Slashdot Mirror
New Online Advertising Model Riles Journalists
Wynken de Word writes "A new online advertising model linking commercial messages to individual words of editorial content aims 'to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet -- the text of articles and message boards -- in what [company backers] bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play' according to this article at Ad Age, a leading advertising industry magazine. On the other hand, the article notes: 'If it looks like a pop-up, feels like a pop-up or interrupts like a pop-up, we might as well just assume consumers will outright hate and reject the format,' said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a Cincinnati research firm that tracks online consumer buzz."
This is what happens when you look at a successful advertising model, like google's AdWords, and learn the wrong lesson from it. Although I'd be willing to bet that someone sufficiently brain-addled will see "24x more clickthroughs than banner ads!" and think the idea is the best thing since the discovery of fire. Get your ads out of my content!
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Does this mean were going to start seeing a lot more ads from Microsoft here on slashdot?
This is nothing new. This has been around for a while. For an example, check out www.experts-exchange.com. A lot of websites and forums already have this implemented.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
Anyone else find it amusing that the banner ads supplied by Google on the article page are all for pop-up blockers?
Boy, if the hyperlinking habits of bloggers messed with google's pagerank algorithm, just imagine the damage this will do.
-Colin
If it's a pop up then my browser will block it like it does the rest. If it's not then I will just ignore it like I do all the rest that are all ready out there. Oh well.
Evolution or ID?
A wiki is a collection of community written documents, with useful links to related articles. For example Wikipedia, an encyclopedia written in Wiki. See those blue links scattered on the page? They lead to articles.
Seems like they took the idea, but they sell the words! It will be annoying.
For example See the word Linux on a page. Joe user will think great, I'm going to learn about linux! But get in your face adverts for linux support services instead!
Wikis are good, Adwords are bad!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
But we all know that it's not going to be like that. Someone's going to use the word 'prevention' when discussing Enron finances, and the link will jump to the site of Trojan prophylactics.
The best we can hope for is a few really badly conceived links, or news stories which start to look like an Everything2 node with fifty links per paragraph, so that this form of ad will fade away, too.
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Maybe its because I'm from a journalistic background, but I really think that the one sacred ground is the journalistic content. You can add adverts and flying noisy banners, nags and clickthroughs, and i'll still read the article.. I won't like it, but it hasn't crossed That Line. This does.
Hiding adverts inside of the content, appearing as part of the context, is disgusting. I'm sickened by the concept.
News 20 years from now: "This just in... McDonalds tastier than ever! More at 11." I only can hope something changes to destroy this trend by then.
you had me at #!
Isn't this the same thing as microsoft smart text, a feature where internet explorer would be "helpful" and add hyperlinks to microsoft sites in whatever page you were browsing based on keywords?
I think widespread consumer criticism about hijacking webpages put the kibosh on that. But I use firefox, so I don't know what IE is doing these days
More music, fewer hits
Recently a National Cash Register executive related a story in Business 2.0 magazine. I'm paraphrasing but the short of it goes like this:
Joe is a new salesman and brings in his first order from a customer. The processing clerk tells Joe he has to take the order back because it's not filled out correctly. Joe's manager drops by to see how the new salesman is doing. Down in the mouth, Joe relates the story about how the processing clerk is sending him back out to the customer to get a corrected order.
The manager is livid. He marches to the processing clerk and tells him: "When my man comes in here with a sale, you get up and shake his hand because he's keeping you employed! If there's a problem with the order, you fix it!"
So where does this relate to this story? Easy: the bills have to get paid. There's bandwidth to pay for, computers, journalists salaries or freelancing fees...something has to pay for it. You can argue all you want about whether or not some of those things are paid at the level they should be (high executive salaries, high sales commissions)...but they still have to be paid. And after all that, mass media conglomerates have shareholders to think about, too.
Plus...there's a glut of freelance journalists out there. Freelancers especially should be glad they get their stuff published anywhere. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth to see links in your article or pop-ups because of keywords in your article, but it could be worse: your article could have not been published.
If this "trend" is all you've got to worry about, you've got too much time on your hands.
My sigs always suck.
awww crap
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
'If it looks like a pop-up, feels like a pop-up or interrupts like a pop-up, we might as well just assume consumers will outright hate and reject the format,'
Didn't Einstien say that insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again expecting different results?
They keep trying with the boorish, intrusive ads as if an irritating ad wasn't necessarily an irritating ad. All web marketers must be insane. Or stupid. Wait wait... let's not be narrow-minded about this.... they could easily be both.
On a more serious note: whatever. I don't care. Go ahead and put ads right in the context of something I'm trying to read. It's really irritating trying to read a forum post or an article and having the text keep changing color because there are ads weaved into it. Put that on your site, and you can rest assured that I'll leave in a heartbeat and never come back, just like I've already done with some sites. Hell, even I can remember from the one marketing class I had to take that ads were supposed to heighten interest in or raise awareness of a product in a positive manner. Yet, these bumbling morons keep turning the advertising into the content, or pushing the content out of the way in favor of the advertising so that people get pissed off by a popup or whatever, THEN see what's being advertised.
What good does it do me to have to struggle with ads to read content? Why should I come back? If the ads destroy the value of the site.... how is it even an idea worth trying? What good does it do the advertiser to raise product awareness with a medium that's making them MAD. What, you want people to be angry when they think of your car? Idiots...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
So when we get our next serial killer story, we will see an ad for a better, more powerful gun?
When we read about a tanker truck accident on I-94 outside of Battle Creek, MI will we start reading ads about Kellogg's Corn Flakes (based in Battle Creek)?
Will an Amtrak derailment story prompt Greyhound ads?
Where the hell does this stop?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Not only is it annoying see these types of ads on news sites and what not but one of the places I enjoy playing CS/DOD/NS at(shameless plug http://www.dexworld.org) has started putting the same types of ads into our POSTS in the forums.
So when i'm posting in the tech support forum or whatever and mention one of 9-16 keywords they have relating to different companies from IBM to Nvidia to ATI those words automatically get highlighted and linked to a site where you can buy those companies products..
I don't particullary care for this because while I'm not sure of the legality of it, I don't want MY post and MY thoughts to be the vehicle for targeted ads that I may or may not support. Its one thing with banner ads n such.. but on my posts? i find that to be a new low and now I make sure to use spaces to defeat it.
And to all of you who will say it pays for the site blah blah.. I donate to the site regulary to help keep it running.. I just don't like my forum posts being turned into ADS!!
If you're familiar with the Prisoner's Dilema, you can understand ad agencies... if only one ad out there is intrusive, it will bore its way into the conciousness of a huge number of people. If they all do it, people get irritated or just filter it out.
So, if everyone plays nice ads are modestly effective. If one person plays dirty, they win by a good margin. If everyone plays dirty, ads are less than modestly effective. Human nature being what it is, nobody wants to play nice if the guy playing dirty will beat them... so everyone plays dirty and everyone loses.
Also, ad agencies don't care if they ruin the quality of everything their campaigns touch, so long as the client sees enough effect from the effort to pay for the next campaign. They get their souls from the same place as most lawyers, and Darl.
I see some people comparing this to Microsoft's failed "Smart Text". However there's a HUGE difference. Here it is the web site owners that are receiving the revenues and deciding whether or not to put these text ads. With Smart Text it was Microsoft that decided universally what a user sees on ALL websites, while no ad revenues go to the respective site owners.
I for one don't see a problem with this model. Here are my reasons:
#1. The rightful people are receiving the rewards for their hard work. And why not? The more ad dollars you allow them, the better and more content we all get. Do you really want more subscription-based content sites, or is free more appealing to you?
#2. How annoying exactly is it? Ok I agree that the inline popups can be annoying, but then you're reading the article. Why in the world would you go mouse exploring all over the words if you're not interested in their ads? To me this type of advertising is NOT annoying at all. Much better than the popups or the skyscraper ads that pollute your screen.
#3. Whenever the issue of advertising arises, you see a boatload of people whining about how ads are not remotely interesting nor pertinent to their interests. Guys would be presented with tampon banners, etc. Well, here you have context-specific ads. If you happen to be reading an article about cars and you see a link for Mercedes (and you just so happen to be interested in that), you can now click on it and be happy!
eTrade SUCKS
The sad thing about all the advertising that inundates us is that it simply pushes up the cost of doing business. Company A must advertise more because company B does, and the consumer always pays for it in the end. There is only so much money the consumer has to spend.
Very annoying!
-If the linked words are marked by another colour or underlined. A well trained reader has a few fixations of the eye on each row of text. But these markings would not be seen as standard text, and will thus generate more fixations and a "stuttered" reading experience.
-Trying to read a wiki text with a lot of references illustrates this point: It is OK if the text is short, but a longer text is virtually unreadable.
Go here and click the demo link to see what it's all about. The popup is relatively small and un-intrusive, so stop exaggerating things and find out for yourself.
_ pr oduct_page/how.htm
https://www.vibrantmedia.com/content/intellitxt
eTrade SUCKS
"i find that to be a new low and now I make sure to use spaces to defeat it." ...use the same method I use to get around swear filters when I want to. For example, if you're on one of those boards that uses tags bounded by [], then FU[B][/B]CK YOU will read as "FUCK YOU" in your post, but the filter won't be able to realize it. On all forums software I've seen with these ads, it works there too.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Have a separate page, labeled simply "Advertisments". Put all advertising there. Keep it away from the news and editorial content.
Provide a visible link to the ad-page from your front page and in your navigational construct. (For example, Slashdot could put this link in the left-hand link list, under it's own heading or under, say, Services.)
Keep statistics for how much this pays off. Don't knock the idea until it's been thoroughly tried.
This will force advertisers to be truly interesting. Maybe sort the ads into categories, or prioritize ads that are related to recently visited pages.
The idea is to be maximally non-annoying.
As an aside, I find google-text-ad-style ads to be very intrusive since they are harder to block. There are periods in my life (for example when I'm flush for cash) that I am extremely disinterested in (commercial and other) solicitation, and exposing me to advertising then only causes me to feel hostility towards the advertiser.
Please, spread this idea.
We experimented with this in a paper magazine I worked for - putting all the commercials in a clearly designated spot in the back. Other magazines have tried the same approach. AFAIK, however, they haven't kept statistics and neither did we.
The effects on good-will this has will be interesting to observe.
(For television, this would be analogous to putting all of a networks commercial spots on a separate channel.)
The origin of these lays with a long-time wish for many writers of documents, such as technical documents.
Rather than explain on every single page what a "TFT" is, highlight the first (or first three, or every, whatever) occurance of the word on the page and have it create a small pop-up with brief description. Optionally, a link to another document could be offered.
This could be done manually, but instead including an external javascript (src="") is much easier to control and maintain.
In a way, it behaves like CSS - applying itself to word-elements, rather than mark-up elements.
Of course, ad-people quickly saw the opportunity to use it for advertising. That doesn't make the technology bad, though. Much like P2P services and those using it for illicit acts.
In some places, e.g. UK, the authors of a work can assert "moral rights" and object to derogatory treatment and so on - in France the ability to do this is stronger (interesting, the US consistently resisted implementing moral rights to satisfy Berne). It's impossible to transfer these moral rights: they _always_ remain with the original authors, even if the publishers own the economic rights in the copyright. I wonder if this kind of manipulation to the text could be objected to by the authors, on the grounds that it is subjecting their work to derogatory treatment. One of the problems with moral rights is that there is little case law: they've been _very_ hard to pursue, the court have been very relucant to give authors leverage over publishers and those who own the economic rights.
Popups clearly do not affect the work per se, they just add junk around the edges. Same goes for all other sorts of advertising. Also, some reasonable allowance is made for commercial purposes (e.g. splitting a work up into separate parts to make it easier for people to read it, or whatever). However, this new type of advertising is really quite insidious: it manipulates the text, and possibly it can be considered derogatory because the authors of the text may mean one thing, but the "subtext" of the advertising message may suggest something else: I mean, authors often leave words and phrases to the interpretation of the reader, but when you overload those words with advertising, the advertising may "suggest" something that the author did not intend. I think there's a lot of scope of problems here.
For a period of maybe two years, I often watched the old Arsenio Hall show on TV. During that time, I noticed I spent less than $8 on things that I saw advertised.
I think the pool of poorly educated people who would buy something because they saw an ad is diminishing.
Froogle is great for people like me who buy things after doing research.
"We've seen response rates 24 times that of banners," Mr. Stevenson said, indicating Web users like IntelliTXT better than other forms of online advertising they encounter.
I though everyone already knew that new advertisement technologies always have dramatically higher response rates not because they are more effective, but simply because they are new. Personally I know that after I see it for the first ten times, I will spend a minute and add a filter to Proxomitron to never see it again.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.