Slashdot Mirror
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?!
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
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>
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
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.
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.
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)
Sounds like the 80's when it was, "Remember, since you're paying monthly for cable TV the cable only stations won't need to play commercials."
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.
You won't need a plugin to hide it. It requires Windows Media Player, so you'd need a plugin to see it in the first place.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Or if the ads still work, just use Lynx.
"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
I am happy to see targeted banners and text ads - I regularly click slashdot banners or Google AdWords because they relate to the site I am browsing and are actually interesting and sometimes beneficial to me.
I tolerate useless banners that tell me I have won a prize or there is an urgent message waiting because they are just the work of a misguided webmaster trying to pay the bills. I never click these, I don't want their crap and I don't support their cause.
I block popups altogether - anyone who wants to hijack what I'm trying to read rather than become part of the page does not deserve listening to. If they want my help then they should be polite - I don't expect my newspaper to flash an ad for 20 seconds before I can read the story.
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.
Reading the unicast site and viewing their ad demos, it uses Flash.
:)
Looks like this will push Flash blocking through quickly.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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!
And my userContent.css will suppress even that: I don't have the plug-in installed and this suppresses even the alert.
However, they can easily code sites such that you can't find out the real link destination until the flash movie completes and redirects the main browser there. To bypass this with Mozilla, it would need to be able to decode the Flash movie (or whatever they use) and find the redirection. Assuming they haven't obfuscated it amongst many false leads or made the ad too interactive.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You make it sound like because you pay for your Internet access, all Web sites should be free. You made the one big mistake of forgetting that you did not send payment to the Web site you are visiting, you paid the person who let you get there.
It's like using a toll road to get to a restaurant. You paid money to use the roads, but you still have to pay for the restaurant.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ooh, this uses WMV? Sweet.
Full-motion ad block? Mozilla Firebird.
I don't need that mime association. It's better
to just save my videos to disk for later viewing.
What? This isn't about pr0n?
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
People misanalyze the "failure" the past ad formats gave.
If we held TV commercials like popup ads were to be rated, Pepsi would be wasting $2 mil on a Superbowl spot if people didn't get up-- before the end of the game-- and buy Pepsi.
If you expect that, then ANY advertisement technique short of "click here to remove the window" will fail. The ads are incidental to the desired info in the eyes of the consumer.
The only exception is ads that tie in well to the content. I have bought from such ads. When I look at a review site, there's a reasonable chance I want the item reviewed, so show me a shop.
The good news: In all likelihood, the first few sites to try it will face a DDoS from users who click "refresh" every few seconds in the attempt to get the page to show... "Why is the next page downloading xxxxkb? Must be broken."
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
No, you're both wrong... of course no one forces them to provide content free of charge and no one is forcing you to visit a site that "tricks" you into downloading an interstitial.
It's capitalism--if you don't like the ads, stop visiting the sites, if you don't mind them, keep going there. If enough people don't like them, the company will change its ways or go out of business. It's that simple. The choice is yours 100%. Personally, I don't visit sites with pop-ups or interstitials, one offense is enough for me to know not to go back to that site, and even if I were paying for bandwidth, after it happened once, I've learned my lesson and can add that site to my hosts file as one to block.
The real shame is that it's not going to be any more effective than the other attempts at web advertizing. All the people that ignore other web ads will ignore these newfangled full-motion ads too. Some people who put up with pop-ups and such will be pushed over the edge and just stop going to the site(s).
And in the end they are left with the same target group as they had before, only they are spending way more money to attract them. While ignoring the root cause of the problem: believing that click-throughs were indicative of ad effectiveness.
Oh well, not my money being wasted...
______-___--_-__-_---_-----__-_-___-_-_---_-----_
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
... 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
What about lynx? I seriously doubt the ablity for this full motion advertisement scheme to work for `play perfectly for every consumer, every time'. Then again if i use *nix am i a consumer?
"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!
Still wrong. If you pay for you Internet connection based upon the amount of bytes transmitted/received, and you won't know the web site is forcing an advertisement down your throat until you have already "consumed" the bandwidth to download it, then I say it is still wrong. *And* it wasn't up to the end user as to whether to dl the advertisement or not.
Now, that said, the end user can remember the site and choose not to go there again, but how much bandwidth ( money ) is it going to cost him before he has built up a decent "blacklist". Even then when he/she first visits a new site, there will be the chance they will get burned.
Sorry, there is no justification for forcing things ( ads and what not ) down end users throats. When you set up a web site or other service on the Internet, you do so with the understanding that it is going to cost you, and if anyone chooses to support the site ( financially or otherwise ), it is 100% their choice, not yours.
I can't afford a sig!
Actually, you know... I'm _not_ anti-capitalistic. In fact, I'm probably as pro-capitalistic as it gets.
However, my idea of capitalism, dunno, has more to do with what it used to mean, a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The idea that you try to build a better product. That you try to give people something they need, and they'll give you money for it.
At some point it used to be, at least theoretically, that a transaction produced value for _both_ parties involved.
E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, for you a loaf of my bread is worth more than the price I ask for it. And for me, having more loaves than I can possibly eat myself, that money is worth more than the loaf. Thus the transaction is a profit for both sides involved.
Now in this high tech market all this got turned upside down. The whole idea is to rape the consumer as hard as you can. As long as you got their money today, fsck 'em.
Just in the software industry alone, billions of USD worth of _worthless_ software is sold each year by marketting, bribery and lies. The kind of snake-oil transaction which actually produces a huge _loss_ to the buyer (e.g., the wasted time of 20 contractors over 2 years trying to work around the bugs) for a tiny profit to the seller. In fact, the kind that rapes you harder than if they just stole that money out of your account.
Plus it's sad to see everything thrown back in time some 500 years.
A _very_ long time ago, long before computers or even electricity, merchants had discovered that being honest and respectful pays. It paid big time. A satisfied customer was a customer which came back tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and next year. And often brings other customers.
Those people were planning to be in business for a long time. For generations, if possible. _Not_ to pull a quick scam.
Nowadays, again, that all got turned around. People are not planning to be in business for generations. At best they plan to show a bigger figure at the next board meeting. Plans now span a year, or in the worst cases barely weeks.
Hence, now it's perfectly acceptable to sell snake oil, and doubly so to screw the customer hard. He may not buy from you again next year, but, hey, who cares about next year? Rape 'em with a red hot poker, if that's what it takes to get their money NOW.
Dunno, somehow I think this is _not_ what capitalism was supposed to mean. Most of those business models are IMHO closer to the good old medieval highway robery, or to flying the Jolly Roger and plundering the Spanish Main, than to anything capitalism was supposed to mean.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.