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Commercials Come To The Net (After This Word)
ctwxman writes "Say it isn't so. Full-motion commercials, when you go to click off a page, are coming to a website near you! The New York Times (standing in a bathtub with an electric iron required) reports: "Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising." Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking. "The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net? It's not what we're used to, but maybe we're asking for more than is reasonable. I just don't know." I think I hear the whip swinging back, but harder ...
Some people, particluarly in smaller countries, pay for Internet by the MB. How much are these ads going to cost?!
And things still aren't looking any better for Salon.
Didn't I read this one earlier today?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
How will this help people on modems? They'll sit at a blank page for 5 minutes before seeing a commercial then having the page load.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Remember that when sites can make money off advertising, they have less need to directly charge their visitors...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Does anybody know more about this full screen superstitial format? What is that?
...is when advertising on the Internet is deemed ineffective due to the # of users blocking ads, and then everything that was once free is now subscription based since they cannot afford bandwidth costs. Of course by that point, maybe bandwidth would be free?
These will play for everyone everywhere no matter what? I'd really REALLY beg to differ... I'm fairly sure my Mozilla based Linux distro of choice will be just fine and dandy hiding from these things.. goodgrief.... man!
before we have a mozilla plugin to circumvent this? I'm betting a week.
Wagers?
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Good thing Konquerer lacks compatibility with everything odd! I don't even get half the ads that are on web pages just through the browser's compatibilty problems, though important content almost always makes its way through.
You're kidding, right? For dial-up users, this will be absolute murder.
Myself, I have a cable connection, and I do not want to have commercials force fed to me.
So this will work in spite of pop-up blocking? Then the next feature I'd like to request from Mozilla is commercial blocking. I have more important things to do with my bandwidth.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
As long as I can Alt-Tab to another window and turn off the sound, I don't care much. It's annoying but livable, and it sure doesn't work on me.
whoever came up with that idea deserves to die. apparently he never heard of the dialup modem.
not impressed, here one visitor that isnt going to be going to their sites
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
I predict that Mozilla will have a way around these ads by the end of the week.
could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
Yeah, it could make millions of people get around to learning how to block ads..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The ads sure don't display for me on Mozilla 1.4 with this handy click-to-play Flash hack I saw on another Slashdot posting. <sarcasm>Oh, darn.</sarcasm>
now I just need a utility to send a nastygram to the admin of whatever domains do this. I am already getting yelled at for bandwidth issues with my ISP (distro torrents)
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
10 minutes to discover how it works.
1 hour to code the block.
1 day to submit to mozilla.
1 week till al bugs are out, and a patch is out and woring for windoze, linux, BSD, MAC, and maybey even DOS.
Nothing to worry about.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm in the tub and holding the iron, but I'm still getting the damn registration screen. Perhaps I should eat some cookies. Might that help?
Doesn't work on mozilla here :-D
Thank God for open source!
The sound of web browsers sudden pointing to sites other than these.
How long before we see mozilla getting an option to block this sort of advertising.
BTW, I didn't RTFM.
The commercials are likely to be in a format not compatible with any of my media players. I know they said it will work for everybody, but that statement probebly came for some dork who thinks everybody is on Windows.
Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time.
Like those godawful, browser-filling Flash interstitials they already use? Those do a perfect job of grinding my poor little laptop (600mhz, but only 300 or so on batteries) to a halt as they load up. Not to mention, the volume levels are usually jacked up so if I'm using headphones, I'll get my eardrums popped.
Dear web advertisers - I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
--riney
p.s. I hate you.
I use Safari with PithHelmet for ad-blocking. Amazingly enough I still subscribe to slashdot...oh well, point is, hopefully, the Helmet will either block this crap, or will soon be modified to do so. I don't want to buy anything. Ever. Really. So ad companies, please just save that bandwidth...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
> "the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time"
:P)... it's always good practice to prevent people from seeing your content, after all.
Provided, of course, you have their required video software installed and configured the way they want you to. Otherwise best case is you don't have to see the ad, worst case is you aren't allowed to see the page you were requesting.
gamespot.com does this now on their home page... it caused me problems getting into the site a long time ago, so I just switched to doing a google search on eg. "gamefoo site:www.gamespot.com" and clicking through that way. Of course, they can block that easily enough (and probably will now that I've posted this
So many problems with this idea.. Cell phone browsers, PDA browsers, Modem Browsers, Pay by the MB browsers.. Maybe we do expect too much from sites that take money to run, but with more options like those at 1and1.com showing up, why should it cost so much to run a web site?
Fuck. You.
From Unicast's site:
"This format breaks-through the shackles imposed by pixel-constrained and technology-led units, giving creatives a full and blank canvas to work from and with"
Finally. Smooth CRT graphics. These people should get a Nobel or something.
I think I need a new sig here.
There's no such thing as unblockable pop up. For starters, what if I'm using lynx?
But moreover, in Internet Explorer, for instance, I simply have to disable active x controls -- then NO Video is gonna play on my system. I hope the corporations they're pedlling this crap too don't actually believe that this stuff can't and won't be blocked.
I would love to see how they pull this off with *nix clients....
... suuuuure
'Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time'
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking.
The good news is that this requires Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, so I don't even need to modify my ad filter to keep them from showing up!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
"...the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much. I have CSS2 on my side, after all. That, and I never go to MSN, ESPN, Lycos, or the rest anyway, and certainly won't now.
And what's the guarantee? Free week's worth of ads every time someone hits your page with lynx? This guarantee business is baloney from so many points of view.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
As was mentioned earlier today . . .
My hosts file is already open and waiting to be editted. Lets see how "guaranteed" your advertising is then.
I guess dial-up users won't mind the wait then. Oh, and people without the appropriate plugins. And people that block them.
But then, I guess those people aren't *consumers* now, are they?
Bad, bad non-consumers. Why do you have to spoil it for everyone else? If you'd only sit down, shut up, and just buy some shit like you're supposed to, you'd be much happier.
I had one, but the wheel fell off.
... and I'm certianly not going to watch commercials off the web.
:)
I give it two days (48 hours) before a way to avoid/bypass these is available.
Then again, what do I care. It's not like I will ever see them. Linux is pro-consumer!
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will not be visited by people who read Slashdot.
The rest of Internet users will call their ISPs and complain.
Why is it that so many media companies have to start "wars" with consumers? Is biting the hand that feeds you a perfectly acceptable practice now? Instead of investing all this money into fighting the consumer thieves, they should work on new business models that don't "port" the old ones onto new technology.
Is this so wrong on the net?
Oh yes it is. The web is where I, Mr. User, am in control. Not a stream of pictures and sound controlled by a central station. And frankly, more intrusive ads will only serve to annoy us, not generate more sales.
.. as long as I can listen to good music without any of this crazy fullscreen advert shit.
I am sorry - this from an environment where companies involved can't even agree on a format for - well - anything???
The Mothership
Three more words: Screw you guys
It is bad enough that people with access to dialup only have to deal with huge interactive flash websites, now they're going to have their computers taken hostage by full motion ads as well?
Sorry mom, time to learn KDE...
so he can show his schlong to millions of people with one video tape..
/. start up with the full motion Microsoft commercials...
when does
Hate me!
I can't get video to play in my browser (moz on linux) without jumping through hoops. If they can get it to work flawlessly for every consumer, then I'd be amazed. As it stands, I'm fairly safe, I should assume.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
What the hell do I care about brand recognition? Say I'm a college student doing a report and I have to frequent these sites, do I have to suffer through hourse of commercials? What if I have a slower pc (on a 300mhz now) and the ads lock up my system, can I charge for the work and runtime I lose to these bastards? If I want Pepsi I'll go to the store, but I don't drink soda and no amount of Brittany skin will force me to like it dammit!
1888 Franklin St.
> "The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
In other words, Mr. Shitweasel, "No they aren't".
Does anyone remember Shoshkeles?
Neither do I. Nor do Lynx, Netscape 3.x, 4.x, Mozilla, nor Thunderbird.
Well, I'm sure there will be many posts on the negatives. But I'll look at the bright side. With a full 30 second clip, it allows for more creative ads. And hopefully we'll see more funny ones. I mean, people download some ads online. So here's to hoping for better ads.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
"I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net?"
Gee I thought that monthly bill from my ISP meant *I* was paying the freight.
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
A.) Lots of formats load completely before they are allowed to play. Flash? Java? What the hell, this must be the sales pitch they gave to the idiot exec's that manage these sites.
B.) I'll be damned surprised if they play perfectly for me in galeon, let alone in lynx/links. I wonder if those sites will be just straight non-accessible during those times.
Sean
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
If the consumer cries loud enough, even the best advertising format will be defeated. Hence popup blockers, Tivos, telezappers, spam filters, etc., etc., etc.
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
my internet connection costs are calculated by how many bytes of bandwidth i use..
As a website owner and web developer, I see Adwords as the future of ad-supported content. Adwords and similar systems work great for text-based content, they're targeted and actually interest site visitors instead of annoying them. (Technically, Google has no true competitors in this business, as the other text-ads are run by sleazier operations, but this will change.)
For flash sites and other bandwidth heavy sites, content creators are moving over to micropayments.
The big movers and shakers can go to full-motion ads, but my eyeballs will be going elsewhere.
Still, it surprises me that it's taken *this long* for advertisers to use the 'net for TV/radio/magazine-like marketing. I figured this out eight years ago--I guess that's the difference between a stupid geek like me and a marketing genius(TM).
"Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising."
..."
Beginning tomorrow, I will not be visiting more than a dozen sites, including MSN, ESPN,
"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I was curious about this Full Screen Superstitial advertisement so I checked the Unicast website here http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery.asp and found that shockwave is required in order to display. Under firebird with no shockwave plugin installed (on Win2K no-less), all I get is a 'Get Plugin' page. Glad to see that this 'technology' is defunct from the start!
- mkaltner
The mozilla "click-to-play flash" add-on will probably prevent this from running. If this doesn't use flash, then it would have to install some other player which the user could just cancel (no no such opportunity was presented, then that would be legally questionable). Of course such a player wouldn't even be available on unix, so we wouldn't even see it.
Either way, ad blocking is here to stay and I highly doubt that these ads will remain unblocked for long. In fact I'm looking forward to them. It lets me practice my regular expression skills in privoxy!
Sites that don't let me in without forcing me to see an ad I just don't need to go to. Why don't these people learn from google's plaintext advertising experience. You don't need large, obnoxious ads to get people to buy your stuff.
"is this so wrong on the net? It's not what we're used to, but maybe we're asking for more than is reasonable."
Well if asking for more than what tv's giving us is unreasonable, than we're in big trouble. I stopped watching TV a long while ago. The fact is that on the net there will be a choice. Look at how pop up ads are blocked nowadays, I used to bitch about them, but they're out, now. Same will happen to those vid-ads, it's how it's done on the net. Remember TV is much, much more centralized than the net will ever be (hopefully).
On my dual screen system the double width ad comes up with only the left half of the ad showing on the right screen...
And of course the ad looks weird stretched out across two screens worth of space.
I wonder what other bugs they have!
Back to the drawing board (or is it screen?)
Ok im sure they have fucked up and not done this properly so it can be hacked (i hope). But the fact remains, if you have to download an advert to get to the content (which either comes with the ad at the end of the data stream or wont download until the server has confirmed that the ad has downloaded) we are screwed and there is very little we can do to hack around it!
Somethings that spring to mind:
*people download the advert once and use some sort of p2p system to distribute the ad-free version around.
*we make blocking software anyway and just block the advert as a strike against the corporations even though we still have to download it.
*we just boycott them.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time.
Now if only I could say that for all the websites I visit!
The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
I guess every consumer is running Windows media player, or maybe the other 20% of internet users don't consume anything.
Also, if this loads "in the background" so that it doesn't affect the speed of page downloads, I doubt it will be smart enough not to slow down my other web pages loading in different tabs (they'll want these new ads, too), my ftp transfer going on, or the bandwidth that other people on my network are using. Sounds like the technology is probably being oversold/overpromised and advertisers are either falling for it or turning a blind eye.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
There is a revolt over popups. Who thinks this is a good time for full-motion commercials? What kind of reaction are they expecting from the public on this one?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
I thought web sites want to attract viewers to their sites not drive them away.....
Jeez, next thing you know, these corporations will try to convince consumers to purchase a new DVR with a 'content-skipping' feature so we can enjoy all of their commercials without interruption. The future's so bright...
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
stand for this???
/.'ers actually pay attention to popups(if u dont have a pop up blocker), and how many of us curse them with disgust?
Do we not get bombarded enough by popups and those completely annoying flash things that crawl across the screen?? How many
Hopefully the 'ole Google toolbar and the integrated pop up blocker in Safari will upgrade to block this insanity.
Well, the only sites i heavily use are SourceForge, Slashdot, and Google (granted I link off google for research now and then).. As long as those sites don't do it, ill keep using the net. But as soon as I have to start waiting for ads to play, ill be using lynx, and that wont get me very far a lot of the time. Bring back Gopher!
This isn't even an issue until my favorite visited-daily sites implement it. I can do without MSN and the 11 other sites they mentioned...and what the hell is iVillage, the place the iIdiot lives?
It's unbelievable that after the huge reaction against pop-ups on the web that they figure people WANT to see more annoying adds.
Good grief, I've already been driven to using multiple different programs to get rid of the stupid pop-up windows.
What makes them think I want to sit through a long ad just to access their content?
Apparently these people are TRYING to force their customers to their leading competitors that don't use the ads.
Perhaps someone out there will come up with a neat powertoy to better allow us control on what flash content is loading.Perhaps by blocking flash content on selected sites or something.
It will be great to see such a tool, unless of course there is one already, which I'm simply not aware of.
HAHA Injured Hippies
I have no reason to ever go to those sites...well maybe ESPN, but only during football season. iVillage? Oh NO!
Blar.
Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking.
Not in my browser they won't
More seriously though, it's bad enough that webpage makers seem to disrespect the HTML standard enough to make life for the blind on the web painful, but it seems that this intersticial video ad thing will just flatly deny them access to the pages behind.
Not to mention the legions of internet users who'll be forced to swallow advertising bull in English for products they don't have (and/or don't want) access to in their own countries.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The best way to sell to anyone: Don't piss them off. Oh let me tell ya, this will piss me off. It may piss me off enough to go into stores and subtly destroy your product.
Let's put it to the test!
I will refuse to visit any of these sites.
If ESPN does it, I'll get my sports info from CBS Sportsline. If CNN does it, my default news page will be Fox, etc.
If MSN does it, my default internet portal will be... oh wait I guess there's no problem there.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Heh, first we come out with free pr0n with 15s commercials, and now these bastards are copying us :-P No biggie though, unlike us they don't have any content worth watching for putting up with the commercials.
I bet you will be seeing a lot more sites with full-motion video on their sites. The cheaper and more pervasive broadband gets (and the better the compression schemes get), the more the Internet will turn into On-Demand T.V. Our site is no different than an On-Demand Adult NBC, and we've received a ton of positive feedback both from our very satisfied customers and our very satisfied advertisers.
As long as a site has good content, visitors don't mind watching the short commercials, and the advertisers love it (3-5% min CTR).
--D3X
www.NeoX3.com: The One Site for Free Adult Entertainment...
...does lynx support this feature?
So they're saying these ads will work with lynx/links (or whatever your favourite TUI browser is), if so what do I get for this guarantee? :)
This is going to suck for those on dial-up and those that have download caps.
Sure, it's an inconvenience to those with high speed, no limits connections, but clearly not every internet user is fortunate enough to have it.
Bah.
Soo, this commercial will be a pop-up? If it is part of the page, I don't care, but a pop-up that can't be stopped? Luckily I don't go to any of these sites...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
I can't see as I will have a problem with this. It will make me ctrl-alt-del and shut down the browser, never again to return to that web page...Ever.
Sometimes I turn off my pop-up blocking to get a better feel of the respectability of websites I'm browsing.
So if you're on dialup do you get to watch a fuzzy blur, or do you have to wait 20 minutes for your page to load?
we shall see a increase in WAP and Lynx usage.
Here is a the new yark times cache of the siteo m.html?ex=1075093200&en=11f5852006ee4f60&ei=5062&p artner=GOOGLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/technology/19ec
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
1. It's not free
2. The free one sucks
2. Not having it saves you from a lot of stupid content and spares your CPU
I imagine that the advertisers would want to see raw numbers on how many people may get exposure to their ads to justify the advertising expense. If people get annoyed too much and don't visit the sites anymore surely the marketing people would figure this out and drop their ads.
Please don't compare this to television. The content on television cannot be had elsewhere LEGALLY. As for web sites, the information is freely available from myriad sources and the web interface just serves to convert the content to a somewhat easier to access electronic form. Sports scores, news, stocks.....remember that old fashioned thing called a newspaper?
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I think I hear the whip swinging back, but harder ...
Will the 40th stroke kill even a Narn?
I'm in .au, where its perfectly normal for business grade connections to be provided with a 19c/meg bandwidth charge, sometimes as low as 9c/meg. Excess charges on home ADSL connections vary from 1c/meg to 20c/meg. Many home connections are shaped after x gigabyte, for some major providers to as slow as 28kbit (yes, thats slower than a 56k modem on a bad line).
.au pricewars at the moment) to download such an ad would take 41 minutes (assuming constant rate of 2,000 bytes/second).
To put that in perspective, for some people:
1 full motion advertisement, weighing in at 5 megabytes would cost up to $1 AUD to download (.75USD == 1AUD at the moment).
2 Advertisements would cost as much as an iTunes track.
For, say, an optus cable user who's already used their allowance for the month (was 3 gig, now 6 gig, is going up to 12 gig thanks to some stiff
Yuck.
A little overkill never hurt anybody.
Unfortunately for us, companies need revenue to provide content. That means at least one of 1) subscriptions, 2) advertising, 3) pay-as-you-go.
Take the NY Times for instance. The same content that one needs to pay $6 a week for a subscription is available free on the web. Some of that cost is newsprint and delivery, but -over the long term- they need a way to make revenue from their product.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a system where I would be charged $0.05 to read a particular article. I usually only read a few items each day.
The other option that we, the community, have to maintain are user experience is to attempt to actively patronize advertisers who choose less intrusive means, and boycott those who choose intrusive advertising. If the least instrusive advertising is most effective, the more intrusive methods will be abandoned.
MSN, ESPN, Lycos or iVillage.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
What the hell does Mr. Vail think TV is short for?"
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
just because commercials stuck up your arse makes americans move, procreate and shit does not make the rest of the world be FORCED to view them. It's bad enough that USIans use their spare arse time for threatening and gun-toting all that dont support your candidate here.
In a word, yes. When the Net comes to me for free, like TV, I will accept intrusive advertising. Not before...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Mozilla's my main browser and I don't have the flash plugin installed on it. If I really want to see flash-based content, I bring up IE.
Why should people have to *pay* to receive corporate advertising?
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge? Those sites have to pay the bills somehow, and for many, ads are the way to go. That sucks if your internet connection makes it such that larger ads cost you more. If that's the case, get your news/entertainment/what-have-you from a site that doesn't use such large ads.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
All we need is more adds on the internet. Its bad enuf that on some sites I visit to read information are so over run with banners and flashy gif's that there is only a 1.5 inch wide spot going down the page for the text. I see this lasting a week before some some fellow geek writes a script or plug in to kill the adds... The Good news is you can tell your wife that its not your falt that Britny Spears is half nekked dancing on your screen,, now if Jenna Jamesson sold Pepsi you would be set.
This Sig for rent.
It's a six week test - presumably the companies want to get some feedback. If the ads annoy you, just e-mail their customer service department or wherever with a polite request that they stop using the ads. See where that gets us.
According to the article, it will be possible to skip the ads by clicking on a button, and also they'll be designed to work with Windows Media Player. It would be interesting to see whether the pages in question function correctly in something lacking WMP (e.g. Konqueror) - if they don't because of sloppy JavaScript or whatever then that would be another trigger for a polite e-mail.
I think it was Henry Ford who observed 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half.' Our job must be to suggest that it's the half spent on ads which actively impede our enjoyment of the web.
Similar to the car warranties, x number of miles or y number of years, whichever comes first, there are places where the broadband is not that prevalent (like India) and the ISP contracts are usually similar to x number of MB or y number of hours whichever come first. These ads would suck up on x number of MB.
Also, this download would probably piss the broadband ISPs off too.
Free XBox, PS2
I don't have flash, or even animated gif support in my browser. no javascript either. rarely is it a problem (read: homestar) and it is a boon the rest of the time :D
Well, at least this won't effect any of us... ;)
In the other, "Vacuum," a vacuum cleaner hunts a Pepsi drinker and eats his pants.
Mmmmmm, nothing makes me want to drink Pepsi like a malfunctioning vacuum.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
If this needs WMP, it's gone. It never works anyway, not even 9. I hardly ever get wmv files to play.
Screwed up format. If I get mad enough, IE will be the next to be deleted.
I'm pretty shure that this will EITHER;
1. Help the problem reach critical mass where even non techies will be interested in taking a radical approach towards spam/popups, and not just be slightly annoyed.
2. Kill teh intarweb.
I hate to live in a world where it is passively accepted that ads are nessecary..
I would like to see them try. I'll wait eagerly for the next version of Mozilla for a fix. Full motion adds, great -end sarcasm- us poor dialup users still waiting for a site to come up while ad's are downloading. Hey why am I complaining I don't go to MSN etc. I get furious with these people spammers/advertisers etc that try to get around these measures.. I have popup blocking cause I don't want the ad's I personaly will refuse to buy something off someone that advertises in such a way. -- An Angry Ball of Fuzz :)
Since I am on such a connection (only 31.2kbps, and broadband is not available), would I have to wait ~30 seconds for it to buffer, then sit through a 30 second advert that skips and jerks along because my connection is slow?
This seems like a highly unpratical thing..
Also, I'd be concerned if I were a user of an ISP with rediculous caps like DirecPC.. visiting a few of these websites a day could sap your bandwidth in no time at all.
If I go to your site and I'm "attacked" by an intrusive advertisement, I'll hit the back button or close my browser window and go elsewhere.
I am sure I am not alone in having no desire to be distracted by obnoxious, and almost always badly-targetted promotions interfering with my ability to get to the information I desire in a timely manner. Unfortunately, you people seem intent on using the bludgeon-the-user-with-noise model which hasn't worked before, and won't work now.
As in other mediums, the barrage of advertising has desensitized the user to the advertiser's message. We don't pay attention to banner ads and the messages are misleading and insulting. You people still have yet to figure out how to properly use the technology at your disposal. It's a shame.
But feel free to continue blasting undesireable noise as a front end to your information. We'll continue to make better use of the technology to block it, and when that isn't possible, we'll fine tune our ability to completely ignore this crap.
That's not to say that advertising is dead. It's just different now. When I consider a product or service, I almost always ignore paid promotions. The powers that be don't seem to regulate the truthfulness of most of these ads and people are now suspect of most claims. Misleading people has become the de-facto standard in advertisers' attempt to sell. As a result, we look at testimonials and honest (non-viral) comments from our peers as to what the best products and services are. We patronize those portals that respect their users' sensibilities.
Good luck with your efforts, though I probably won't be paying attention.
-- Dick Hopple, CEO Unicast Communications
Unicast Communications Corp.
160 Varick Street 6th Floor
New York, NY 10013
I work in advertising/marketing. And yes, it IS so wrong on the net. Repeat after me, "THE NET IS NOT TV". We're not asking for anything unreasonable. The net was fine the way it was before, and now its broken, horribly, because of companies who want to clutter it with push content, and because of "ad agencies" (i use the term loosely) who create this kind of software that evades popup blockers.
To all companies out there considering using this advertising method. Don't. If I block popups, it means I don't want to see your message. I don't care how much you think I want to see your bandwidth sucking ad, I don't.
The reason advertisers want to turn the net into tv is so that you have no choice about what you see. With banner ads, most people just kind of tune that area of the website out. Popup blockers are the next step. So with every method you have of controlling your choice, that is one less venue for a company to deliver "an urgent, important message" to you.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
A couple of things bother me about this concept:
1. yet another attempt to hijack my cpu whether I like it or not. What I like about the web is that it is an interactive medium where I choose what I want to view. Anyone remember push technology? People still haven't figured out that you can't turn the web into another TV without destroying its value.
2. Commercial content appears to have decreasing value on the web. I've found more and more over the years that I spend less time at some of the "big" sites and find more value in the content from smaller organizations.
3. Um, somehow I doubt they've found a universal, cross-platform, vendor-neutral, browser agnostic, method of delivery. Unless it is plain old w3c html 3.2 I doubt it. We'll see how some of the more obscure browsers deal with it (Elinks, lynx, dillo, etc).
4. I find it offensive to refer to the general public as "consumers". Maybe it's just me, but it reeks of a corporate world view where the only thing that is relevant is the exchange of goods and services and lets not forget where your place is in this relationship.
5. Generally speaking, the first time I run into a "commercial" of this nature at a web site will be the last time I visit that site. My 56k home connection is strained enough as it is.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
McDonough said, adding, "It's a wonderful way to surround the consumer."
Fabulose just what i wanted. to be sorrounded by ads. HOW DID THEY KNOW? I cant wait!
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
These king of pages always bog down when I am opening google news articles (I usually open four or five in a row). I simply terminate the windows that are too slow to open. And didn't they say that these adds would 'always work'. The Allianz add didn't work on my browser.
It'll just mean I won't go to those sites. There are plenty of good alternatives to those major sites (IMO those major sites suck anyway).
Mr. Nail predicts that Internet users will react well to the ads, both because they can click away if they choose and because the advertisers involved have brands that "people have positive reactions to
They won't have positive associations with those brands for long. People don't like spending 1,500 on a computer and 20/month for the net only to have adds forced on them when they are trying to do something else.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
Not so much that it's wrong, as it's a turnoff. Ads are the main reason I don't watch much TV (I will endure them mainly for the Simpsons and certain sporting events). It's not that I'm such an idealist or purist or whatever. The ads just bug the hell out of me, and most of the content isn't worth it.
On the web, as long as there are choices without intrusive ads, I will take them. And there always will be. Sure, maybe good content will occasionally drive me to an overly ad-ridden site, but in general I will avoid them. Look at what happened to Salon. I used to read it when it was free, then stopped when they went all subscription. Now that you can get a day pass (for free!) by watching a long annoying ad, I hardly ever do it. It's not worth it, there is better stuff elsewhere that I can read without the hassle.
PS I also think TV channels could draw more viewers with fewer commercials. Maybe it's not worth it to them in terms of the bottom line, but I'm sure it's true.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bullshit. I have yet to see a decent video that can be downloaded by a 56k modem in the time it takes to read a page and be played fullscreen. I picked up a freebie program back in my 56k days and i still use it. No-Flash lets you disable java, flash, pictures, animations, videos and so on. This little program made such a huge difference (especially by killing animations) in my browsing experience. At the bottom of their page, they admit the google toolbar does pretty much the same stuff. Hopefully that means it'll stop those videos from downloading, not just from playing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Perhaps this is a chance for a return to major websites as a cottage industry? The MSNs of this world have huge overheads and desire for huge profits. Consequently there is an opening for companies with tiny overheads and a desire for a modest profit (enough to support the owner). After all, on the Internet noone knows you're a dog, and they don't know your server is living in a spare room.
This isn't that big of a deal... all you need to do is: 1 - don't overbitch about this kind of stuff.. your just going to bring unnecessary proliferation of the sites you now despise 2 - proliferate the dislike and simply boycot visiting such websites
mix_master_mike
vafrous
CNN with ads is still better than raw Fox
(though both still suck compared to BBC and others)
Furthermore, she said if users complained about any advertisement, MSN would pull it.
So make sure you let MSN know exactly how pissed off you are about this.
The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
So Non-Windows users are off the hook, for a start. Heh! It's not as if I *needed* another excuse to not use MSIE.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
i will boycott any product advertised in any way that interferes with my use of the internet, as i already do with television advertisments
well, I know ESPN's site is now completely within MSN, so it's sounding to me like a MS thing/deal...
Good news for us though!! You wanted "the sheep" the consider other browsers, other portals? Well, sounds to me like MS is shooting itself in the foot... Like selling LZBoys that dominate so no-one can sell a chair to compete, BUT then LZBoy adds electric shock for each time you sit down! Good news for competitors. Let them force video ads on IE and MS customers... you think this is bad??? (anyone say "switch")
I went to unicast's web page, found some example ads. I couldn't get them to play at all using mozilla. guess I have nothing to worry about.
try proxomitron. "a free, highly flexible, user-configurable, small but very powerful, local HTTP web-filtering proxy"
www.proxomitron.info
"Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials.."
Noting the sites that are going to be running these commercials, isn't it safe to say they are targeting your average computer-savvy consumers?
By this, I mean people whom turn to such sites for information on the internet. I am not stating that the listed sites cannot be useful. However, in my experience, people who are not overly familiar with the intenet tend to rely on portals such as MSN, Yahoo, Lycos, etc. or their information and other web-based needs.
Knowing this, I think it is safe to say that such ads will be met with little caution by those who actually access such sites on a regular basis. Advertising, on general sites, for the general population. Furthermore, the resources found at these sites can for the most part be found elsewhere. So, those who are bothered by the addition of ads can look elsewhere.
Obviously the implications of the implementation of commericals on all sites are drastic. However, I do not believe the response of users to the aforementioned sites will represent the reaction the internet would see if such advertising were implemented on a larger and more user-specific oriented scale.
- - Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand. - -
it's called a Digital Signal Processor, and it usually has at least one volume setting.
Also note that Linux on PowerPC has no Flash browser, and doesn't play flash ads. Macromedia is too busy ruining the web to use a freakin cross-compiler.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Pop ups (or under) are merely annoying.
Having to HAVE to watch a commercial is an affront.
I'm PAYING for my internet connection. Can't I have any friggin' peace?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
of web sites I no longer need to visit and products I no longer need to buy. I love the way they help me cut down on the crap in my life!
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Maybe we can code up a plugin that uses Unicast's bandwidth by randomly downloading images from their site every time we receive an ad, up to the amount of space tht the ad consumes. So a 1MB ad ould shoot off a spider to Unicast to download 1MB of images and data from their site. I'm sure they'd love the bandwidth boost. After all, they're asking me to take a hit from my connection for them.
Just a thought.
"I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net? It's not what we're used to, but maybe we're asking for more than is reasonable. I just don't know.
commericals make whatever they are advertising on their "bitch". as in if you dont please the advertisers then they pull the funding that you need to keep running. this in effect, puts them in control of content that the company produces. personally i do not care as none of those sites (espn, msn) i would ever visit. i care because it sets a precident.
a good example of abuse would be one of these sites doing a "study" that concludes that advertising in this way is the best way to do it. this article could lead to wide spread adoption and thus more control.
its not very far from reality to see this happening. do you think all the companies under the GE umbrella ever speak badly about GE?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I've used tvguide.com to check for another mind numbing activity and been caught up in a video feed from hell. Fortunately THAT only happened once ... anymore than that and I would have stopped using that site. Looks like it may be opportunity time for some smaller sites as bigger sites adopt video ads.
Setting the WMP buffer (preferences) for '0' seconds should require the add to be fully streamed before playing, thus giving the user a chance to cancel.
Try this, and you'll note that our friend MS allows no less than 10 seconds....time to wipe that little beasty from the drive, me thinks.
My favorite line from the article: "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online."
applet, embed, iframe, object { display: none !important };
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I wonder if there will be any sound with those commercials, often people will have their master volume higher then the music they're listening to. Just imagine the fun of late night surfing with your music turned down and up pops an ad shouting from the rooftops to buy their product. Should be enough to give anyone a heart attack. :)
Why are banners and ads able to be "forced" (term used loosely) to your PC while telemarketers and text messages from businesses aren't able to call you or send messages since it costs me money. My internet bandwidth is not unlimited so shouldn't it be right to say that ads are costing me money. I would agree that it is somewhat debatable since your visiting that site and so you are almost agreeing that you'll accept the ads. As an arguement to that, how do I know a site will pop up advertisements (ie to the extreme, porn)? Should a site notify you before it loads stating that "to view the site, you accept that advertisements will be displayed on your computer"? Where does customer/visitor accepted advertising start/end?
Just some thoughts. Anyone have any thoughts on that rambling?
I work for an ISP, I can see getting *tons* of calls for this. "How do I stop these commercials?" ... "You can't if you run widows. You'll have to install Linux."
Who said this wasn't the year of desktop Linux?
FLR
Anyone have a link to an example page?
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
Subject says it all. Junkbuster to the rescue.
When they see their user base drop to 15 I guess they will try to figure out why.
Get a free ipod.
Initially some people will think it's cute, but as the ads pile on, they will become less inclined.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
what about the places where users are charged for their internet traffic? i guess they'll be delighted, first they pay for spam and now this spam of another breed
I'm at work, so I had a Windows box handy to check this out. I went to the Unicast site and loaded an example ad. Sure enough, it took up the whole screen.
That, while being the selling factor for advertisers, will also be the downfall of the medium from a user's perspective. Full screen ads work fine on TV, because there is no concept of a window or multitasking.
Users quite often have multiple windows open while surfing the web, either multiple browsers or multiple applications. I will quite often type in an address, hit enter, and then switch to a different window while the page loads. Or I will simply queue up a site knowing I'm going to need it in a minute as a reference when writing a document.
I wouldn't mind these ads so much if they were full-window ads. Who is the advertiser to say that they have the right to become full screen, and become the focused application when I may be typing into a word processor or code editor?
People typically watch TV and aren't concerned about getting things done. However, using a computer they usually have are trying to accomplish a task. Any form of advertising that gets in the way will not be tolerated.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
The analogy between television and the 'net is spurious. Here in NZ at least, and most other countries of the world, TV is broadcast free to air. The Government supports it a little, but it's bread-and-butter is paid commercial advertising. Fair enough, I say, it's how they make enough money to stay in existance.
The net, on the other hand, is a totally different kettle of fish. We _already_ pay to use the net. We pay a monthly access fee (in NZ, broadband pays by the Mb, too). We pay for our hosting space, and our domain registration. We pay excess bandwidth use if we have a popular site, or if we want extra mailboxes or services.
Someone explain to me _WHY_ we now have to watch commercials as well??!
I'm not saying that having commercials on the net is wrong, but it's not quote as well-received because the WWW is an interactive medium, where the consumer clicks on a link and is waiting for a response. TV programming differs in that the consumer picks a channel, but otherwise has no control over the data stream being fed back to his/her TV set. To illustrate, let me ask this: what's the response time of a TV program?
That little bit of interaction vs. passivity gives net users their protectiveness toward their online experience, and most (or at the very least me) are loathe to surrender our time and screen real-estate for an ad or commercial to load up while we wait for the server to respond with the web page to which we really wanted to get.
This can be easy done in privoxy or junkbuster
by blocking activex.microsoft.com or download.macromedia.com. On windows you can delete flash plugin as well. Any file with swf extension can be blocked as well. Plus I doubt that ad content will not be served from some central ad repository like double click. Most of the add suppliers are already blocked anyway. If browser fetches ad over http protocol proxy can be made to block it.
Remember, bandwidth on the Internet has to be paid for by both the subscriber and the provider of content. Once the advertisers get tired of paying for the staggering amount of outgoing bandwidth needed to send 30-second video clips that are unrequested by 100% of the viewers and skipped by 99% of them, you can expect full-screen superstitials to go the way of the 110-volt rubber duck.
Well, the Unicast site says the advertisements are 300k -- and run for FIFTEEN SECONDS.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
...my first-born to anyone that can write a program to get rid of these intrusive advertisements.
And yes, it's sad state of affairs that, at this point in time, I'm willing to sell my first-born to keep my MBs. But hey, read the URL of this site. I'm not likely to get a first-born.
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: January 19, 2004
TELEVISION commercials, in all their big, loud glory, are coming to the Web.
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
Video advertisements from major marketers have dotted the online landscape sporadically in recent years, but the new ads differ from their precursors in one critical respect: until now, none have run at 30 frames a second, the speed of TV video. As a result, most multimedia ads are less sharp than TV images, even for people with fast connections.
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
Unlike TV viewers, Internet users will not be deluged with these ads, at least in the short term. According to Unicast, 100 million ads will be served to individual PC's beginning tomorrow through the end of February. That may sound like a lot, but publishers, who can track a user's repeat trips to a Web site, say they will generally limit a person's exposure to the ads to one a day.
Unicast says it hopes 50 million to 75 million people will view the ads. Pepsi plans to distribute two ads, which have run on TV in the last few months. In one, titled "Just Lunch," a dog steals its owner's sandwich and Pepsi, and replaces them with a cat. In the other, "Vacuum," a vacuum cleaner hunts a Pepsi drinker and eats his pants. At the end of each, users will be shown links to more ads, on the Pepsi Web site. (Those ads use so-called streaming video technology of an older vintage, and are less than TV quality.)
Mr. Vail, of Pepsi, said he would monitor online viewers' reactions through a tracking study conducted by the research firm Dynamic Logic, to determine how much use Pepsi will make of such ads in the future. "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online."
James Nail, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, agreed. "This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I've seen," he said. "I expect big demand from advertisers for this."
Among other features, Mr. Nail says he appreciates the fact that the ads do not slow Web surfing. The commercials load into a computer's temporary memory, and only when a page is idle. If a user clicks to a new page within the site before the ad is fully loaded, the process is merely paused until the browser is again idle. The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
Mr. Nail predicts that Internet users will react well to the ads, both because they can click away if they choose and because the advertisers involved have brands that "people have positive reactions to," he said, adding, "So I think they'll get a little more leeway, at least initially."
If users are annoyed at this development, they can blame high-speed connections. Richard V. Hopple, Unicast's chief executive, said he decided to release the company's "video commercial" technology now because high-speed connections - known as broadband - have reached significant numbers. The number of United States households with broadband connections reached 49.5 million late last year, or 38 percent of all households, accordi
Complain to The IAB.
Tell them you're sick and tired of intrusive advertising. Tell them your failure to click-through is *not* because you didn't notice their ad.
Ah Bugger IT! Just write a script to auto-submit their "contact" web forms with SPAM.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Boss: Bad news gang. It turns out people and blocking and closing our popup ads. They're disabling Flash and Active-X because of our overlay ads. What are we going to do? Drone 1: Stop annoying them with those ads and go back to unobtrusive banners? Boss: You're Fired! Who's got a GOOD idea Drone 2: How about we hijak their entire monitor, makign sure they can't even begin to think about closing our ads? Bross: That's brilliant. Drone 2: Then we can kick them in the balls. Bross: Brilliant! Anything else Drone 2: Well, I have been kicking around this idea involving armies of parachuting advertising monkies... Bross: Great, leave a memo on my desk. I've got a tee time with Gates and Eisner at 2:30.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
From the gallery page:
e /creative_play.asp?adtitle=Mercedes+Benz&adhei ght=400&adwidth=489&ad=0%5F6435816UNICAST% 5FCREATIVE%5F10%5F23%5F2003953632453v1%2Eswf','SUP ERSTITIAL','width=489,height=400,screenx=100,scree ny=100,left=100,top=100')" src="../img/logos/0_6435816UNICAST_CREATIVE_10_23_ 2003953632453v1.gif" vspace="0" border="0" hspace="5">
<img onClick="MM_openBrWindow('../superstitial/creativ
3 minutes from someone seeing an advert to them finding a workaround/hack. Lets hope that its harder then holding the shift key down while the page loads
I find the solution to this easy enough, and I tend to already do this anyway. If I go to a website that has a huge obtrusive advert, I'll stop going to it. They already have some pretty obtrusive ads on some websites, and I just refuse to go to them ... instead head over to another site that gives similiar info without needing to sit through a commercial.
At the end of the 4th to last paragraph it states "The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers." I think Linux is finally starting to catch on if only 8 to 10 users use Windows Media Player.
When I try to go there, all I get is:
BLOCKED
This is Privoxy 3.0.2 on localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1), port 8080, enabled
Request for blocked URL
Your request for http://www.unicast.com/ was blocked.
See why or go there anyway.
More Privoxy:
* Privoxy main page
* View & change the current configuration
* View the source code version numbers
* View the request headers.
* Look up which actions apply to a URL and why
* Toggle Privoxy on or off
* Documentation
Support and Service via Sourceforge:
We value your feedback. To provide you with the best support, we ask that you:
* use the support forum or (better) the mailing lists to get help.
* submit banners and all problems with the actions file only through the actions file feedback system.
* submit bugs only through our bug tracker. Make sure that the bug has not yet been submitted.
* submit feature requests only through our feature request tracker.
Crap. Your post reminded me I could probably press the Especially Secret Crack key ("Esc") on my kayboard and avoid these ads. I wonder if that means that the Esc key will be illegal, like the Shift key is now. That's two keys down, 99 (or so) to go!
They'll pry "Scroll Lock" from my cold, dead hands!!!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Also could extend to:
Yet Another Reason Not To Use Internet Explorer.
I like to have full control over my internet experience, thank you. That's why I stopped watching TV. I'm not going to be complacent when commercials similar to what's on TV come to the internet.
Gone are the times when you would be replied "we don't support linux" - they guaranteed it.
A decade ago... it was great.
Full Screen Ads are unreasonable, they often take over your computer and I have had some that crash it too. Several pages, including one of my old web-mail providers started using full-screen/takeover ads and I simply stopped going to those sites and will never go back. I switched to yahoo for my webmail and won't hesitate to switch again if Yahoo starts something like that. There is *not a single* site I can think of where I'd be willing to sit through a full-screen takeover ad to see whatever content they provide.
Also though, ads only fulfil their purpose if you click on them or buy something because of them, which I have never done. If an ad is annoying or offensive in any way, I refuse to start or continue doing buisness with whoever the ad is for (both online and on tv.) Pop-ups are annoying alone, so it doesn't matter what they say, I won't buy anything from anyone I've encountered using a pop-up ad.
And, as I said, if I go somewhere with a full-screen/takeover ad, not only will I not buy anything from the advertiser/ee, but I'll stop going to that site all together.
The mozilla "click-to-play flash" add-on that you can find here
I think this is going to reduce these sites' hit rates, because people will stop browsing them during idle time at work when either they shouldn't be or they shouldn't be disturbing their neighbors. Sites with mandatory or default sound ought to have a good reason.
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
It's not the slickest thing, but if you run Firebird you can install Flash Click-To-View. It does exactly what you'd think it would do - replaces any and all Flash content with a gray box saying "Flash - Click to View." Works pretty well, except gets annyoing on those flash-only navigation pages.
Cue The Sun...
i've opted out of operating systems that tell me what i can and can't do with my computer.
i've opted out of television unless i can get it without advertising (canceled my cable but the bastards just won't come and shut it off).
i will certainly opt out of any site that requires me to be face-fucked by advertisers before accessing their content.
the truth is, advertising-supported media will always cater to those kinds of people who are susceptible and receptive to advertising: in a word, imbeciles.
i say: kill all the advertisers. content will then come from two sources: individuals and communities who are truly passionate about their subject matter, and those with content that is actually worth paying for. i favor this for web, tv, radio - all of it. i want to just pay for my fucking content and get it free of all the time-wasting, soul-destroying, mind-manipulating, insulting, humiliating shit that drips from the lobotomy scars in advertisers' foreheads.
have i mentioned that i don't like advertising?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Now *THAT* really burns my briquets!
When I am on the road and have to use a modem that means that I will be sipping the connection to some of the search engines, etc., via a straw. Guess those companies will be on my DO_NOT_GO_THERE list.
To all the people who are saying: "this is no big deal, we'll just block flash or whatever they're sending and ignore it". What do you do when the link to continue to the content you actually want is only available at the end of the flash ad?
No, I'm not giving them the idea, I've seen sites do this already. The greatest thing is when they're using some marginal JS hack that makes it so only "approved" browsers can get to the content link at all without reverse-engineering what they're trying to do.
They have the content their users want to see, so at some point they're going to be able to demand you verify you've looked at/done something before they let you see it, provided they can figure out how.
I was using this Web site and its video banner when hovering mouse cursor over the ads bring up annoying video ads! UGH!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have not visited any of those sites in years, but probably will tomorrow just to make sure this crap doesn't work on Moz 1.7A
Help fight continental drift.
..."the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
i use opera (under linux emulation) on OpenBSD - i can't even watch movies that i want to watch without manually starting mplayer...
Oh, yeah, that's right, I remember now....
This sig no verb.
And why do we need "YOUR COMPUTER IS BROADCASTING ITS IP ADDRESS" or "YOU HAVE ALREADY WON" or other similar forms of deceptive advertisers to pay for internet content anyhow?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
First I have to get a job so I can pay to eat and have a house. i have to buy a computer. i have to pay to get on the internet. i have to pay for cable. then i have to see commercials. and now i have to see commercials on the internet? fuck that shit. fuck the world. why is it that every time there is a good idea, bad people hijack it in order to shove more cock down our collective throat in order to get more money for people who already have EVERYTHING!? and they use the government to do it. and it doesn't matter -- democrat, republican, finna fail, finna gael, labour, torry... only democratic socialism can save us from this scourge and it scares me.
Linux is Lowest Common Denominator?
Maybe you should think about that for a second. I'd say that Windows is more LCD then Linux because you can use it on more hardware, more people have an easier time to use it, the sheer number of people who use Windows should be enough to prove that point.
Broadband content is good, but turning the net into a push driven system is in my opinion, bad. The net should stay pull driven and stuff I didn't ask for shouldn't be downloaded (or should be easy to stop).
It uses Windows Media Player. Hell, half the comments mentioned this and you missed it?
I hate the NYT registrations. Here:
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
"I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net?"
No. If you don't like it that much, make a note of the websites that use this "technology", and don't visit them in the future. If you have to, use an hosts file to have any links to those sites you unknowingly click on routed to your machine, or some other web site. You don't even have to be a super computer genius to do it.
I certainly plan to never again visit a site that I find is using this stuff. They obviously don't care for me being there, and I don't care to be there, so it works out in the end.
Are they going to change their name to multicast when IPv6 comes along? Seems to me that unicast is kinda bad name for such a bandwidth hogging application.
The ads are nothing more than popups that make the popup window "full screen" (ie, they set the size and position of the window to 0,0 and x,y to fill up your screen, and not actually setting the browser to its full screen togglable state, which pisses me off because all future browser windows will now be of that size), and load a flash applet. My own pop-up blocker for IE, NoPopIE has no problems catching those popups, and with proper security settings IE will prompt you to run Flash. All this is going to do for me is prompt me to finally get around to blocking popups from resizing the browser window.
You can find samples here to test against.
I looked at the example advertisement and all that was there was Snuggle fabric softener ad with a couple of buttons that didn't work. I left thinking that the content delivery firm got screwed by who ever made these ads. They are not much different from regular pop-ups except the companies being advertised are Fortune 1000 companies instead of over the counter viagra and home serveylance. I hope these companies choke on this crappy, expensive, worthless advetising.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
The easy one, blocking the adds with some sort of popup blocker.
The harder one : Just don't visit that site : If webmasters like to pull this new nagvertising on us (just around when we are getting the other annoyances restricted (spam, popups), then pull your own commercial string on this one : and don't give them their Hits.
this will get every geek around to visit msn.com tomorrow just to check that $BROWSER_OF_CHOICE is blocking the ads...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
So many I'm just not looking on the right pages or something.. but where are these ads? I've surfed all over these sites today and can't find them? (As for another article reporting this it's today not tommorrow).. can anyone confirm or deny this/
When it doesn't cost the user to receive information, it's kinda annoying, but when it truly impedes your network connection, and bascially takes over, then that is wrong. Now, sometimes ads are cool, like on the SuperBowl, that deserve a seconf viewing. Some sites kept these up like AdCritic, and probably the most viewed ads are movie trailers like at the Quicktime Trailers. This, however, is for entertainment, not for clicks and profit...
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
Avant Browser's "Allow Flash Animations" button, when clicked off, nicely prevents the samples on their site from displaying. Sweet.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
What bugs me about this is that it's only watching the action in ONE window. I open a good baker's dozen whenever I go online. I imagine that there are plenty of other people who do the same. The way I read the article, the ad will be served even if OTHER windows are currently downloading. That's going to make life hell on modem users who use tabed browsing to download other pages while pausing to read an article.
Since it currently requires Media Player, I'm going to uninstall Media Player on all my family's computers and they won't have to worry about anything. We'll be safe, at least until they figure out how to make it work on non-WMP systems.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Is my cel phone going to start playing ads before I can place a call? Will my PDA pick up ads from Bluetooth and pop them over my schedule as I walk past a store? Will the f**king toilet tell me to "Drink Pepsi" when I flush?
- Make instrusive ads for new media. Observe backlash.
- Make MORE intrusive ads for said media.
- Profit!
How are they ever convinced that this will work? Thank God I have a Mac without WMP installed...CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
e-mail the sites that are running these ads. Let them know how you feel. It took years to end the tyranny of pop-ups. Don't let it happen again.
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?
Forced? Sorry, do we live in different countries, where your government holds a gun to peoples' heads and tells them "update your website or we kill you and your family"?
No one "forces" websites to do anything. They don't "need" to work for nothing - They simply don't need to work at all.
Those sites with an actual product, which at the moment appears limited to storefronts, some news outlets, and porn sites, deserve to stay solvent because they actually provide a service people will pay for. Every other site can go pound sand, or stay up because its owners love doing it (ie, most personal sites, blogs, and certain hobby-oriented informational sites).
Naturally, the obvious followup question involves Slashdot's status under this idea. Personally, I think it falls into a "hobby site that trades bandwidth and hosting costs for massive amounts of good karma for OSDN. That might not have a direct dollar value, but in terms of effective advertising, it means more than all the half-time SuperBowl commercials put together.
To address the parent article, I for one will not EVER visit a site that shows any advertising that I can't either ignore or circumvent. I said that long ago about popups, and well before popup blocking became incorporated into the major browsers, I wrote a crude local proxy server for myself and a few friends to do nothing but filter them out. I'll attempt to do similarly for these new ads, but if the hype holds true and they really do prevent me from visiting the site without watching it, I can guarantee them the permanent loss of one visitor. And I doubt I'll act alone in that regard. People avoid ad-heavy sites already - Having to watch a full 30-second spot will turn off even the most computer illiterate grannies out there.
AtomFilms/Shockwave.com already does this. Only it's way more more appropriate for full-motion advertisements on a site like that, seeing as they're providing full-motion video themselves.
Flash has one legitimate use: Strongbad Emails (Ok, and some of the 'fanimutations' are funny. Your various All Your Base, Hyakugojuuichi, et al). Everything else is evil. Comming soon to your computer: Full screen tv-style commercials from the people that brought you the animated page intro, the crazy rotating webpage icon bar, and other fun bits of webtastic 'enhancements'! The Brothers Chaps: Flash(tm) is not a technology that needs to be promoted or given any veil of legitimacy! I implore you to migrate to a less blatantly evil animation format!
There seems to be a false sense of 'security' running through the discussion on this article. I, like many people on this site, am using Mozilla with adblocker and a lack of odd-format plugins. I went to check out this companies site, and view the example ads, and was did a "Wait....that wasn't supposed to work!" when they did, in fact, play.
Misconception #1: Popup blockers will block these. Not so much. At least, not right this second. They're not really pop-up ads, afterall.
Misconception #2: These aren't going to play on anything other than IE with Media Player. No...they're just big Flash(tm) movies. They'll play if you have the plugin.
Not that there's nothing you can do. A suitable hosts or Adblocker entry will sort things out. Or the oft-mentioned Flash(tm) click-to-play button. Just saying that the situation isn't as happily mititated as people seem to believe, simply through a supposed technical incompatability.
That said, I believe that Flash(tm) is The Next Big Thing for web advertisers. This Unicast company for example, and their friends Ad4Ever are clearly going this route. Ad4Ever(tm): Not just an evil-sounding name! I feel dirty just going to these pages.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I didn't say Linux is the LCD, I said image what linux would be if it was an LCD. I made the point that it wasn't an LCD because it was coded by and for technologically savvy people.
Yup - that is rght folks... we've already paid for access to the content. Its built into the tarriff we pay for ISP services.
Anyone who lives outside the U.S.A. pretty much knows that when their telcominications carriers call up the backbones in the US, companies like Worldcomm, that their carriers get charged a hefty monthly fee for access to the content they carry to their end users. This fee is passed along to the ISP's and forms part of their cost structure which is ultimately paid for by the end users - that is YOU and ME.
There are generally two ways that a telecommunications company can gain access to internet content: (1) By far that LARGEST source is through a connection to a backbone (via a POP (point of presence = a big fast router)). (2) The second source is from the web servers themselves. Obviously any server not in their own neck of the woods will be behnd a POP. Thus, the POP's are BY FAR the largest source of content - and access to this content has to be paid for. Its covered by what is known as a PEERING AGREEMENT.
Since access to the VAST MAJORITY of the internet content is already being paid for - why should the telecommunications industry single out the second source of content, IE the lowly web servers? If they are willing to pay at the POP then they should also be willing to pay at the server itself.
So - We end users have paid, the ISP's have paid and in general the backbone operators have been paid. The system breaks down at this point and the webmasters in general ARE NOT paid - they are billed instead.
But this is NOT OUR FAULT. This clearly an INCONSISTANCY created by the over-gready telecommunications industry and it happens simply because they figure they have us all by our short and curlies.
The concept of fair play seems to not exisit in this industry. Hense we have the problem.
I don't think ANYONE wants more advertising. Our costs go way up because of the crap that we don't want in the first place. Instead, if the webmasters could actually make a little money our of the servies they supply - then we would probably see a great improvemnt in the content we really do want.
It is incumbant upon us to educate people what is really taking place so that we can get a broad based pressure to correct a situation that is obviously inconsistant, probably illegal under the fair trade practices legislation of most countries , and certainly not in the interest of anyone.
Remember "every consumer" is someone who runs Explorer on XP with every imaginable plugin installed.
Those of us who run konqueror with no plugins and java/javascript disabled must just not be consumers.
How I got all these damned computers without being a consumer, I'm not sure.
i'm on dual monitors and this takes up 100% width and height ... so i can't even see the ads properly anyway ... all stretched out.
how retarded.
Well, being on that part of the world (Americas) I quit watching commercial television after realizing, that every 4 minutes of programme is interrupted by a 5 minute commercial break.
..
... or just use lynx/links, they worked just fine for years.... write a popup for it if U can :)
If they find a way to force me to watch full screen crap while I am browsing I think I will start building my ham-radio/wireless/underground-whatever ad-free net even if it will have only 2 nodes connecting my toilet and living room together
Hopefully the crap does not run on Linux at all, and I am almost sure there will be ways around
Now I can see a video telling me how my banner ID #814734 won me a free DVD player!
I've been updating this list for a few years now and it works fairly well with very little to no blocking of legitimate content. Enjoy.
Before I get flamed for "blocking ads," first off its my PC and I'll do as I please. Don't like it? Switch to a subscriber model. When Salon.com went pay I sure as heck forked over the money. I can't imagine doing that for msn.com or the other sites mentioned. If their content isn't worth it chances are they're going to subsidize their lack of worth with gimmicks like these.
Secondly, text ads are far superior, convey real information, and the google method puts them in the context of the website itself, so you don't get car ads on a site about bicycles.
Fuck you execs. I will NOT buy anything that is advertised in this manner. NEVER.
PopUp Killer (Smart mode set to 25) works great at blocking Unicast's demo ads...somehow that makes me think it's not guaranteed to do anything.
Don't go to any site that uses this technology.
It's coercive to run an ad deliberately intended to evade consumer ad-blocking software.
Show your displeasure - do not go to these sites, send email to these sites telling them so, and send email to the ADVERTISERS telling them so.
Enough people revolt, the companies paying for this crap will stop paying for it - simple business decision.
These people need to be told that the Net is NOT one-way broadcasting.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I remember how annoying those things were during the Winter Olympics of 2002. The "official" site had them, if anyone remembers. I doubt the Internet Archive will have them in graphic detail.
Honestly, why? The 'net is too different from radio and television to be treated the same way. I would wager that the majority of people for whom these ads would work do not have broadband, and (I'm guessing/assuming here as well) that the majority of users who do have broadband have it for reasons other than viewing stupid ads. It's like paying extra for cable so your television-watching experience can be more inconvenient and wasteful. I, for instance, have broadband because I enjoy instant-on and always being connected. Pages load instantly. I can check the weather in my area in about 5-10 seconds (and download pr0n in 30). If I have to watch a 30 second ad before seeing what I actually want, I'll go elsewhere. If all the websites I normally hit up start doing that, I'd probably just find other sites or other means to find what I'm looking for. Isn't there a better way to keeps sites afloat than by bombarding their users with ads? Can't we develop a better system for sustaining content on the net that doesn't cause it to become less user-friendly and more intrusive?
I'm looking California... but feeling Minnesota...
If standing in a bathtub with an electric iron isn't your cup of tea, here's a guiltless Google Link.
Bwah ha ha ha ha! Let all of the Windoze drones using IE with WMP pay for my web surfing. I won't notice their pitiful little attempts to serve ads to my Mac.
Adblock for Mozilla and Firebird is a very robust and precise content-filterer that allows users to specify filters which remove unwanted content based on the source-address (ex.: *doubleclick*, */ad*, *.swf, http://www.goatse.cx/*) and much, much more. It blocks anything that can be seen in a browser.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
If I can avoid the ad by configuring my browser a certain way or writing a patch or plug-in, I'll do that. Otherwise, I simply have to decide whether or not the content is worth the price. If I really want to read a certain story, I guess I have to suffer through the ad. That's their price for delivering the content. If the price proves too steep, they'll lose customers and the world will continue to spin.
As for avoiding the ad via technological means, I think people will have a much tougher time with it when the content providers start putting the content and advertising in the same Flash movie. So people without Flash cannot get it. Whatever...they're only valuable as consumers if they see the ad anyway.
Nerd Rock In Progress
Millions of 56Ker's screaming in agony.
Both with Motion and the Unicast commercials, "advertisers can reach people during the day, when they typically don't watch television, and continue delivering that brand message in the same creative format," Mr. McDonough said, adding, "It's a wonderful way to surround the consumer."
I am thinking that this BS is not going to go away. Advertising is in trouble (dont know about you, but I rarely see commercials since I got tivo). Television commercials, radio commercials, and print ads are becoming less effective every day - as people move to the internet for their entertaiment/information.
They are losing their captive audience and are going to try as hard as they can to "surround" it again. Anyone think they will really discontinue such ads if people complain?
It seems to me that the only way to prevent circumvention of these ads (without requiring user feedback "enter this code") would be to control which browser they use. IE only sites? Where is your Trusted Computing Certificate? Don't have one? Sorry, you are not "trusted", you can only surf the "unsecure" web.
Release OS X for x86 - Linux Desktop Developers get your heads out of your ass and create something as functional and easy to use as Windows - time is of the essence!
These guys sound like the brilliant types who decided that I could afford to spend a dollar or two a month to visit my favourite websites. "Anybody can afford that" they say. The bozos forget however, that I visit *hundreds* of different sites a month. And suddenly my "easily afforded" monthly bill for web page subscriptions is upwards of $200 a month.
The reality of the situation is that I simply stopped visiting those pages asking for subscription fees. Just like I'll stop visiting any pages who use these new ads.
is a dinosaur walking up to me and saying hi, like it's no big deal that it isn't long dead. Television was an anomoly. For one short period in history, a select few had total control over a major communication medium - television and radio. They used this to their advantage of course, and made lots of money. That is gone, hopefully for good. We are all peers on the internet. Nobody controls it. When we get annoyed by advertising, we just go somewhere else for our information, or block the ads with privoxy or proximitron. Marketing will never be the same as it was during television's reign. When will these dinosaurs realise that they are dead?
I see a lot of posts saying "If you don't like it, you don't have to use their website." This is true of most conventional flash-based ads; when you get sent to the page with the huge plugin block you can click "Skip" or close the entire window if you want, and elect to go somewhere else. What't wrong these is that they load in the background BEFORE they are triggered. So if I go to a website using this they automatically suck up all of my bandwidth without so much as a notice that it's happening. Don't want to watch the ad? Fine, close the window, but you've ALREADY paid the bandwidth costs of downloading it. It's not that I necessarily mind paying for a "free" service with bandwidth costs for advertising, it's that they've decided to choose for me.
Anyway, I predict it'll be about a week before this nonsense is stopped in its tracks by the Mozilla/Konqueror teams. And judging by Microsoft's ground-breaking decision to add pop-up blocking to IE, Windows IE users should expect to have it blocked too! In 2009, when Service Pack 2 for Longhorn is released.
They have a directory of all the sites that will be using their technology.
/. via OSDN personals.
Note that match.com is amongst them, who are affiliated with
Can we trust no one?
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
If you check out the specs sheet of the "Superstitial" full screen ad format here: http://www.unicast.com/formats/htmlspecs_fs.asp?do cument=FullScreenSpecs%5F05277521%2Epdf. At least the specs are reasonable.
- All ads are essentially Flash movies with set limitations
- max file size 600K
- limit to 15 seconds max
- *MUST include sound off button
- *MUST include a skip commerical link
- if no buttons are visible at any point during the commerical, clicking on the commerical itself will allow the user to "bail" from watching it.
- embedded videos can be no larger than 320x240
And all interactivity and motion/animation is done in flash, most using actionscript. It almost seems like a crime to pass this off as new technology, when it fact it just appears to be flash movies forced to run full screen.
And no I don't agree with what they're doing, and I don't believe that I should have to pay with my own bandwidth to watch someone elses ads, but at least they're giving up the option in these ads to skip them... Which isn't much a silver lining but..???
The most important thing is that when we see these commercials, we should not click on anything but the "skip" button. If we make sure the skip them all, I think our message will be heard loud and clear by advertisers.
Mod parent up. Cool little utility....
Exodus of 80% of users of those sites, all going to mozilla.com. MS wants the market share of IE dont they? Seeems like a bad move in that regard.
Error: Id10t detected
... is that anyone can set up an Internet site, whereas very few people have the ability to set up their own TV station. So let these guys make their sites as annoying as they want, it will only encourage alternative sites to spring up. One day, ESPN will wonder where all their viewers have gone, only to find they have migrated to opensports.net or somesuch.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
How much more bandwidth can be consumed by fuckers and their Flash/Full-Motion Video ads. WTF. If I want your shit I'll be looking for you, you don't have to annoy the piss out of me, and if you're preying on people that have impulse buying problems, then you're a shady bitch that I wouldn't want to do business with anyway.
No sig for you!!
I knew there was a reason I never installed a sound card in this machine.
Now, I know what it was.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I don't mind advertising, well I do but I can put up with it. What I hate is when they force the user to deal with them outside of the media they are supporting. For example there are magazine ads, bus ads, television ads, etc, but does a magazine ad magically litter your room with more maganizes which are full ad books? No, they include them in the publication, this is exactly what a pop up or under is for the web.
Advertising should strictly stick to only on page ads which are fluid with the media they are supporting, I think people understand and appreciate this much more than popped ads. Besides their revolutionary unblockable technology will only be a matter of a few days before its blockable, so whats the point, just make regular ads people if you have to make them.
THE USER OWNS THE SCREEN. This is why pop-ups are so much more annoying than banner ads, and why this sort of advertising will be instantly the most hated form of ad yet devised.
They think this is akin to a television commercial that viewers are forced to sit through in order to finish watching the show, because they understand television advertising but not web advertising. They don't realize that banner ads are the natural analogues to commercials. This is more akin to being forced to watch a commercial before your television will permit you to change the channel. How many viewers would put up with that?
Just went to their site, and couldn't see any of their demos! I had to disable "Refuse pop-up windows" in Opera 6 to be able to see one of their demo ads. The full-size window also didn't open in the right place, and it's top-left corner was near the middle of my screen, and much of the window outside my screen. So unless you have some crappy browser which cannot block pop-ups (which is only MSIE by now?), you probably won't be bothered much.
As I read a site, I click interesting links into tabs whie keeping the first site on top. Those adds can play away in the background while I finish up the original site.
Blar.
Just browse with no associated video file types.
They'll never do this with QuickTime (filesizes are too big), so just make sure you don't have WMP installed...
(And of course... stay faaaar away from RealPlayer)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Just don't install Flash.
< )
( \
X
8====D
Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking.
Wahahahaha....ill pay them just to see if they can make debianppc + epiphany working with their crap...
NO SIG
Blocking http://*.unicast.com/* and http://*.enliven.com/* seems to take care of this new annoyance quite handily.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
http://adblock.mozdev.org
:)
Lets you selectively block Flash objects, as well as filter out a whole bunch of other crap. Like Slashdot ad banners
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Well I for one am all for FSIs. Anything that pushes users away from IE and closer to other browsers (or even operating systems) is a smart move.
Bill: "So what's our latest gimmick?"
NonBill: "Drive customers away."
Bill: "Ah, yes, and then win them back in a couple years and charge them for the time lost."
NonBill: "...uh, sure, yes, precisely."
if this really does what you say, then a simple application of ctrl-alt-del ought to do the trick good enough for us M$-slaves.
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Since I'm only able to get about 28 baud (because of line conditions, of course), a 2 or 4 MB video would really eat my already finite bandwidth. Perhaps, if advertisers want to be so low as to do thinks like this, they should put in some sort of bandwidth-sensing mechanism so we dial-up users don't have to spend fifteen minutes downloading a Mountain Dew commercial we probably don't want to see anyway.
"Is this so wrong on the net?"
Yes. It is as wrong as if a TV commercial could prevent me from changing the channel, turning on the radio, or going to the bathroom while it was playing.
A full-screen advertisement as herein described consumes my bandwidth without asking (potentially forcing me to pay more to my ISP), hijacks my entire computer interface (which usually does much more than just web browsing).
I have little problem with net advertising in general, as long as it respects my control of my property. A website that requires you to click-through a page of advertising may be annoying if you are in a hurry, but is completely reasonable and up front. A website that silently loads a high-res movie in the background, then takes over your entire screen when you try to leave, is an abomination.
Yes, we're all going to love this advertising. Every last netizen. That's why so many of us watch a limitted amount of TV (if any)! That's why tivos are so popular! Because everyone loves watching commercials, and supplimenting the value/entertainment of their browsing/TV watching time with senseless commercial fluff!
Bring it on!
Or not. This'll fly like a fat balerina.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
These sites will be blocked at the proxy servers. Piece of cake. Unless everyone and their mom starts using these ads. But we'll come up with something to kick these guys where it hurts-- just like they're trying to do to us.
Full-screen, must-view ads ate work? Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Maybe I *won't* block them after all. We got lawyers, too.
Then the WMV crap won't play. When you're done with the New York Times, set it back to medium or whatever.
Nice. You have a lot more than I do. I added yours to mine. BTW, mine are in the form of entries in /etc/named.conf pointing to a zone file that wildcards an A record pointing to a special web server that always gives a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF regardless of the requested URI. It looks cleaner that way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If any of the sites that I have bookmarked and visit on a regular basis run these ads, I'll simply remove them from my bookmarks. Simple as that. I don't pay a lot of money every month for a broadband connection to watch commercials. If these sites are not able to run a site without these ads, then they shouldn't have a web presence. Period!
Although Flash click-to-view is very cool, you still download the flash, even though you don't see it.
Some of us are constrained to use IE, for better or worse, all political feelings aside. You can try this out right now at www.unicast.com, there are examples in their gallery. My findings so far:
1. Simple popup blockers like the IE Yahoo plugin do not block these ads.
2. More complex IE blockers like AdShield can easily block the content of the ad window, but the window still pops up.
3. The window is closable at all times, so at least you are not trapped looking at it if you click quickly.
So... the javascript looks like it is using standard window.open - so why do the popup blockers not see it? Ideally someone will create an IE plugin that simply disables whatever hack they are using to get the windows to display. More technical thoughts?
looks like i'll be adding a few sites to my hosts file. no need to accidently stumble on them through a link.
Ever since they loaded up on the flash ads I stopped visiting.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
They've been laying one steaming turd on top of another on it. How long before we all get so pissed off at it that we create a virtual network on top of the Internet and refuse access to those assholes? I'm ready...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Whenever you see one of these ads make sure you write to the advertiser and tell them that because of the ad, no matter what their product or service, no matter how good that product or service, they will NEVER, EVER make a penny off you from this day forward.
Then stick to your guns; DON'T buy those products or services. Go on forums and blast these companies for choosing such an invasive form of advertising.
Is this Windows specific? Mac too?
Is it Flash? What technology?
Can Safari and PithHelmet block it? New OmniWeb?
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I'd think good and hard before hosting this kind of ads on my webpage. Let's suppose a reasonably percentage of my public isn't on broadband (or just easily annoyed). These ads would loose me these customers, and my advertiser wouldn't improve his image with them, either.
Now of course I can say "screw them, they don't have no purchasing p0werz anyway", but I had better be right.
For sites that need broad accesibility, they therefore should be big no-nos.
sig is my sith nature.
Just don't use crappy IE and you won't be exploited by this crap.
Some good catch-alls for Adblock
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I'll go so far as to say I don't mind the commercials if they will pay for the content. Otherwise I fail to see the point, I don't want an added annoyance if I'm not getting anything extra in return.
I don't mind the idea of the full motion ads so much as the sudden hit of the sound.
I personally keep my speakers turned off, but not everyone does that. When they hit a site now that has embedded sounds, it's very intrusive to those around them.
Lets say you park in a parking garage that charges by the minute, while you go shop at the mall, and just browse around. You come back to you car, and then as you leave all of a sudden your car comes to a screeching halt, and a video monitor pops out of the ceiling in front of you. It begins to play a 30-second TV commercial, turning over your time meter and making you pay an extra dollar.
Now I ask you: How many people do you think would want to buy what the commercial was advertising? Would you? In fact, a lot of people would grow resent towards that company.
Furthermore, how long do you think it will be before somebody figures out the mechanism and jams a screwdriver in the servo motor?
The companies that invested in the video monitors will be out money, and the companies that payed for the advertising will have a much, much smaller and more resentful clientelle.
It is pretty obvious that this is a very, very bad idea, but a lot of people in marketing don't have that kind of foresight
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
The hack is unnecessary if you disallow Flash to run in Mozilla. I use Mozilla for most of my web browsing. If I want to see Flash (which is quite rare), I use Internet Explorer.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
These sites are going to have their traffic drop, bandwidth costs increase, and people the people that still use those pages are going to start switching over to the first browser that circumvents the ads. And if you need MSIE and WMP, then I'm going to check out their "guarantee" with a linux box. Maybe their guarantees only work for the people who use AOL.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
Never hit these sites again!
It's only a matter of time before Mozilla includes the ability to squash these damn things. I for one will not tolerate such intrusive ads on bandwidth I pay for. Then again, I will also realize which sites are pushing it, and stay away from these for good if this is the type of business they choose to do. Banner ads are fine with me - pop up ads, and now pop up video are not, and they will not be tolerated.
The commercial is loaded in the background while the normal page is displayed, and in fact loads only when the system is idle.
When the commercial is completely loaded into memory, it then starts playing.
Sorry, scumbag corps are not going to take away the Internet and make that just another commercial vehicle. I have no problem sharing it with commercial and non-commercial interests as long as there is balance. However when the commercial interests try to take over, something needs to be done.
This is typical greed that will continue to push the envelope to see how to generate more and more money. This is not capitalism, it is just greed, plain and simple. Most people will stoop to any level to make a buck/Euro/paso.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
From the Article...
"The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. "
So, in other words, they are using some sort of ActiveX/Browser plugin. Great just what I need, yet another plugin to block. The good news is that those using anything other than Windows won't have to bother with this crap.
"Mr. Nail says he appreciates the fact that the ads do not slow Web surfing. The commercials load into a computer's temporary memory, and only when a page is idle. If a user clicks to a new page within the site before the ad is fully loaded, the process is merely paused until the browser is again idle. The ads run on Windows Media Player software"
Doesn't slow the web surfing? WTF? He's smoking crack. While I suspect from the description that it tries to detect when the user is idle, that will hardly keep it from sucking up bandwidth.
at 300K a this isn't going to be popular with those who manage corporate networks. Why is it that these media guys never seem to grasp the fact that most of the surfing that goes on does so from some sort of corporate or educational environment. Neither of those environments will be happy about seeing their bandwidth usages going up yet again because pepsi and co think throwing a 300K 30 video ad to replace the popups that everybody hates is some how going to convence johnny that he should drink more fscking pop.
Bugs Bunny was right.
I avoided using GAIM because AOL Instant Messanger (the AOL version) seemed to do just fine, until I logged on one day and heard "I'D LIKE TO BUY A VOWEL PAT!" at 200 decibles and it played a commercial (still picture with sound).
I thought some spyware was installed - putting loud-ass radio (essentially what the ads are) ads in my software seemed like something a sneaky no-good Gator-type thing would have...But no, it was just AOL (is there a difference?).
After that, I had enough - I deleted AOL Instant Messenger and installed GAIM. Their obtrusion cost them a customer - they no longer get to put ads on my computer - they went too far.
It uses Windows Media Player.
This is ridiculous. It's about time we fight back against advertising bullies who make the Internet annoying for all of us. The other day, I went to a movie, and commercials--not previews--were played for about 30 minutes before the lights dimmed and the movie started. I'm getting sick of being inundated with advertisements everywhere I go on-line and, for that matter, in the real world. The only power we have over these advertising companies is our money. We should refuse to buy products from companies that engage in less-than-kosher advertising practices.
When will these companies learn that pissing off the entire Internet community is not good for business?
I'm sure this new advertising 'technology' is covered by one or more of the most vaguely worded software patents. Once companies start getting sued for infringement, which will be around the same time they notice the sharp drop in visitors, they will pull the plug on these ads. And if this means that Microsoft takes down msn.com since it produces no revenue, somehow I think the Internet will live on without it.
If I ever visit a site that succeeds in doing that to me, I'll never visit that site again, and I'll email them and post to the abuse groups saying so.
Believe me this is an IE emulation Opera doesnt need. Looks like the usual marketing schlock. by everyone, they mean IE users. So perhaps this will be the begining of the end of IE. As an Opera and Konqueror user, this is a very good thing.
"Click here to get the plugin"
Don't have Flash, don't need it.
Thank you, Mozilla.org!
from their own site...
and
Mozilla firebird prevented it from displaying any of their ads, even when I directly clicked the link to see the ads!
and on the one gallery page that popups actually worked i got a new popup, but no AD! it looks like a great service.. good luck unicast.
Thank you Linux. My box(es) will not be 0wned by anyone. I am GOD of *my* systems.
Go ahead smart ass vampire bastards, try to "ad" me up... It ain't happening....
There will be NO ads running on my systems.
Free Hint.
Smoothwall 2.0, http://www.smoothwall.org
squid / adzapper http://adzapper.sourceforge.net/
instructions for above combo, http://martybugs.net/smoothwall/adzap.cgi
If they're right, then:
a) it's going to get worse
b) whoever figures out how to derive value from a real RELATIONSHIP with the customer, and can effectively address each customer's concerns instead of working around them, will win big.
Priceless
I'm sorry. I couldn't resist.
But it ain't already free. They're just being greedy and trying to make more money out of it.
Pretty hypocritical, considering it wouldn't exist without a lot of donated tax-money research and net-hacker time.
from their own site...http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery_over page.aspl la firebird prevented it from displaying any of their ads, even when I directly clicked the link to see the ads!
# i got a new popup, but no AD! it looks like a great service.. good luck unicast.
and http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery.asp#
Mozi
and on the one gallery page that popups actually worked http://www.unicast.com/gallery/gallery_inpage.asp
There's nothing wrong with trying to finance your site by using big ol' ads. But if you make your site annoying enough, people won't go to it. This will be a new era indeed...
...and die by it, too. It's every site's right to place intrusive advertising, but it will make me far less likely to visit.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
What does that mean, we all know that there is registration required for NYT, and even if you don't you'll find out pretty fast. This whole ripping on the new york times because you have to register is really lame and childish- almost as bad as the FIRST POST thing-- maybe I stand alone on this one, but it makes me not want to read the story after that lame ass joke.
Well, it didn't work for me, but that's a nice benefit of not having shockwave installed. Of course, I just ended up with a large blank page that did nothing. Handy
-Brad
When will people realize that this is so easily fixable with Squid and Adzapper? Why aren't ISPs doing this (as well as virus scanning email the right way) already? Are they afraid they will lose customers by doing the right thing or something?
Help us build a better map!
You've got to remember, these ads will only be on specific sites. The user gets to choose which sites they go to. Some will have the ads, others won't. I don't really care about the bandwidth, but a full-screen ad? I'm not gonna stand for that. I will stop going to a site that gets in the way like that. Users have power. If a site loses a vast amount of traffic because of these ads, the ads will go away.
Hey man, I am Canadian and I pay for my capped bandwidth. So much per month. If I am going to start getting pop-under, silent downloads of f*#@'n tv style ads on the web then I'm going to have to ask my ISP to deduct the advertising total from my bandwidth before they bill be every month.
ESPN and sites like them should have more then enough revenue from their tv operations and if they don't then CHARGE people to visit your website and watch how quickly the rednecks ditch INteractive TV and the online in-car camera.
Please if you think its really that valuable then charge for it! Don't think you can steal my bandwidth to make money by playing ads. Maybe I should start billing these websites for using MY bandwidth.
Here we go again with what will prove to be another failed attempt to bring TV style, interuptive advertising to the web. It will fail!
Hmm... you mean like setting dom.disable_window_* to false in Mozilla?
For reference, * includes
I think move_resize is the one you want, though chances are you'll want open_feature.close and open_feature.resizable (and... well, all of them) too.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Goto their home page, view source - scroll to the bottom, a hidden link.
All this from somebody that is suppose to know web design?
I'd be willing to bet real money Mac users won't be affected by this crap.
Not that I go to any of the sites mentioned anyway.
And I've got dozens of ad-servers blocked at my router. So I'll have to ad a few dozen more, who really cares?
If advertising gets that far out of control, I'll just stop using the 'net entirely. I'm already using it far less than I did a couple years ago. And I've nearly completely stopped watching TV. I've got a lot more time to do useful stuff these days. (But all I really do is play Halo. ^_^;;)
To me, those sites seem like the need to post the ads due to large overhead costs in various aspects of their business. Seems the main sites doing this are the news sites. But as the internet is the way it is, news from only one source isn't very likely. I think people will just find another site that isn't so blatent in it's advertising. Take for example the ign and gamespy websites. I know of a few people (including myself) who refuse to visit these sites due to their advertising. Instead there is a whole plefora of sites out there that serve up the same, if not better news. It's just like TV. If an ad is on, change the channel.
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will not be visited by people who read Slashdot. So... will this be the reverse /. effect?
--Mike Boos
Anyway guarenteed? Links/Lynx playing full motion full screen video? Like to see that. How about people on say on of those nokia phones with internet access? How about odd ball oses? No not bsd or linux. Apple.
Anyway I think I seen this already. Visited gamespot for insanity reasons. It had some kind of horrid ad for poptarts or something. Talk about targetted advertising. The ad played alright on a linux/opera setup. Tiny little problem. They don't sell them in holland to the best of my knowledge.
Other piece of targetted banners I saw was an ad for UPC (local isp) constantly displayed on the garfield site. I was using UPC connection. Duh.
Get this targgetted stuff right then we will talk about full motion. Until then you are just wasting time.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anyone know how firebird's tab browsing will effect this? If it is activated on window close that would suck to have 10 tabs open then close the window and have to watch 10 ads.... Or could you close the tab without it recognizing it as a window close? Anybody know?
-blar
These ads are Flash. The Mozilla extension "click to play Flash" can take care of that.
Mozilla won't let me view their sample ad.
BTW.
Running Debian SID... Linux is my mainstream now.
Most of us are aware that the Internet isn't really free. We the web browsers usually pay an ISP or put up with an ISP's adds to pay for the "free" Internet access. The same is for those who provide Internet content. It costs something to be connected and costs something to keep it running (and that cost is not always money.)
Then there is the perversion of the Internet(motly the World Wide Web). The Internet was created to share information in a platform independent way, not to pop up endless adds, not to display animated adds jumping around, not to run code like JavaScript, and Visual Basic, and expecially not to run ActiveX controlls.
Yes, a lot of what has been done is really cool and things on the Internet should change and grow, but the changes really should be for the better. If your website only works right on an IE browser but not on ANY other, there is something wrong. If a binary or script can be automatically run, something is wrong. Any time you add something to the Internet that only takes something away from the people, it is a perversion!
So what does this have to do with Internet adds? This is another change to the Internet that does not improve anything. In fact it makes things worse. It will at least cost some people browsing the Internet money, and annoy us all.
So what do we do? (1) E-mail the companies using this service and tell them you will stop using the service if they continue run such commercials. (2) Stop using the services. (3) If only one company is going to be spitting out the adds, time to do a little local DNS editing or block traffic from those spicific Internet domains. (4) It sounds like it is a new type of file since it loads compleatly before playing. Switch to a web browser that does not support it.
Okay, so how does this format load and play when I browse the web using the text-based LYNX browser? How much is a guarantee worth when it is impossible to deliver?
So exactly why is it good business sence to piss off your customers with adds? I get pissed off going to a Movie theater and see TV commercials and go to other theaters.
Not all websites are free of charge. Ever been to a website that requires you to login? Some of those charge a fee for an account. Those services are usually worth it (or they would have gone under).
"The Internet is my tool; I refuse to be the tool of the Internet." -- MrNybbles
How to make Adds NOT piss people off
Many DVDs put adds/previews/whatever in a bonus section of the DVD. MAKE ADDS OPTIONAL!
In magazines I can skip the add pages. In addition, some of those adds are actually more interesting than the magazine content itself. MAKE IT UNINTRUSIVE! MAKE IT INTERESTING!
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?
Wrong. At least one of the named companies is a nationwide ISP that charges its users for the privilege of receiving banner ads on its home page, and presumably will now be charging them to receive these new ones. This same company is about to release a major browser update that blocks pop-up ads. (BTW, I don't see much difference between this situation and D-Squared Solutions' alleged extortion.)
How convenient that this ISP will concurrently "enhance" ads blockable by its new browser with unblockable ones.Given the tone of this post, any reply should probably be considered flamebait. Still...
I think a lot of companies will respond to hatred of advertising by resorting to product placement. No more beer commercials during Friends. Now you'll just have one friend offer another 'a bud.'
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
How often would I have to watch one of these ads to eliminate all of the advertising on the pages I request? That way I could have 30 second meditation sessions during my otherwise ad free browsing.
What ads? All I get is a message saying soem crap about active x controls not displaying properly, same crap I get from http://www.tomshardware.com/
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
If you wish to remove flash and shockwave as well here's a url with removal tools by macromedia
http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/alter
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I mean, since the recipient pays for the transfer (especially so if they pay per MB downloaded via modem) and it's not requested (they even say it starts to download AFTER the page has been loaded, hence it's not part of the page requested?).
And if that is the case, then doesn't this law apply?
Seem to remember something about computers counting as a ''telephone facsimile machine'', or did I miss the point about the law and it has nothing to do with wether or not the recipient is the one paying for it?
IANAL nor do I live the U.S btw...
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
Not that reading the article is something we used to do :).
Seriously though I hate it as much as the next person but the ads are only 300k. Not fast on a dial-up but definitely not going to take 'hours' to download.
What cracks me up is their 'patented' content delivery system. Its Flash for crying outloud! there is nothing new or special about it, people have been doing this for site intros forever, I'm surprised someone didn't think of this sooner.
The bad news is that it isn't going to be easy to block. The redirect is embedded in the flash so your proxy or your browser would have to decode that flash natively and then direct you to the correct page. If you block the host or turn the flash off then it simply isn't going to load for you and there will be no way to get to the real page.
The easiest thing is don't visit sites with this stuff on it.
The Anti-Blog
This is one situation where I hope it will work only under Windows.
Jory
... in what my machine will be sending back to them as part of this process. After all, it does have to send something to tell them my browser is open and waiting for their wonderful content. There's got to be some kind of ACK packet or piece of cookie or something, right?
Oh my golly, I certainly hope that these little ACK packets don't get all munged up and get some big ole MP3 or something accidently cat'ed to them. Why, that'd shove a whole bunch of useless junk up their widget while it's waiting patiently to feed me my commercials.
The difference between TV and the net is, we always wanted to tell the TV off, but couldn't. We've been waiting for years for this, and now we can.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Flash tends to be small (even smaller than equivalent sized JPEG in many cases). You can always use a proxy which blocks requests for swf files and replaces it with a blank one, ala squid or something.
No, the thing I hate is the flash plugin, which tends to peg the CPU. Click to play keeps it from loading until I want it to. It also stops me from seeing those annoying banner ads (while still "registering" an impression)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I know there aren't many of us left, but really, do companies think that people like us will be interested in their products after they rape our modems with this trash? It takes me long enough to get what I need done with 56K as it is. Call me crazy, but I think Microsoft and all of those other companies can live without the extra revenue.
Atari - 80's
Kool-Aid - suicide
Goya - Spanish artist
Levis - Everyone
Adidas Too poor or sensible to buy Nikes
Apple - Artists. Computer labs.
Phat Farm - A rap group?
Fender - the thing in front of a car
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
animated, full-motion pokers, with sound!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And here I am using my Linux based Linux distro like a sucker!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So, I turn pop-ups back on and enable plug-ins, to see the samples at unicast.com... they open up in a full-screen-sized (closable,hideable,moveable) window inside Opera's MDI window. Weird definition of using the full screen real estate. Anyone have a link to a site that actually has one of these ads running?
Patent# 6,466,967
Looks like it should be easy enough to block:
Haha... that really made my day. If I go to a site with those commercials (gee, sound like ign at all?), I'll simply stop going there, and get my info from another site that DOESN'T use them. Gee, that was a tough choice.
:p
Worst case, I'll uninstall shockwave. It showed some real potential for site design, but now it's mostly for banners and stupid meme vids anyway.
Sorry, but even DVD region encoding is harder to fix than this.
Egads - that is like saying "why not pee in the punchbowl - it will add more flavor."
go get myIE2 v0.9.13 www.myIE2.com in AdHunter, both popup and content add *.unicast.com *.enliven.com all I get is an new tab window that says DONE... on the status bar. -------- those who just sit and bitch deserve all the crap that is dumped on them
Hey, if it's that new ad from Pepsi with Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyonce dressed as gladiators, I don't mind!
Okay so advertising keeps Network TV free, Newspapers cheap, phone books free. So will internet advertising of this short make the internet cheaper for the rest of us? Or is this just another way for large corporations get larger and spam us in a new way? I'm thinking towards the later on this.
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
I don't want to troll, but that's running non Apple xor M$ box... or Mozilla on any of them
(sure, some still want to see certain flashes... but, I guess, then you either use another browser that supports it, and start picking the places you browse...if one dosen't have the skills to add hosts to banlists....anyway, it'll all be good in the end - users aren't so stupid when things start to irritate/bug them, they'll somehow manage to achive their goal)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Common guys, we are getting soft. Unicast's site is still running without problems.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
How long will it take for porn sites to follow suite? Anyone care to wager?
I give it less than a month
What needs to be done, is to spread the word to all your non-tech friends, family, and otherwise. Tell them to get Opera, so you can turn off Flash with just a couple of keystrokes, and turn it back on the same way. I went by a web site that has these sorts of ads. They wouldn't play till I turned Flash on.
Opera has scored BIG time with me, with the F12 key. No animted gifs, no Java, No flash, no annoying sound. It's great to browse without the bullpucky. Oh! Might I even mention no unwanted pop-up windows??? No need for additional software.
Opera is just a joy to use, and I recommend it to any OS user. Not to mention how fast it is.
So no need to whine about all the stuff. Just do something about it.
Shad
The bandwidth problem still exists though. Content blocked with Adblock is still downloaded, it's just kept from view. I'm fine with this on my cable connection with unlimited download a month, but my mom on her dial-up and our Aussie friends who pay by the meg still get hurt, even if they don't see the ads.
Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking. "The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
That's funny, it doesn't work for me.
as you browse pages, only displaying it after it's loaded all the way and only using bandwidth when the line is clear (well, this last one probably not, but it'd be nice if they did). That way browsing doesn't grind to a halt and they can send dialup users fancy lookin' ads. It's a clever idea and very annoying. I expect IGN uses it, which explains why I sometimes go several pages without an add and other times get one between every page.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Perhaps, but it would certainly still be easy to circumvent. I don't even have my browser setup to play movies, but even if it was, how hard would it be to ask the user if they want to play the movie?
A commercial, such as on TV or Radio, partly or wholly pays for the content being broadcast. In many cases, it reduces or eliminates the cost to the consumer. THIS, however, is THEFT. They are useing resources on MY computer, and bandwidth that I pay a monthly reoccuring fee for, in order to feed me more intrusive forms of advertising. This is like getting a monthly bill for rabbit ears.
You can filter conent. There are a number of programs that already block banner ads.
You can hit the "SHOP" button.
You both have the wrong prospective.
It's not forcing users who pay per megabyte or have dial up to download large amounts of ad data.
It's forcing them to NOT visit the websites or worse block the advertsments and thusly deny the website revinu.
I'm quite fond of the "banner ad" consept and I'm also fond of the text browser for times when I'm stuck using a dial up connection.
I don't actually exist.
I wouldn't get my panties up in a bunch over this yet. It seems to be aimed at Windows users. I hope they aren't stupid enough to use something that crashes anything else. I suspect that it won't take long to see lots of plug ins and other software that kills this dead. Its not like they will write software that forces ads on us. If they did that, it wouldn't take long til some blackhat hacks that to force viruses and trojans on one and all. Lawsuits shall fall as rain. I suspect that writing blocking software for such software would soon be the killer app of the moment, people might even stop writing new P2P systems for a while. I suspect software that would back these sort of ads up, clogging bandwidth like clogged toilet from hell would soon have the ISPs demanding these websites halt this sort of attempt to write obtrusive ad software. I suspect it won't take long to set up blacklists and go-to-hell canned e-mail with relevant addresses on various websites and Blogs. Whatever did happen to Cancer and Seagull anyway?
Isn't it somewhat worthless to further increase and increase and increase the amount of advertisements?
I mean, I, like everyone, know all the big companies and their most important products.
So, they have informed me about their products.
But the problem is that *most* advertising nowadays doesn't inform people but instead is produced because the bandwidth for advertisements (in TV, radio, internet, whatever) is too big. IMHO, a company produces advertisements because otherwise it would lose customers because of other companies advertising.
Where is this good for society? I don't get it...
heh
Open /etc/hosts or c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in a text editor.
Then add the following lines to that file:
The sad unstoppable outcome, if this takes off, is that the same ignorant people who will ensure the successful launch of this advertising concept are the same ignorant people who fuel it everyday.
I remember my junior high school year Government/History teacher, who tried to find something on the Internet. The first sad aspect was her default home page was taken over by some shitty advertisement search engine which she didn't know how to change until after I showed her how to. The second sad aspect is that same site bombarded her with tricky popups that mocked the Windows interface, and when she tried to close it, she of course clicked the X in the advert, not the real X that actually closed the window. She complained verbally to me about it, as I was standing behind her, and I just told her to ask the school admin if he could install a popup blocker for her. Sad aspect number 3? She said she always thought she just had to see all of them every time because she didn't know there was a way to stop popups.
It just sad how ignorant so many people really are about technology. I really wish there was a way that they could all learn that there are clean, decent alternatives to the cesspools of shit out there. Just compare news.google.com to msn.com, for instance.
-- paper
you dont have to visit these sites, and I bet it will end up making them lose money, but if this does become a trend where more sites do it, then I'll be pissed off, because I have right not to be subjected to forced advertizing, not to mention the net is a development platform where data is sent and recieved, websites and companies with websites are just using it to promote their companies, companies that already have enough money to run hundreds of sites if they wished, they just want more money, and they want to turn the net into another version of television because more and more people are starting to look online for entertainment because TV sucks, so the same ad leeches who ruined television (where there are almost more commercials than the actual show) are trying to ruin the net, but unlike television, it's incredibly easy to start your own site and offer information free of ads..
I think we really should start worrying when our isp's start forcing us to view these ads and prevent us from running personal sites and creating verisign's wet dream, I wouldnt be surprised if they started phone ads where before you can call, you get 5 minutes of advertisements before you're allowed to call someone. and I bet that will be implemented in VOIP.
I didn't even read more than about 40 or so posts in this story/thread/whatever.. Geez what a bunch of cry-babies.
.. well... I'm rambling/ranting too much.. =]
Is it really that hard to wait for those die-hards that have Squid/whatever setup to visit some of the sites, grab the servers they are being served from, then post the list somewhere so the rest of us can add it to our hosts file? I'll be doing this myself with the sites I visit personally... 'course, I may just get lazy and wait for someone else to post a list.. Depends on my mood.. =]
Nothing to see here.. Move along...
(Guess my post goes along with those "in 10 minutes, someone will look through this, figure a way around it, and post the info", but I think
bork bork bork!
Turn off Java and Javascript, and reject loading anything automatically from a domain other than the web site. I'll bet the movie doesn't load.
As long as they warn people ahead of time that ads are the price of admission (ie. you must watch an ad to see the content: GO AHEAD | BYE!), then fine. Let them rise or fall based on what consumers will put up with. Better yet, this ensures that they don't waste server time sending a commercial to someone who is not receptive.
But if they try to do something sneaky that uses bandwidth without warning, then they deserve all the kicking and screaming anyone can make.
Disclosure: no tv since 98 and no commercial radio since 03.
they think that ads will be unskipable? wrong! sooner or later someone will cook up some plugin or something. that's for shore.
AIM is now airing mini-commercials in their ad-block on the GUI. It really pisses me off (I'm almost tempted to go to Yahoo or MSN) because I'll be playing a game and all of a sudden hear some audio from that damn ad.
Does this mean that the combined might and resources of the advertising world will now work towards open sourcing every video format there is? Or will they stick to well-documented and free formats, finally driving the likes of RealVideo out of the market?
I figure, either way it's good for me. And if they do neither, well, I guess I'm just going to miss out on the commercials.
bring them on ill just disable flash on my web broswer sorry but your content cant get threw. lol no matter what they use you can always not install there plugins. this is just another story of ad companys abusing flash and being 6.0 supports full moton video well you knoe where they got the idea. so now the rule of broswing the net is install a popup blocker and disable flash(unless your on stickdeath.com lol)
I have had ENOUGH of visiting sites with Gator pop-ups, etc and now this. While these sites do have the right to generate revenue to sustain themselves, grown and make a profit it is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE that these sites automatically push this type of content to you with your explicit permission. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is an infringement to the security of your PC. One could call this tampering with your PC...especially the adware crap that's out there now (Gator, etc). It is a CRIME or should be! I think what really needs to be done is a filtering intitiative needs to be started just like we have for SPAM. Sites should be filtered based on the content they push to viewers. Then viewers can use these filters with a custom plug-in to their browsers and be warned in advance to opening the page as to what it is pushing to viewers. "WARNING: this site will attempt to push Gator software to your PC" "Do you want to proceed?" "This features full motion commercials" "Do you want to proceed?" Something like mailwasher except for websites instead of email. I have one machine that I use specifically for web browsing (and use Mozilla Firebird) and gaming and one for my business related matters that I do not browse the web with at all. I don't need the headaches from potential problems like this.
Did anybody ever use iVillage?
MSN might be able to get away with it, since it's the default home page for people who don't know how to change the home page.
For ESPN, it might work. They actually have, like, content.
It's pretty clear that Flash-blocking has to become standard, and soon.
i currently run Mozilla 1.5 under win2k, the latest version of WiMP is the stock 6.4, and it's gonna stay that way. Realplayer is staying as far away from this LAN as is possible. I should remain immune to this shit, and if not, there's always a full blown *nix desktop (i'm content to keep linux server-side until things with windows get ugly.)
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
> MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage
In other words, websites that are already so loaded with multimedia content
that they're utterly unusable on a residential connection. Full-motion
video advertisements will only reinforce what we already know about these
sites: they are intended mainly to be viewed by people sitting on a T1 or
better connection at work.
Normal websites that calculate their page load times based on a 56K dialup or
even cable modem will obviously know better than to adopt this sort of thing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
or at least cheaper than $40-60/mo that it is now for broadband. At least with tv, I get 40+ channels of "unique" content--take that as you will--for 20 bucks. The content on the internet as of late, with the exception of 'chat-rooms', porn, and shopping,(and of course slashdot) has been so poor that I find myself not using it as much--which can be a good thing! I find myself exclusively using archive.org for links since most of the good stuff related to topics I am researching was on sites that either shut down, kill links, or meter bandwith.
i am so very tired....
block the ad using privoxy. I belive the default configuration prevents it from opening.
You pay to watch TV too, in the cost of the TV and electricity. If you have cable or a satellite dish you pay a monthly fee as well. The websites you view on your computer don't get any of the money you pay to your ISP (except for the ISP's own site). Unless they are a pay site, they have to make their money by advertising as well. If you don't want to deal with it, you can always change the channel. I don't think it's as bad as broadcast TV. If I had to sit at my computer for 20 minutes every hour I'm surfing just to watch the commercials I'd be pissed.
If I create blocker protection for my browser and a website circumvents that protection, technically they have violated DCMA and I should be able to sue the hell out of them. Correct?
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
opera doesn't have problems too. i browse with turned off plugins and enabled "open requested pop-up windows only". tryed click unicast ads at their site - just opens clean white window. and thats all. still looks like soon i will need to add few new entries to my /etc/hosts file :-)
>> the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking.
I love a challenge.
Presumably, the ads are coming from a small group of centralized servers (unicast), so it's nothing that can't be blocked at the firewall.
I doubt that these are going to fly, anyway. At 300k per download for a 15 sec spot, they're going to be alienating a lot of dial-up users.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Let me get this straight. If you go to a site that uses these, the advertisement begins downloading (without your consent or a warning), then plays itself (again without your consent), and until it is done playing you can't do anything else with your computer? It sounds to me more like a trojan horse than legitmate advertising. It's not legal to install Sub Seven on someone's computer and beam advertisements to them thatway, how is this any more legal?
They might be able to say that you consented to the material by going to the site, but in a case like that I'm pretty sure they have to put up some sort of warning that the page uses something like that.
One a different note, how can they guarantee that this software will work correctly on Linux, Windows, and Mac, as well as in all browsers? It ought to be as simple as using a browser that doesn't support it (as Mozilla probably won't). In order for open source browsers to support it, they'd have to release their code on how they show the adverts, which would just create a situation in which writing a plugin that blocks them would be a no-brainer.
MOD this dude up
My goodness... they were truly shite. Jolting, hard to make out and long to load (regardless of if they're in the background or not).
Terrible.
Just terrible.
- Make my DNS server authoritative for the unicast domain, and add not a single entry?
- Add lines to my HOSTS file for every unicast server I discover, and point them to 127.0.0.1?
- Simply put a *unicast* filter in my Mozilla Firebird Adblock plugin?
Any portion of the web made unusable by these ads will simply be amputated as far as I'm concerned."The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I've never heard of this format, but it must simply be awesome if it's universally supported by every browser on every operating system. Heck, I've even had MP3 audio files that wouldn't play, so it must simply be amazing if it's perfect.
I'm using FreeBSD with Konqueror. And no plugins. Will this work for me? Or will I have to do all of the horribly complicated things to get the Flash plugin to work under Linux emulation mode? Maybe it uses Java. Does it use Java? If so, how can it play perfectly if I have Java disabled?
Of course, I know the real answer. They're phrase "every consumer" means only those consumers running Windows, and possibly Mac. So what happens for the rest of us? Will these render these sites unusable, because there's no way to get past the requirement to view the advertisement? I'm thinking of all those sites that are completely and utterly inaccessible without flash.
p.s. No, I'm not going to switch to Windows, Mac or Linux just to see some ads. No site is worth that much. Ditto for switching to anything else.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I hate the crap real estate agents fill my letter box with telling me how they sold a house on my street or are doing free market valuations. Once I even got a hand written note saying please call me to discuss my house. When I want to sell I will go find one of the slimy bastards to sell it. I don't need them coming to me.
So my new years resolution is to collect every piece of crap they send me and at the end of the year I am going to take it all back and dump it in their office all over the floor. Hell, I didn't ask for it. It's not mine. It has their name on it so it must belong to them. I will simply return it.
...you lose. Advertising becomes obnoxious when advertisers forget that people are theoretically the purchasers of their goods, and that their money comes from those who willingly choose to exchange money for goods and services. Instead, some seem to think that they have an inherent right to the money and attention of others. Previously (or maybe only in my fantasy world), a business had to have goods that someone wanted and might actually consider purchasing. Now some businesses take for granted that obnoxious and obtrusive ads (let alone spam for dru9s) will earn them my attention and not my anger and annoyance. Other businesses intimidate their customers (or people who should be their customers) for money they believe they should get (SCO) only to find out that they don't have any customers anymore.
My bar has ads in the toilet which are run by a company which says as its tagline (I think) "ads for a captive audience". Pop-up, -under, etc. ads, spammers, etc., are the same way - instead of having products that people might want and choose willingly to look at or even buy, companies predicate their income on an absolute right to my attention. They seem to forget that there are few people with an absolute right to my attention (parents, GF, boss, etc.), and that they aren't on the list. If they attempt to force the issue, then they will lose any attention I might ever have willingly given them, and any money that might come from it.
The market comes from the willing exchange of goods and services and money. Any business that is predicated on forcing you to watch their ads is probably doing so because they don't have anything worth selling, and thus deserves to lose. Don't enrage your customers, and they might give you money (and only a few will take from you). Screw them, and pay the piper as a long line of angry people take you out of the corporate gene pool.
"Guerilla marketing" schemes are taking off
Text-ads are being prooven more effective
Studies are showing consumers are fed up with mass-marketing
I also think consumers are more informed and have more choices than ever. If you put it all together, it seems inevitable that advertising will become more targeted and concise in its message.
That said, plenty of advertisers are way out of touch. For example, there is presently a moronic woman dancing across my TV with her dust mop. You just guaranteed I will never buy your product.
Dead link, sucker!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Would it be possible to add a clause to the various versions of open source licences to prevent use of an open source technology for unsolicited advertising?
I know this does not apply to this case, but should we be thinking of protecting open source from this kind of abuse in the future?
i can not get muti-megs adverts for crap and i pay to get them how good a 500kb\s modem withh be as much use and as 28kb\d modem 6 years ago
thats grreeeaatt!
...couldn't you just block shit like this with a proxy? Find out which URLs are sending the worhtless crap over and block the traffic.
Un-news
Nothing will start a mass migration towards an open-source OS/browser as an enraging stunt like this if that's the case. Go ahead and exploit every security hole/feature in Windows, I don't care. Make MSIE/Windows the platform of self-selected victims more than it is now. In the end users will choose between OSX, Linux or BSD, and the internet will be far better for it.
Perhaps I'll stop getting Swen.W32 every single day then. I'm so terribly tired of suffering the effects of users choosing Windows.
My computer typically has the sound turned off and is at high resolution. The ad samples are quite hilarious as I have to squint to see them and can't make heads nor tail anyway since no sound.
This test will prove to be flop I think.
Yeah I'm sure dial-up users love slashdot too. The front page that I load is about 135KB (~39KB for images and ~95K for HTML). Lets say you get about 3.5KB/s (nobody gets the full 7...at least back when I had one) you are talking about 38 seconds for a load time...weeee
:-P
Hope my math is right..wouldn't want to get flamed
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Just don't use Windoze!
Is that so hard to grasp?
Imagine if a system could be worked up so that you pay just 5 cents to a website to access its content for a month.
I run a website that gets about 200,000 monthly unique visitors. I'd gladly take 5 cents per unique; I'd be able to work on the site full time.
A site like Yahoo gets hundreds of millions of uniques per month. They would be able to make millions per month from this deal.
And the best part is that no one would care about paying the 5 cents. How many sites do you visit in a month? A hundred? That's just $5 extra dollars out of your wallet -- less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. You wouldn't even think twice about paying a nickel to get permission to use a site for a month.
When someone can figure out how to do this, we'll all be rich. Until then I need to figure out how to keep motivated with 1/10 that amount.
Ralph Slate
http://www.hockeydb.com
Note that he's not talking about the audience for these ads - he's talking about the advertisers. Once they get comfortable with 300K, they'll start pushing 500, and then 750, and then say hello to megabyte ads.
privoxy
If these do start becoming mainstream, somebody will eventually collect all the adserver information and add it to the block list.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
I've already a couple like those mentioned on tvguide's listing page (some kind of biography channel commercial with sound - every time you click to see the description of a program listing it replays it) - disabling all scripting seems to take care of it but at the same time it's rather aggravating because other websites like espn don't load properly anymore.
TV keeps pushing the limits, but at least realizes that there are limits to how much exposure the user (viewer) will tolerate. For example, none of the mainstream networks seems willing to go past about 8 minutes of commercial time in a 30-minute show. They also tend to clump commercials together, so the user gets reasonable-sized blocks of uninterrupted content. I think at least some Web sites have pushed beyond what reasonable users will tolerate. Loading the banner ads on a Web page shouldn't be the limiting factor in how quickly the page is displayed. A user who spends five minutes on an information site visiting a total of six pages shouldn't have to endure eight Flash-driven eye-candy ads. There are limits.
If you had bothered to read the article you would have seen that the ads are 300k, not 5MB by any means. Nice troll.
mcox.com - Useful Information re: IT, Running, Fitness, Finance, or Ann Arbor!
...they withheld the url of link you clicked on.
Say they only provide it in the last 200 bytes of the advert.
Then it is all-out war.
How the hell do they expect to be able to handle the bandwith of thousands of video downloads at a time if they cant even keep their site from getting slashdoted?
Look at the HTML source at:
:)
http://www.unicast.com/gallery/
Check the 'Full Screen Interstitial' example. It isn't Flash, but Windows Media Player. It bails right away if you aren't running IE with the right version of media player. Also requires Javascript.
Not a problem for me.
- Necron69
I think we all should. This is the only way to let them know they are not making us happy. If we could affect the total number of hits they get during the commercial test it would send the correct signal.
Jeoin
Just curious as to how they are doing this. By the way it is described, it sounds like an activex control.
The small number of legitimate sites using active X, (windows update, trendmicro housecall, etc) It should be fairly easy to whitelist this.
How will I know? I will see the unexplained network trafic.
Proxomitron is a local proxy that lets you write powerful scripts the alter your incoming and out-going browser data-stream 'in real time'. Yes, you can intercept Shockwave/flash as easily as any other sort of file, as well as Javascript and .CSS files. You can not only block ads and pop-ups and cookies, you can customize your entire browsing experience! You can also SEND things like spoofed cookies and other codes that let you control your browsing experience. The add-blocker CSS for Mozilla/Firebird is good but but this is an order of magnitude better.
Proxomitron. Get it, learn it, keep up with the cookie snoopers and pop-up pushers.
http://www.proxomitron.info/
Do I hear a bunch more people getting it? I mean the Macromedia thing? It is missing consistant end user controls for so long, nobody pays much attention to it. The lack of a close or stop button that works is the reason I have removed Macromedia completely. The junk to content ratio wasn't worth it. It is loaded on my wifes machine because the kids do the flash game sites. (neopets) I'm not into the games so Flash has very little use for me and usualy slows and delays searches and reading articles. Because of a consistant lack of a stop button of much flash advertising, I have removed the playback mechanism. I wonder if intrusive advertising using flash will accelerate the removal of Macromedia.
The truth shall set you free!
I tried to view their demonstration. Not only did it not load, but it complained about my browser not accepting cookies. Safari doesn't accept cookies from sites I don't navigate to by default, but I changed that just in case. Unfortunately, I can't get the ad to load no matter how hard I try.
This is a great step towards keeping websites free for those of us using non-MS operating systems. The windows users can view the ads for us, and we can just get to the content. Similar to copy protection on CDs not working on non-MS computers.
-- If it aint broke, fix it till it is. --
I will be boycotting all sites that use this BS. I use dialup and I'm not waiting 5 minutes for a fucking ad to load, just so I can look at a stupid webpage.
Anyone else notice the fact that MS is going to add a pop-up blocker to their next-gen browser, but seems to be a proponent of this forced-advertising service? John
How will I know? I will see the unexplained network trafic.
Sure. If you are doing nothing but browsing the web. But what about if you are ftp'ing files at the same time, or are a member of bittorrent or freenet? Or are running some other P2P application? The list goes on.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It's back to FTP!
I remember this same argument in the early days of the Web when there was the big "non-commercialization" feeling. Then too, some people said "just don;t go to sites that have any ads - the companies will get the message." Baloney. This is like visiting a brick and morter store and learning that you've agreed to accept collect-call telephone solicitations just by walking in.
AdBlock + Flash Click to View = No Annoying Ads
I'd love to see how they can make me see those full-motion ads, when I've got these two extensions installed. And if I have to, I'll disable JavaScript, and uninstall all my plugins. Which I won't need to--I'll just filter out their ad URL mask with AdBlock.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I can see it now. Due to demand Redmond provides multiple window desktops like Gnome. Several apps and browsers are open in several windows. Full page adds load in several windows. Surfers surf the channels to see which one is done with the commercials and has gone back to regular programming.
I quit watching TV due to the poor content and overload of advertising. Is the net next?
The truth shall set you free!
The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time.
;)
What if I'm surfing in links? Or if I don't have their plugin in firebird? Yeah, it'll magically play, ok...
You are missing a point. Ever visit a site overloaded with banner ads and pop-ups? Closing an ad early only brings up the next and the next. (mostly got people to seriously consider pop-up blockers, shut off JS etc.) Too many advertisers pay per delivery. Don't expect it to just be one ad per page. There are enought sleezeball webmasters that do anything for an advertisers buck and provide no content. We don't need a skip button. We need a no way button for the entire site.
The truth shall set you free!
So, can someone please post an example of this? I'm really curious what it looks like.
How effective is angry advertising -- advertisement that force the viewer to watch them using aggressively annoying tactics?
I have never personally followed anything other than an occasional banner/skyscraper ad, or, more frequently, a text ad, but then I'm not an average internet user.
I can't imagine these being effective. I just don't get it.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Here you go: No! Flash: freeware Flash enable/disable for IE. Sits in your systray, click it to toggle Flash on/off. Also can do other ad blocking (popups, kill animated GIFs, etc.)
I leave Flash disabled most of the time, and enable it before I visit homestarrunner.com
-Richard L. Owens
Just post the first pages to slashdot, I am sure we can take care of it. . .. now how do I loop a wget script again?
Ok, how about this...
Don't like ads? Use an Ad-blocker like I do. Seems reasonable until you look at it from this from a not-to-distant-future perspective:
Web content is copyrighted, and by viewing that page you are making a copy from the webserver to your browser. So, the publisher could stipulate under the "site usage" (license) that you may not alter the content, therefore prohibiting adblocking. Better yet, encrypt most of the content and decrypt via a trivial JavaScript or similar method to invoke some additional legal bullshit as well.
So let's say this happens and you run an ad-blocker. How do they tell? Just diff the timestamped IP request logs and go chasing from there. Through in a few high-profile example cases and you're good to go.
On top of that, software like ad-blockers would be copyright infringement devices, having no "legal" use, and would be banned outright.
You'll note that fair-use isn't mentioned, because I'm assuming that courts will have decided that the content providers need revenue from adverts to survive, so it's not "fair use" to filter them.
Scary enough for you?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
These ads will probably be served from some central server - not the actual news site - that's easy to block. I rarely even see Flash ads on my PC.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
hmmm. . . at 20c/meg, windows iso's go about 700 megs. . . .. carry the two . . . . that's about 140 for your pirated copy of XP
Just find out what website they are being served off of and redirect the address to 127.0.0.1.
Let me be the arsehole who says it: the problem there is that they expect to be paid for something completely worthless. Just like in the good old dot-com days, eh?
Here's a rule of thumb: if noone's willing to cut a check for the service/goods/whatever you provide, then it's simply not worth anything to them. Period.
Nothing personal. Most sites just fall under that category: pointless distraction for when you're bored enough. But if they crawled somewhere and died, we'd just go back to watching TV or whatever other equally mindless passtime.
Most of those gazillions of "news sites" are not even that. Most of them are just a personal or corporate ego trip. Definitely not something worth paying for.
And that goes double for the gazillions of lobotomized blogs linking to each other. No, they're not providing some politics education to the masses, they're just a bunch of whiny idiots polluting the searches for actual information.
And if they try to levvy a toll in the form of sheer annoyance, we'll just stop going there. (Well, in the case of blogs it's not like anyone went there except by accident in the first place.)
Here's an idea: how about actually having something to sell? That used to be what capitalism was all about.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It wouldn't be so bad.. if the commercials ar half decent and you want to watch them.. like the Honda one.. British TV !! its amazing...
That's what this is.
I recently moved from my unlimited high-speed connection in Toronto to a pay-per-minute dial-up account in Croatia (the fastest/cheapest account available).
I pay through the nose and I'm lucky if I get 56kbps. FMV ads will kick my ass. They will make the internet a sad place.
Lets start a WEBRING that only allows sites opposed to FMV & pop-up ads to join. Everyone else can just Badger Badger Badger...
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
Odd name for a corporation, isn't it?
Company names up for grabs:
Multicast, TCPIP, IPV6,
Warning
Your browser does not accept cookies. You must enable cookies to continue with this demo.
When my bank decided to stop paying my direct debits to my insurance company for no reason and I asked them why, they tried to sell me their own insurance!
Ads on television are time consuming, but we put up with them. Ads on the internet are annoying. Why the difference? I think it's NOT because of anything inherent in the 'net itself, but because of the device they are being delivered to - your computer. A television is a passive device. You sit and watch it without taking action. A computer is *not* like that. You *DO* things with it. You write letters, you read mail, you work on things for your job, you play a game. Having *that* device get taken over out of your control feels more intrusive than having a device like a TV, which is dedicated to doing nothing but passive entertainment, get taken over in the same way. With the computer, it feels more like the advertisement has taken over more aspects of your life. It's like a TV ad that shows up on not only the TV, but also the kitchen table, the cieling, the floor, the closet, and the desk, where you do things other than just watch TV.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Isn't that the idea?
WEBRING is a copyrighted name of the Microsoft Corporation.
Sorry.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Check this JavaScript sample (raw-source view) to see how they check for not only Shockwave Flash but Windows Media player, QuickTime and some video-related plugin ("ntsc").
Looks like the only surefire way to block them is to add unicast.com entries to your local hosts file and/or proxy servers.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
The big chains (Dixons, Comet, Currys) will not sell you a region free DVD player.
You can get them in other reputable shops like RicherSounds, but is by no means a generalized given.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...there is so much crap out there with every nut and moron creating websites on Pyramids On Mars and Jewish Conspiracies To Take Over The World...it's almost all trash now. Before the Internet came along, I was perfectly happy creating little games and songs using my VIC-20. When I first got Internet access, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information available to anyone on anything...it was truly something useful, educational, and fascinating. Now it is turning into a giant forum for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to make a buck off you...whether you want it or not. I can see a time in the very near future when I personally will just "unplug" and go back to being happy and virus-free. Screw the internet...
It's Windows Media Player - NOT FLASH!
Poor Macromedia has nothing in common with this!
Let's hope so, the rebellion that is. And let's hope that goes for the rest of society as well, in a not to distant future.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Dude, what ad's?
Is it my hosts-file blocking their server? Is it my user-css blocking the ad-div-tag? Is it my opera-browser set to ignore unrequested-popups or plugins?
This seems to be IE-only ad's to me...
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I dunno if we're anywhere near being a majority here, but here's one anti-capitalistic soul supporting your statement.
Somewhere along the lines corporations achived the right to make profit whatever, and the right to take rights away from consumers in order to achieve this.
Fuck this world.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I don't think they'll work very well in my lynx-window. Unless they support aalib =P
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Hah! Those sample ads won't even play, and I'm on windows, using IE and have Windows Media Player installed. The problem is that video would be still downloaded, but won't play, but all other formats won't even download, popup or do whatever they are supposed to do. My firewall(with ad filter) logs show that 6 popups have been blocked in only 30 seconds, and one active-x control, so I think that blocking active-x for specific sites should disable this kind of ads.
As long as you got bandwidth to spare, it's:
wget [yournastyurlhere.com] &
It's in the little details you find the real difference, you know :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
This is just the kind of stuff that will fill up any internet connection. Soon a 2Mbit/s ASDL line will feel like a 2400 baud modem line used to. We will all need more bandwidth. This will drive prices down for high bandwidht connections.
Then I will get a 8Mbit/s ASDL line which will actually be much faster because I block all this kind of bandwidht waste.
If you do need to look for an alternative news source, I think Fox should be at the bottom of the list.
Unless of course you actually believe that the attack in Iraq had something to do with the September 11 attacks or that George W. actually fairly and justly won the presidency.
Once a day post news about unicast on slashdot. That way we've got a continuous stream of slashdotting that prevents their servers from working.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I have moved away from webworking after the last few years but I remember a few things (java, activex, meta) all have tags. I wouldn't doubt that this ad downloading has a tag, trigger, or file extention reff that can be killed as the "main" page is loading. IOW, ignoring all tags in a source that say junk junk junk
Right?
Perhaps we can get enough people together and run something like the setiathome screensaver application, with the explicit purpose of fetching the video streams over and over again. That way, we can chew up their bandwidth and tax their server's CPUs so that they have to upgrade, or cheese off more customers.
Sure, it's not polite to grab a handful of mints from the big jar at the restaurant, but they were "free"...
Match 6172: Flash animation killer
:) I use a few more than the 'default' options but no ad type of theirs loads automatically.
Match 6172: Frame Jumper-Outer
6172: Restore pop-ups after a page loads
+++CLOSE 6172+++
Yup... I love that program
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, it was the most underhanded, unethical company I've ever worked for.
Something like this coming from people like those doesn't surprise me one bit.
Fascists.
However, if it catches on, I'll keep two browsers open and when a stupid-ass commercial pops up, I'll alt-tab over to the other one and keep browsing until the commercial stops.
Just use a browser or firewall that doesn't allow playing of videos... I think ie will do it too, I have all those boxes unchecked. I browse the internet with sound off, video off, b/c all this stuff is extra bandwidth crap I don't need, and don't want. I also (on my own PC) have a copy of ie. with shockwave/flash/java disabled/not installed (can't remember which) so that I don't have to see the stupid punch the monkey adds, etc.
Then, if I visit a site that requires one of these, I use my copy of Netscape. I am fscking tired of people presuming to tell my computer to do things that annoy me. That's why I don't use M$ products on my PC either. It's a beautiful thing.
The way I see it, I don't generally buy what's hocked to me, I buy what ** I ** decide ** I ** want or need. I find the idea that someone flashing big tits at me (and yes I am a straight male) will cause me to buy a motorcycle or aftershave. So I don't feel obligated to view advertising that is most likely to offend me or insult me, which is a waste anyway.
I suspect I'm not the only one.
Liberty only.
In the world of terrestrial television in the UK, we have the BBC. They provide a service whereby they choose the content and everyone who wants to use a TV (regardless of whether they watch BBC broadcasts or not) have to pay a fee.
That, obviously, would not work for the Internet but maybe a network of ad-free sites would work. It could involve a new top-level domain and sites would lose their right to use the domain if they use advertising. A subscription to the network could be later introduced (once it has some faithful followers) to provide income to the sites on the network based upon ratings, visitor numbers or some other (carefully thought through) criteria.
Powered by onion juice.
....since none of these sites are in my online wheelhouse......I'll simply go elsehwere. Obviously if you have invested in their personalized content and are too busy or lazy to find other sources, then the issue looms large. If hit counts are still a bellweather of a site's popularitt, the full motion/full length ads will have a short life. Dial-up users will be driven simply based on the time thet would have to spenp, and broadband users will simply stay away. It's a concept that won't develop any new business, and therefore has limited if any potential to give its proponents any marketplace traction. After it fails, it will be fun to see the heads rolling from the offices of the firms that claimed that this was how to make a web presence "pay for itself"
"...MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage..."
Well, I would actually have to visit these sites pretty much for the *first* time to get any of this 'news'.
What it actually boils down to is: you know those crap sites which take an age to load? Guess what: they're going to take even longer!
Easiest filter in the world: Post-It note on monitor with writing: 'Nalfy, remember not to visit MSN. Ever.'.
Cheers,
Nalfy.
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Content blocked with Adblock is still downloaded, it's just kept from view.
Not if you set it in Tools>Adblock>Preferences to "Remove Ads" instead of "Hide Ads".
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I can't find a real example. I made the demos work on the eunicast site, (whoops, that must have been a freudian typo...Unicast) but I tried ESPN and I didn't get anything.
;-)
Bummer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, even Amazon.co.uk sell primarily multi-region players. I'd say it's pretty common;' arguably more difficult to get a region-restricted one these days.
The view examples on the unicast site...it sat there downloading the commercial and got stuck on 99%.
They play fine in my copy of Opera (7.10), unless of course I disable the flash plugin.
I don't have a problem watching commercials for FREE television broadcasts. However, when I pay for my television programming (both "pay channels" and cable/subscription-based satellite), I don't think I need to pay a second time by being forced to watch commercials.
Likewise, if I had free network access (ah, the good old days), commercials would be an annoyance, but one I could live with. Since I pay for my internet service, I don't think the burden of maintaining dumbass.com's website should be mine. I pay my own fees for connectivity, domain names, and equipment.
Maybe if the people trying to foist advertising on everyone would make a product that was worth something, intrinsicly, they wouldn't have to resort to commercials to sell it?
Oh well, I already run ad-blocking software, I'm sure this just means there will be more frequent updates.
This tech. is exactly the same as this, which is done one mighty fuck of a sight better.
.. well, yes, it's a big ol' full-screen Flash film, although not browser-compatible (Mozilla shows me a distinct window, rather than full-screen in IE).
...
If you click on 'Enter Site'
Still: it IS advertising, but well done. And imagine if THAT came up on MSN. Most users would be stuck ringing support:
Support: it's just a film, it's ok to click 'Herunterfahren' (German for shut down, btw.).
User: But is says SHUT DOWN, I don't want to shut down!!
Support:
Cheers,
Nalfy
P.S. AS a version of Windows, it's also a damn sight easier to code than wine. *G
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Disable flash and you have no worries. In Linux you can just delete the plugins.
Flash sucks.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The sad thing is, they will probably have a mechanism to block non-WMV-enabled clients from accessing the website at all, or at least severely inhibit. So, unless you are running IE on Windows with Windows Media Player (in all it's DRMed glory) installed, or bothered to associate WMP as a Mozilla plugin, you probably won't be able to visit these sites.
Now you probably don't care about visiting MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, but I can definitely foresee more sites adopting this if it ends up being profitable.
The fundamental difference between TV an the Internet is that the Internet is a communications tool, not a broadcast medium. Big websites want it to be more like a broadcast medium, and ISPs as well - hence the common upload/download bandwidth disparity and many ISPs blocking people from running any kind of server. The internet in general is not very conducive to making money for information distribution, but big corporations want to change it until it is. And you can bet they won't care about any open standards in the process.
There was a wonderful article about this change relatively recently... can anyone remember where?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Works on ALL platforms? Every time? Well geez, I went to their Unicast site and not a damn thing works for me. Guess that when you way ALL platforms, you mean all good little Borgs running WinBorg 98 and higher and an Intel-based machine. As much as I curse my O.S. at work, for once it is a good thing.
I don't think companies and employees are going to be very happy. Companies have to pay for bandwidth too, and most employees are not going to be aware they are downloading 2 megs in the background. And they they get in trouble for 2 things. 1. 2 megs every site adds up quick. 2. Many companies have rules against downloading media. Since it would be reported in a log, would it show up as media. I'm sure that eventually there will be an easy way for companies to get around that. But how many employees are going to get chewed out first? I wouldn't doubt it if you close the window and up pops the video
These flash advertisements covering up everything I'm reading is annoying enough. I'm careful to keep spyware off of my computer. So now they are forcing videos down my throat? Maybe Unicast and the companies allowing their sites to display these ads need to be notified of the error of their ways. Have they been slashdotted yet? And many consumers that have caps on how much they can download are going to be very upset when they can't play their everquest for another 2 weeks.
...is that I never go to any of the sites that were mentioned. It's not a matter of some principle; they just don't appeal. Now they won't appeal even more. :-P
"i for one welcome our new web page commercial advertisments"
"Insert Sig Here"
Nothing yet. I tried ESPNs site, clicked around, clicked off, etc. No movie popups at all or my blocker is indeed blocking them.
What is up with the link to a Coldwell Banker Real Estate Agent hidden at the bottom of the Unicast demo video page?
Check the source, at the bottom of the page, just below the Unicast address, you'll see the link, but there is nothing betweeen the anchor tags...what the heck???
It seems that advertisers measure the success of an ad entirely in terms of clickthroughs. The more obtrusive ads are easier to accidentally click, and thus they are considered more successful. Our answer has always been to just block ads, but I've often heard it said that positive feedback is more effective than negative feedback, so what if we did something like write a Mozilla plugin that sends an HTTP request to make the advertisers think we're clicking on the unobtrusive ads like those little banners?
Even in 'developed' countries, a lot of people are still on dialup, some with a monthly 'base' cap.
So aside from cost, they will have to sit and wait all night thru the stupid commercials to perhaps read one page of text....
Plus many large broadband ISP's are toying with the idea of bringing back 'bandwidth based' pricing again for everyone.
Another great way to kill the internet for the common man. I know the day I have to pay hard cash, ( I'm paying soft cash now, as my pc wasn't free, nor my time or bandwidth or power... ) im outta here.
Though the concept is not new, I know those 'required' popups that have started coming with some websites drive me away, permanently.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Probably less than a month until someone comes out with a way to block the ads. After which, half of the people complaining about the ads will install the blocker and go about their business, the other half will just keep complaining.
Remember, if it's in a stream of bytes, it can be filtered and adjusted... Don't get yourself in an uproar. You are allowed to pay just as much attention to the rules as big companies do - just don't get caught.
Most ads are not written to sell products to the consumer, they are written to sell to the people that buy ads. These are the real deep pockets. How many ads have you seen that didn't make any sense and you couldn't remember who the sponsor was 5 seconds latter.
Imagine a corporate board meeting with everyone forced to watch prospective ads at the rate of thousands of dollars per minute. Imagine the corporate CEO forcing his family to endure watching the company's new ad, while going through the mental masterbation of how clever he was to sign on to this great new thing.
The worst thing about this new form of advetising is that there is nothing useful you can do with it. Since it doesn't play until fully loaded. At least with four or more minutes of TV ads running together, I have plenty of time to get a beer or make a cup of coffee or take a piss and not miss the return of featured show.
Junk mail is my most favored form of advertising during the winter, because it heats my home. Just save it for the wood stove. I only wish they would quit using that expensive glossy clay coated papers and spend more money in researching a paper that was completly combustable. Hauling those ashes out is a pain in the ass. Maybe if they would just soak all that suff in fuel oil before sending it to me, it would be more useful.
I will do a hard reset before i sit through one of those. And after the first time a site throws one of them at me i won't be back.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I also tried to view their demo (IE with googlebar), but all that happened was that googlebar blocked one popup, and their questioneer loaded without insident. If that's the best they've got, let them have their fun.
Or do anyone have a link to a real page on one of the mentioned sites, where one might see their technology in action?
Not getting any 'unusual' ads here, let alone video.
Tried their website directly, in Mozilla, says I need cookies enabled, and in IE 6.0, hangs at 99%.
GOOD product, can't match it's own hype...
aaaaa bbbbbbbbb cccccc dddddddddddd eeeeeeeeeee
I'm using Mozilla on Debian with popups blocked and I got no commercials from espn, ivillage, or lycos?
None of those websites mentioned will ever come near my computer!
Wasnt AOL on the list too?
bickerdyke
In case you haven't seen it yet ...
I loaded up IE instead of Mozilla to take a look at this new ad system. Went to lycos.com, looked at a couple pages eventually getting a Wired page. While reading the first couple of lines I noticed my bandwidth spike. Didn't last long being on DSL. Thinking that was it, I closed the page and lo and behold, the advert appeared. Not exactly 'full screen' - I run 1280x1024 and it was very centered. It can't have been more than 640x480, and looked to have mild-to-high compression. Fun advert too.
Only problem is, I forgot what it was advertising :( Sorry Unicast, I think I just cost you $412 or something in wasted capital!
--
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
Not many details yet, hopefully it too will target only Windows users and leave the rest of us alone.
It will not be Linux that does Windows in, but the marketers who abuse M$ software and drive M$'s users away. Perhaps M$ will smarten up and stop allowing this?
Funny you should mention that---I just checked over at MSN, pottered about randomly for a few minutes, and saw nothing like the commercials being discussed here.
Could it have something to do with me running the Junkbuster proxy, and surfing with Mozilla configured to disable Java and Javascript? :-)
If they can't get their ideas across without that stuff, they don't really want to talk to me.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
No wonder IE is going to support popup blocking...when Micro$oft has already crowned the successor to Doubleclick.
Considering Unicast's claim that the ads will still work even if pop-ups are disabled more clearly reveals the thin edge Microsoft has just skated upon. Obviously, Microsoft has chosen (yet again) to support revenue sources over end-users. Unisoft's claim that,
clearly boils down to this Hooray, IE pop-up blocking...Firebird anyone?Have you heard of the Macromedia Flash blocker add-on for Mozilla? Has anyone? I would like to install it if someone has a link ( I use Mozilla ). Oh, and I agree 100% on the Macromedia Flash nuisance, I don't have it installed, but my friends keeps sending me "cool" links to sites that are Flash only. If a browser add-on could identify links to flash content and block it based upon filter settings, that would cool.
I can't afford a sig!
If Mozilla were a beautiful girl, we'd be married by now, or at least shacking up.
I can't afford a sig!
Your unable to close it. What I saw of the ad didn't seem overly smooth. But then again, we didn't give it a chance. Right clicked on taskbar, clicked close, then End Now when it popped up. I wonder if microshaft provided/will provide a 'patch' to prevent you from ctrl-alt-delete or forcing a close, yet disguising it so people will actually install it. many people that have used msn are now going to avoid it like the plague. I'm probably going to attempt to block the downloading of that crap tonight. means I'll have to watch a few to make sure it works. But hey, it means I won't buy any of the crap I see.
Listen, you're only supporting your site for the short term. Advertisers will not continue to pay you favourite sites $ for ads that don't get an ROI (return on investment). A simple click isn't roi. It's an indicator that someday they may get roi. Advertisers will certainly notice that users are just connecting to the link page and not going any further to purchase intent and stop utilizing those 'failed' ad formats. In reality we should encourage these video advertisements with the sites and discourage all those freaking useless banners that just slow down my web surfing and I never even look at them.
Unicast ads always have a close button. It's on their policy page and it is enforced. If you saw an ad that you couldn't close, it was from some other vendor or ESPN itself.
Unicast has a corporate policy that all ads MUST have a close button. Don't mix them up with those spaminator popups that you get on your porn sites dude.
Dude, move to a real country that doesn't charge you by the byte. No wonder Canada is a 3rd world country. What is it about these British commonwealth countries? Canada and New Zealand charge by the byte. What entrepeneurs!!!! Let me guess it's all regulated by your socialist governments? You get what you vote for!