain that allows the brain to easily ignore them every time.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reminds me of the Circle of Life movie...
Slashdot's been running text-based ads in the banner space above, and I can honestly say I've actually read those. Click-through is another story all together, but the message got through. The graphic banners are usually lost on me, mainly because they don't actually provide information.
It's kind of like the difference between reading Nickel Ads (or the want-ads in a newspaper) and reading a billboard. Me personally, I like having all the info up-front before I click. I'm sorry they can't track that, but banners have suckered me too many times. Just yesterday I clicked on a banner that said "Revolution OS" with a picture of a CD on it. When I got there, it turned out to be a documentary about this OS. I was expecting a distro I could install. Grr.
Here's what I think makes the text-ads work on Slashdot:
1.) They share the same font style/size as Slashdot.
2.) All the info's there. For example, I ran across the ad for adding barcode support to apps, with free demos available. I didn't click it (I have no use for barcodes) but if I did, I'd feel comfortable knowing where I'm going.
3.) They don't annoy me. They don't try to grab my attention. They don't pop up new windows. They don't interrupt my reading. Etc.
4.) They're relatively on-topic. Though I have no use for barcodes, it is of a subject matter that would be discussed here.
I just hope that the good stuff here isn't borrowed and 'improved' until they have to find some other way to sneak ads into content.
"Derp de derp."
Give me text ads over those bloody annoying pop-over flash advertisements any day. Those things actually manage to annoy me so much that I go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy the product.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
I often times go to google with some vague idea of the brand names and models of what I want to buy. By searching google, I not only get relevant advertiser links that I usually click on, but I also get all the reviews, etc with it. I wouldn't click on the ads if they were banners because banners convey less meaningful information that text ads. The text ad gives me a contextual description of what I'm looking for, whereas banner ads just flash different pictures and I have to sit there and wait for it to cycle through them all before I can make a judgement of whether I want to click it or not.
In short, text ads = good because all the information is right there. banners ads = bad because I have to sit and watch them to get all the relevant information.
It also helps that the ads are occasionally interesting. If every ad you get is something you don't care about, then you will begin to disregard the ad space, since there's never anything of worth there.
I prefer plain text-ads. They are actually descriptive instead of flashing banners that go like "KLIK HEER 2 GIT PHREE PRON!" or "CLICK HERE FOR CABLE DESCRAMBLERS!!!!". I tune out the banners/popups, but sometimes I read the text ones. Plus, stuff like Xupiter can't piggyback on plain-text ads.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Lets see... I block images with "ads" in the url, I don't install flash, and I don't allow pictures unless they are from the same site as the HTML. (thanks Phoenix/Firebird)
A line of text is all I would see, if it is tactless like pink blinking text, I won't even read it.
I think well thought and well worded text ads have a place.
You would have thought by now the advertisers would realize screaming their message (or using harsh display tactics) only tend to deafen and desensitize their audience to their pitch.
I don't even see the pictures on Slashdot anymore, I know aboout VA linux, and the OSDN network; I don't need to be reminded of them. What amazes me is why there is a penny arcade link permanently etched on the bottom right, but not one for MegaTokyo.
I really find text ads (such as those found on Google) to be nonintrusive and even useful at times. The big difference I have found between text and graphical banner advertisements is that the text ads tend to relay actual information to the end user, rather than try to impress the end user with brilliant but often completely uninformative graphics. I am only inclined to click on an advertisement when it actually tells me things about what that company offers. This is why I don't think that text ads will fall under (at least my) oblivion.
This is a good point, and a fact to which I think advertisers are becoming increasingly aware. The ads that have worked for me are those that satisify needs. At the same time, however, I can see that brand recognition is also important. For example, I wouldn't have my current ISP if I hadn't seen Speakeasy's banner ad on Slashdot. The name stuck in the back of my mind, and a year later when I moved and started shopping for broadband I looked them up.
But I think there is a difference between advertising your wares in a unobtrusive manner to people likely to need/want your product (Thinkgeek banners on tech sites, for example) and idiotic Brand Ambassadors.
The point? Advertising should be a way of unobtrusively letting people likely to need/want your product know that you have such a product. If text-ads let me know about products or services relevent to what I'm thinking about, fine. But the second they -- or any other form of advertising -- begin to interfere with what I'm doing, I filter them out of my perception.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Text Ads community when IDC confirmed that Text Ads market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all banners. Coming on the heels of a recent Advertiser-Backed survey which plainly states that Text Ads hav lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Text Ads is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Webmasters comprehensive annoyance test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Text Ads's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Text Ads faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Text Ads because Text Ads are dying. Things are looking very bad for Text Ads. As many of us are already aware, Text Ads continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Google Text Ads are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core advertisers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Google Text Ad customer Slashdot and Freshmeat only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Google Text Ads are dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Google leader Mr. Page states that there are 7000 people who click through Google Text Ads. How many users of Google Text Ads are there? Let's see. Google Text Ad click throughs on Slashdot are about half of the volume of Google Text Ad click-throughs. Therefore there are about 700 Text Advertisers. A recent article put Google Text Ads at about 80 percent of the Text Ads market. Now Freshmeat is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Text Ads have steadily declined in market share. Text Ads are very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Text Ads are to survive at all it will be among Advertiser dilettante dabblers. Text Ads continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Text Ads are dead.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Neilson makes the point that text ads in search engines are not doomed. He notes:
Text-only ads on search engines have become particularly successful in recent years, and non-search sites are now experimenting with this format in hope of replicating that success. However, it's doubtful that their efforts will work because non-search sites lack the equation's crucial element: users' single-minded goal to leave the site as quickly as possible.
He also points out that the ads resemble content to an extent when they are related to a search. It is text ads on any random homepage that are doomed according to Neilson because those ads are not targeted.
This seems awfully sensible - I'm sure most people have used Google's text ads at one point or another because they offered a solution to a particular search. My guess is that most people make a point of avoiding ads on non-search websites, whether text or flashy. I certainly do.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I've noticed even more invasive ads, more so than pop-unders or pop-ups (see this google article for their take on it). Coming to the mainstream it seems that flash ads that popup over the page itself and make some noise are becoming quite popular, and I've decided to completely stop visiting these sites, weather.com being one of them. (I think they're running an ad right now where a rhino busts through your page...wahoo.) Thankfully, the National Weather Service is ad-free! These ads are not only annoying, but make it difficult to close and take too much time when all you want is real content.
This article on Low-End Media for User Empowerment explains why simple adverstising works, and why complex doesn't.
I'm really getting tired of 'Is X,Y, or Z doomed?' based stories.
-n
http://www.remix.net/
Warning! Personal opinion ahead!
I don't know about you, but if all websites should look like useit.com, I'll stop working on websites instantly.
The useit.com is by far the crappiest site I know, the colors are, apart from being plain ugly(the yellow bar on top and he light blue!) and very badly chosen, pretty distracting. The layout of the pages is awful and very hard to read since there is no real structure or thelike. The font is far too big so reading becomes eventually a PITA (agreed, too small is also a PITA!). He could have at least used a <blockquote> or so, just to make sure what belongs where! I could go on and on. So we have here a so-called usability guru, who can't do better than the folks he criticizes, so judge for yourself please.
Where's the novelty in the output format that the first usable computer used at the beginning of time?
Your definition of "usable" may differ from mine, but I would say the first usable computer didn't have a text display, but just a bunch of flashing lights.
So, it really has a lot more in common with banner ads, so text ads would be the next logical step. The only problem is when you'll have to submit your order for the product with punch cards.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
[Scene: Planet Express: Lounge. The crew are sat around a table.]
Fry: So you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?
Leela: Of course.
Fry: But, how is that possible?
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes.] Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
Bender: Quit squawking fleshwad nobody's forcing you to buy anything.
Amy: Yeah. I mean we all have commercials in our dreams but you don't see us running of to buy brand name merchandise at low low prices.
[After a long silence the crew gets up and runs out.]
Also, there's that whole Omniscience bit.
I do this to punish you. You've been very naughty.
--god
Obviously Nielsen has no clue. If he read yesterday's slashdot piece of ascii-porn right here on Slashdot, he wouldn't gush crap...
Text based ads as they are presented on Google will not go away. There are major differences between the way Google uses text based ads and the banners found on most other web sites:
- The ads on Google are almost always related to the search that the user is performing. The ads almost augment the search results with semi-relevant information.
- Banner ads on most other websites (cough.. slashdot!.. cough) are unrelated to the topic of the web page, and sometimes to the subject matter of the website itself.
- As the article stated, the user is already expecting to be moving onward to another web page, so feels free to click on an ad.
These are major differences that have nothing to do with the fact that one is text and another is a banner. If google wanted to display banner or graphical ads instead of text boxes in the same way, the clickthrough rate would probably be similar or better.
I dont care about an "Anime Unleashed" advertisement when I am posting a message about banner ads. If Slashdot tied the topics of the articles to the banners that they present, they might bet better clickthrough rates...
So anyhow, I remembered a text ad from Kuro5hin, from half a year ago. So I went over *to* kuro5hin, found the ad, clicked through, got an email address, and sent a specific question.
I don't know whether I'll buy from them: I give about a 5-10% chance of buying at all, even if the price is right. However, I can definitely say that text ads do work. Yeah, I'm blind to them, when I need to get stuff done. But for that same reason, I appreciate the consideration that is involved in a text ad, so when I have free time, I really do read them and remember them.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I've learned to WATCH for ads on Google where I ignored them in the begining!
You can find all kinds of neat stuff by following Google ads! That's how I met Mistress Whiplash, and why I'm typing this standing up!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
It's the usual pendulum, just like it is with womens skirts, sometimes they go up, sometimes down, but every year there's something "new". Same with ads. First ads were "average", then they got more and more instrusive. Then came the rebound and there were friendly, non-obtrusive ads. When that fad is over, there'll be something new.
But if you want me to read ads, stick with text-based. Privoxy/Opera seems to stop the rest. And if you complain about me not giving enough ad revenue, some beats nothing. And no, I will never ever allow sites to pop up windows and run annoying blinking banners again, if I can help it. I'm just waiting for the first blink tag text ad to show up....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If they have a consistent placement/formatting on the page, they're easy to filter out with a regexp based filter.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just ask Google! They don't seem to be complaining.
What boxes? ;)
Doomsayers are rarely correct in predicting doom. My God, how often have we seen doom forcast for almost any product, company, etc.?
Text ads have been show to work and continue to work (although, possibly to a lesser degree after the "novelty" wears off). It's a matter of finding the niche WHERE they work effectively.
Text ads on Google? Love 'em!
Often I use Google to conduct searches for products and services I want to buy. They key word there is WANT. Often, the text ads are more useful to me than the Google search results because (surprise, surprise) they are from companies that WANT to sell that product. What a perfect match! I just go down the list (of ads, not search results) and choose a vendor that has what I want and offers terms I find acceptable.
I give further props to those guys that are clever enough to put an ad in front of me, at the time I want to buy, about a product I want to buy and do it in THE LEAST ANNOYING MANNER POSSIBLE.
I figure they deserve my business for the fact that they are not advertsing in an annoying manner. I will gladly support a smart and non-annoying advertisier with my hard-earned money!
Text advertising is very important in making porn sites, and should be looked at by other sites looking for better rankings in google. Basically if I advertise on a site with a high PR, my PR will also go up with a text link on that site with certain keywords I want.
I started blocking ads with a web-proxy when they started opening up windows and strobing/flashing and blocking where I wanted to read or click. I do not mind text ads.
It is the lack of individualization that seems to come with the more annoying ads that I dislike the most. I do not need another web-cam, no matter how many times they pop up that ad, but I am interested in the ad for a company that sells micro-ITX motherboards.
So I only get the text ads.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
...rap!
All your base, covered by Jay-Z:
All your bizzzase, base, base
all your bizzase are belong to izzzus
word
mizzzzove zzzig
- A real programmer uses $ cat > a.out
We need to have a standard internet profile that internet sites can access and see what a user is interested in. Obviously, this profile would be an OPTIONAL feature in the user's web browser. The user could fill-in text fields what he or she is interested in, or looking to buy. For instance, let's say I've got an older Macintosh (which is the truth) and I'm intersted in accelerator cards and larger hard drives, the web page I'm visiting could automatically list the links for the lowest prices of those items in a special advertising section of the web page.
Let the freaking advertisers shop for us!
I remember reading one of the Dilbert books, Is your computer safe from hackers? where it said that marketing will continue to become more and more manipulative Make money with your website! as it builds upon the shoulders of already tried marketing schemes.
I just wonder how long before Specials on Ink Jet refill kits! they start putting ads Long Distance for just 1c per minute! in the middle Spy on your neighbors! of all web content?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
This is one of the reasons that Google's Text Ads are so freakin effective.
If I want to purchase something, I just type it into Google and look at the right side ads that are displayed. More often than not they are MORE accurate than the google search results (which might contain non-commercial fan sites and whatnot).
Google has created the on-line shopping mall that we've always wanted! It works, because we go to google looking to buy and people advertise on google looking to sell. JACKPOT!
...because of a simple business prinicple: Do not piss off the customer. A banner at the top of the page is okay, too many incite urine and make the page slow, and popups are tools of the devil.
People buy more from advertiser when they are not piss off. It's simple and it works.
between "box blindness" and "banner blindness"?
All the time. Everywhere.
There are no exceptions.
I will never reward someone for annoying me.
That may be true for unknown companies but the big dogs that we are already familiar with really are promoting their brand whether we click on the banner or not just by reinforcing their name recognition.
Duh. Most people are only interested in things that are free of charge.
But there's always a catch. For example: Free* beer! Free** Winona! Free*** checking!
(*) - Free for the first person. Everybody else must pay full price.
(**) - You don't get to keep her.
(***) - If you keep over $2500 in the account (with no interest, that means you're really paying them like $6/month).
Call me a nitpicker if you want, but it really peeves me when websites play with the status bar. I primarily use Phoenix, and thankfully it has the option to disable this trickery (on the other hand, for whatever reason, Phoenix doesn't display anything when it does so). I've always used the status bar as a way to show where a link is really going (handy with all those goatse.cx links). I've never understood sites or ads that think they should be doing anything other than displaying themselves on the screen (like Flash ads, popups, status bar changes, etc). Basically, if I have to go to a lot of trouble to check out the validity of a link, I won't bother. Don't get me wrong, text ads are a good thing, but this is two steps forward and one step back.
I've noticed while browsing Slashdot that all the text ads seem to get through my ad filter Privoxy(the ad filter formely known as Junkbuster). Is there any way to filter them?
And his un-researched bullshit caused me tons of pain during my modem days. He said that people should 'split up' long stories on the web because people were to stupid to scroll. But that meant a 5-10 second pause in reading for me, on my modem. And it also made it impossible for me to download a whole story before getting offline. My online experience was severely degraded because of his advice. In fact, people still do this despite the fact that he renounced the practice. (people have learned how to scroll, apparently)
I mean, for gods sakes this is was the 'usability expert' behind CDE! the ugliest, impossibleist to use window manager ever!
I guess anyone can make themselves an expert putting out some press releases and sounding condescending.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You know, I do often agree with some of what Nielsen has to say, but how can you trust a "useability" expert with such horribly designed sites??? Aesthetically *and* functionally, nngroup.com and useit.com *suck*... ...welcome to the web of 1995... I'm not saying flashy is good, I'm saying we've become "smart media consumers" when it comes to the web, and UI should evolve as well.
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
The only sensational stories that are doomed are the ones hosted on BSD based servers.
In fact, it was a text add I saw while googling something (strange how "google" has become a verb now-a-days), that lead me to start building a PC for my car. I forgot what I was googling for, but one of the text adds caught my attention, when all was said and done I ended up at http://www.opussolutions.com/ where they sell a kick ass DC power supply. ;)
A couple hundred bucks and a few weeks later and I had a Mini-ITX computer in the trunk of my ION powering an Ir controlled mp3 player and streaming DivX movies to a 6" LCD display.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm about one of the most anti-marketing people you'll ever meet. I refuse to buy clothing with logos on them because I do not want to be a walking bill-board. Hrm, pay 80 bucks to wear a shirt that advertises Tommy-Hilfiger, or pay 20 bucks to have my own name imprented on a 3 dollar shirt.
But never the less, I'm more inclined to read a 30 character text add than some frigging Providian VISA banner that takes up 30% of my browser realestate and shakes vigorously to get my damned attention, I'm sure alot of you have seen that one.
Never clicked on an ad, never read banners if I become aware they are ads, always disable cookies, grudgingly enable them if I have to to visit a page, then delete them afterwords, have a huge hosts file to dump ads, run junkbusters, never reply to spam...
keep on trying to find ways to waste my time if you must...odd way to pass your time though.
Soo...you donate cash to websites, then? Or do you live with your mother and survive on free samples given out in grocery stores?
-Waldo Jaquith
I figure advertisers will try to embed thier messages in any way they can without causing enough of a backlash, legal or social, to still make a good profit.
We may very well see increased efforts at "target marketing, or profiling
We may also see attempts to incorporate subliminal messaging in the product placement, or product intrusion in our online experiences. Such messages could be placed to prove difficult to directly link to the advertising.
Since, as far as I can tell, subliminal messages are not in themselves illegal, this can be used in advertising. They were banned by the American networks and by the National Association of Broadcasters in June of 1958.
Finally, whether or not submlibinal messages work is still in controversy
SCO to Hell
I don't think ads are failing because they're not flashy enough.
1. There are too many of them, and this causes people to subconsciously ignore them. That's why tricks such as changing the ad style work temporarily (as one of the first posters mentioned), because the new format slips by our subconscious filters. If it were more like tv, there would be a few ads every 10 or 15 minutes of surfing. And of those few, you'd maybe see one, because you flip the channel. This problem reminds me of the tragedy of the commons, in a way. The commons is our eyeballs. It's essentially free for each website to add another ad. So every website put as many ads up as it wanted, resulting in an ad explosion that destroyed their worth.
2. The second reason is that ads are *too* targeted. Whenever I sign up for something and tell them I'm into computers, I'm showered with ads about computers. Well I've never seen a computer ad that interests me, and I'm not likely to. I already have favorite places to buy computer stuff, I know how much things are supposed to cost. Because it's so specific, these people are never going to find out that I have a secret dream of being... a fisherman. Or that, although I don't know it right now, I'm very curious about 19th century russian authors. In fact it reminds me somewhat of genetics. If an organism is too homogenous, it's less resistant to problems.
There, thats the secret,
If I go to a search engine, and theres a relevant ad I will welcome it...
If they are trying to sell me a (insert useless item) or credit card... I DO NOT..
Its a simple concept, why can advertisers not grasp it??
I think text-only ads as Google, for example, implements them won't die. Why?
- They're fast and non-intrusive.
- They're relevant to what the user's looking for when they're presented.
Users like these things. They'll continue to click through such ads even as they ignore unrelated banner ads, pop-ups and such.( yawn ) I think most have developed Jakob Neilsen Blindess by this point and largely ignore the boxy triviality and utter uselessness of this crank's stale observations. Simplistic generalizations work to momentarilly hijack our attention, but end up just wasting everybody's time.
In times like this we must ask ourselves...
What would Paul Harvey do?
I'm so sick of this guy, he's over-priced and over-rated imo. He's an expert in stating the obvious.
Has anyone been to pogo.com, a free online game site. They have an advertising scheme where after a while of playing their free online games (java i believe), an animated add covers the window with a coundown display that starts at 30 seconds down to 0. It works because the games are short and have a clear beginning and end to them. Kind of a television advertisment feel.
How this guy managed to trumpet his horn into becoming a usability expert is beyond me.
I guess in his opinion the best design is no design. Sure, if you have a site like his which exists purely to disseminate information, then having simple text is fine. I like simple text sites. Mine's like that, mostly because I can't do decent graphics though.
However, if your objective is to sell product, this sort of design generally falls flat on its face. Like mblase said, there's very little indication of what's more important than anything else. What the heck is behind the "Paper Prototyping" link on his home page? Huh? Or "Low-End Media for User Empowerment"? How about "DUI GUI PHOOEY"? OK I made that one up but it's just about as informative as the rest of them.
All Nielsen really teaches me is that I should go off and be an "expert" in something too.
www.clarke.ca
Not my point. Take Slashdot itself, for example -- it uses color, fonts, and small graphics to keep the site organized, interesting, and easy to scan. Jakob's site is over-simplified so that, to my eyes, it's actually harder to scan his pages for the bits I want most.
A newspaper will specially highlight headlines that deserve notice, use color to grab your attention, divide up the page into columns to make it easier to read, and so forth. It will use whitespace to separate chunks of text that are distinct from each other. And so on, and so forth. They use them not just to grab your attention, they use them because it makes the thing easier and more enjoyable to read.
These are basic design elements which every graphic designer knows, and most other people recognize instinctively. Jakob ignores them deliberately for the sake of ignoring them, and in doing so he loses all their benefits. His homepage is difficult to scan, his page is all in one column and as a result my 800-pixel-wide browser default contains way too much horizontal text to be easy to read. The colors are so bland and faded as to be useless as highlighting. His use of font variations is limited to one bold size and one header size.
I could go on and on, but my point stands. Too little design is just as bad as too much, and raw information presented as such does nothing to convey your message if you can't make it a little interesting to the eyes.
....till I read his "about this site" information.That confirmed my suspicions that he is losing the forest in search of trees:-).This guy,who is so attentive as to the use of 'glyphs' and heirarchical maps for guiding the user thru the web site,could'nt figure out the right color combination for his site. I presume he is too busy to design his own site,but why put out a shoddy work in the first place>?
I just love the Internet. We're such a bunch of sheep...
I know we all have blinkers on for banner ads but even after all these years I do notice them if i am paying attention.
;-)
popup ads just get on my nerves and i will never click on them just cos I am so darn infuriated.
Banner ads on the other hand can easily be ignored of you are too busy to click on them (no matter how interesting). On the other hand if you are casually surfing they will often show an interesting product which I often click upon.
I could of course just have too much time on my hands
It's My Tea and I'll Drink it if I Want To!
I've been using the 'net since ~'94/'95. I've seen banners come, and go, and I don't see them anymore.
/. has a banner ad at the top.(When did they start this?)
I just now noticed that
But, when I go to google looking for something, I pay just as much attention to the "ads" as I do the "results".
Since ads are targeted by keywords, there's a good chance that the ads have exactly what I'm looking for.
These ads have relevance.
Ads will be effective when the customer is ready to accept them. Ads will universally be ignored when they are just irrelevant noise.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I caught it in about a week when I figured out they were paid links, irrelevant to almost anything I searched for.
Important Stuff:
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
I was searching for a regulated power-supply with three terminals capable of 0-30volts, 0-2amps on each, able to do serial and parallel joins between them etc.etc., it does not really matter what it was exactly, but I used Google and Google displayed some text ads that interested me. This was the first time in my entire presence on the web (since about 1995) that I actually clicked on an ad. It was a text ad, not a banner, not a pop-up, not something that took up the entire screen. It was a simple text ad.
/. story about ultra-intrusive ads) that simulate TV experience for the web user will never work on the Internet. When you are sitting in front of a TV, you are a passive receiver of the information and you agreed to that by turning on the TV, however, when you are surfing the web, you are doing so to get to information that you need as fast as possible and as effectively as possible. The internet is becoming our library, our collective memory, our history, our research center, our store and our bank and bill-consolidator etc.etc.etc. But it cannot be what TV is - a one way enforcer of the information, it is not designed for that and it is not used with that kind of attitude in mind.
Other types of ads (like from an earlier
You can't handle the truth.
has being plain-text or not affect creativity?
Google has text ads?
Like spam?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's that they're often just not very informative. Too many banner ads seem to have been designed by marketers under the premise that if they get a mysterious hook set up, people will follow their ad to learn more. But that's not the way people work, either on-line or off.
Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has). But advertisers seem fixated that the same setup will work on the web, for some reason. At least 90% of the banner ads I see are setup like a hook (such as, "Looking for a new job?") rather than giving info (such as "Monster.com: Over three bazillion ad postings")
If more banner ads were informative -- giving me info on who the ad was for, where it would take me, and why I should be interested -- I bet they'd have a higher clickthrough rate. That's what Google's ads do. It's got nothing to do with whether the ad is graphical or not...until the ads start getting intrusive, at which point people are actively suppressing them.
Yeah, I don't click unless I can actually see the boobs.
...he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously.
He thinks "Punch the monkey, win a prize" wasn't succinct and focused?
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Text ads do a better job of quickly conveying information. Text ads work because, for the most part, the text links you see on the internet are legitimately designed to help people navigate to where they want to go. Banner ads were built with the illusion of a marketer influencing the decision of where the user will go next or with the branding advertising approach used on tv, radio and billboards. The difference is that the text empowers the user, while banners try to manipulate.
Plain text ads are the only ones I click through on. Well, okay, I do click through on the occasional Think Geek ad, but I can't recall ever having (purposefully) clicked through on any other banner ad. I do click through on plain text ads on Google, because they're relevant and descriptive. And I find the text easier to parse in realtime in my brain than a stupid banner ad. As for "text box blindness", I haven't experienced that. But my brain is now quite adept at ignoring banner ads.
I tend to ignore graphical ads automaticly, text ads (such as the ones on MSN and Google) actually stand out for me. Plus they take less time to load ;)
If there were a database of textads for major sites continually updated, an average person could download updates. This is very similar to virus definition updates for an anti-virus program or spyware signature updates for Ad-Aware, which many people have no trouble using.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm getting a 10% CTR with some of my Google AdWords text ads. Try that with your popup ad. Text ads are great because they're non-intrusive (read sustainable), hard to block, typically very relevant, easy to create, and they fit in with the page better. Text ads are no more dead than banner ads (ok, bad example).
Josh Woodward
It may be just me, but I tend to read the plain text adds presented at the top of OSDN sites more than I pay attention to some flashing/shaking window that doesn't even look like my window manager.
"Now, we're lucky to break 1%"
meaningless without knowing what the numbers where before the switch.
What they were before the switch is hardly relevant -- I'm comparing the effectiveness of text ads to banner ads, but the effectiveness of text ads now to text ads before. To answer your question, the numbers were the same before the switch -- we were lucky to break 1%.
Could the reason be no one is interesed in the product? or that everyone who saw the add and was interested went there in the first week and had no reason to go back?
I guess you didn't see the site. It's, as I said, a self-serve text ad system. There's an ever-changing parade of text ads for a series of different products. We've seen hundreds of different ads. Legal services, CDs, website hosting, consulting, little-known bands...we've seen it all. It's altogether possible that people are uniformly disinterested in all of these products and services, but it strikes me as more likely that people simply aren't looking at the advertisements any more.
-Waldo Jaquith
Fucking freeloader.
we dont need authorities from on high like neilsen. he (his crowd) is completely outta touch.
flash and animated click trhus are not looked at by anyone. text IS read. its hTtp after all.
Wasn't this about how handsome he was, how smart he is and most noteable how charming he looks with his Java ring?
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Yes, plain text ads are doomed, they are being phased out by more secure encrypted counterparts.
-SK
I read this spoof the other day, and got a chuckle... Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable
What *would* you expect a usability person to say about *any* kind of ads? Really? In what way does advertisement actualy enhance the user experience? The two obvious situations where they can were mentioned in his article -- search engines and classified ads.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
I was very surprised at the analysis expressed by Mr. Jakob Nielsen's little essay. He missed one of the most important lessons of the Web: many web pages are one large ad, on behalf of the page owner.
Take several of the Web sites I manage. www.softwarr.com is a Web site for selling and providing support for a computer program. The entire site is one big ad. Another one: www.tahoetrans.com, a single-page (so far) site with a short, pithy message directed at the few people that need natural-language translation.
How many of you have Web pages that advertise YOU? After all, a resume is a form of advertising.
We talk about banner advertising (and ads of any kind) in a negative way because ads are intended to intrude on one's quest for information. We forget that many times the very information we are seeking is to be found in... an ad! An ad that is germane to our quest, that is information we seek, that answers a problem or a question or a need.
What a number of Web advertisers forget is that the original paradigm for the World Wide Web is seekers finding you, not you trying to lure seekers of other knowledge. The ubiquitious banner ad is off-topic, un-wanted, and in many cases a waste of perfectly good bandwidth. The text ad has the virtue of being far more conservative of bandwidth, which is music to the ears of our European brothers and sisters who pay by the byte.
The days of ad broadcasts in the United States being "free" are coming to an end. Broadband providers are slapping transmission caps on users, so every single banner ad takes away from the user being able to see or hear something else. (This is especially true for those ads that have sound attached to them.) I've found that banner ads don't cache well at all, probably because the ad salesmen would otherwise have no way to measure the number of exposures with accuracy. I can see the day when banner ads are viewed exactly like junk faxes are viewed, as we end up having to pay to receive these commercial messages as a form of "tax" on trying to find useful things on the Web. Then you will hear people wanting to charge back the cost of connectivity, just as hapless fax users want to charge back the cost of paper, ink, and phone line time.
"But how do I make a site pay if we don't have banner/text advertising?" Good question, and one that the continued use of advertising has set aside. Instead of clinging to a business model that is quickly dying, embrace a new business model that will continue long after the last banner ad is sent. Be as creative in coming up with new revenue methods as you were coming up with the banner ad, and the cookies as market tracking tool.
If all the ad-supported sites were required to think up something better or die, we would already have an alternative that works. I'm firmly convinced that the crutch that is the banner ad has slowed down the development of a better way to do Web business.
Go to it!
pretty much every article not related to current events seems to be bought and paid for, here.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
After all, if you visit any of the free thumbnail galleries you invariably see (so I've heard :) text ads which link to other pr0n sites (as well as banners and popups which can be easily blocked).
Since they seem to be widely touted as being one of the few profitable web based industries, their click-thru rates must be quite good.
I would therefore surmise that text ads are probably THE best form of online advertising, since people would only click on them if it was deemd sufficiently interesting, kind of like clicking on hyperlinks to content you wish to view.
Visceral Psyche Films
Granted, this is somewhat tangential to the main point of the topic, but just because Jakob unveils a new decree does not make it so. I cringe every time I see his name in a new /. article...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Everyone knows sexy people don't have much memory.
Didn't he go help Macromedia to make Flash more "usable"?
... now the art of letting an HMO fuck you into cheap insufficient care you pay for through the nose. Welfare, now government robbery to pay ppl who won't take a shitty job to pay the bills, and a favorite of the sacks of shit who pump out more kids to get a bigger chunk of government cheese (go ahead and flame, it doesn't matter to Jesus. If you're on welfare maybe you should be looking for a job instead of reading slashdot... ever heard of McDonald's or the Post Office... or the MILITARY, designed to give you the essentials in exchange for the right to use you as cannon fodder). AD&D First Edition vs. the WOTC shitpile it is now? Rock n' Roll (don't say the Backstreet boys could've happened if it weren't for the sorry masses)? Usenet for christ's sake!
The general gist was that "surfers" get easily confused by all the custom design widgets and interface paradigms that multimedia and interface designers think are cool... you know, the kind of things that brought the 'web' to popularity with the bleeding edge cool sites and such? Yeah, that has to be changed over to match all the standard UI CRUFT now.
Now that the web is being transformed into a front for advertising and big business everything must be simple enough for your low-level joe sixpack to understand.
Now the ppl who made things so great that everyone wanted to be part of the online phenomenon will be analagous to experimental musicians who put electrical hookups on steel baskets and throw them down stairwells, all the while calling it "music".
Life is a bowl of cherries.
[rant]
That's the problem with making something cool, so many close-minded ppl want to be part of it that it has to be changed into something shitty for them to use.
Don't believe it? Take any significant invention or social trend and examine it from it's roots and potential to the sorry piece of shit it ended up being so it was available for the masses. Medicine, the art of healing
Etc, etc, etc.
The internet. Remember when the internet was cool? How many ppl online actually know there's more to it than WWW and e-mail now? eh?
[/rant]