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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
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 #!
'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!
To a certain extent, I agree with your post, but you're missing one critical point: To a journalist, credibility is key and it's the product he's selling. Without credibility, their only career option is the Weekly World News or the New York Times (zing!). When you start to intersperse ads into journalistic content, it blurs the line between impartial reporting and paid shilling and is diametrically opposed to journalism's most basic foundations.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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
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
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.)
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.
it stealses our precious vision!
There's been a lot of whinging about Micros~1's latest Innovation, with talk of the horrible nerve they have to "re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave".
Aside from the usual Micros~1 practice of claiming others' technology as their own, and the icky ripoff of the Aqua GUI in their screenshot (What is with this fascination with white or almost-white backgrounds? GUIs, Web pages, everything. White backgrounds are too harsh and make reading difficult. One of the more significant advances between Win3.1 and Win9x was the death of the horrible white background everywhere, and now they're doing their best to revive it.), I see this as a good thing.
For once, they seem to be behaving somewhat responsibly in the integration of new functionality (although I wonder how true this would be were the specter of an antitrust breakup not looming over them). Smart Tags are quite visibly different, both in appearance and behavior. They aren't including any tag packages with IE (although I have no doubt they'll plug their ad-pimping package as much as they possibly can). All processing is done locally, which saves bandwidth and prevents a list of all the URLs you visit being sent to Redmond ("What's Related", anyone?).
Smart Tags scare Web "designers" to no end, because they exploit the most fundamental and useful feature of the World Wide Web: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks scare them for 2 simple reasons:
Obviously, these can't be used as arguments against the introduction of these tags, so instead they complain about how their sites are being edited behind their backs. But this is a lie and everyone knows it. Their pages are still stored on their server in exactly the same pattern of bytes as before. What frightens them is that the reader might be given the option to go read something else, and this is not right.
What they don't realize is that they never had the right nor the ability to control the presentation of their site. From the moment their pages are posted on a public server, I have the right to do anything I want with them. I can view the source. I can critique their site and their product. And I can disable their grotesque colors, their unreadable fonts, and their gratuitous JavaScript. I can see if their site contains any value to me, and if not, I can leave. A browser is not a television for them to flash pretty images on. It is a tool for me to explore publications, and as such I expect it to provide me with cross-referencing features.
There is public documentation on creating Smart Tag packages. Anyone can write their own annotations and distribute them to friends or the world at large. Of course, this ability is only useful to "the hate groups, the spammers and the junk marketers on the Web". I want to see Smart Tags in Mozilla. I want to see widespread grassroots dictionaries, references, and
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.