Slashdot Mirror
Coming Soon to a Wireless Hotspot Near You: Ads
mindless4210 writes "A new generation of spam is born with the launch of FreeFi's new Wi-Fi advertising network. It is the first service of its kind, with intentions of delivering ad content to hotspots around the world starting in mid-Summer. FreeFi's President, Lawrence Laffer, says that the service displays a 'persistent set of ads adjacent to the user's browser without use of invasive advertising software or pop-up ads.' He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'" This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
I was going to say this same thing, thanks for saving me the time.
In other news, television, magazines, radio stations, newspapers, taxi cabs, and sporting events may soon have to turn to advertising to help cover costs.
I'd rather deal with ads (although i'm undecided about flash adds with cutesy soounds) to get free wireless access, although i've had some bad experiences with hotel's that offer free wireless - mostly that they periodically shunt you to a very slow loading, grpahics intensive splash page. Still... free with a catch is still free enough.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Isn't this the same exact thing that NetZero (and Juno and others) have tried in the past with dial-up? Are any of them still offering free access?
This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
Yep, the majority of us will just find a way around it. I kinda doubt they'll be putting ads next to my lynx window.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Submitter: He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'"
CowboyNeil: This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
Actually, Mr. Cowboy, you just validated their business plan.
While the idea of free wireless Internet access is fun for the user, there's still the annoying fact that someone's paying for your bandwidth. Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world -- I would, if I could get broadband in rural east Texas.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough altruistic geeks per square mile to sustain that "business model". So someone has to pay the bill. Why not advertisers?
I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it. So I have a banner ad built into my browser. I even click it sometimes -- out of curiosity, or to send Opera some ad clicks. I'm willing to put up with advertising to get the product, and lucky for me, the model is working.
I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though... anyone remember Bluelight?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Maybe you can run it inside Vmware, and have your "real" OS route through the virtual machine. Or the crossover guys could make a hacked WINE just for running this client and network interface.
Sure the ad system isn't the best but it's functional and beats having to wait in line for 45 minutes to buy a pack of $20 ciggarettes in a Socialist/Communist society.
You can't have your cake and eat it too I'm afraid.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Someone will write an application/patch/work-around that deactivates their ads without effecting the service. Those in the know will use it. Those not smart enough, or not clued in won't. This is how it always is. The application/patch/work-around will be brought up here of course. It always is.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
But, Netzero, Juno and others got themselves a customer base from offering free then converted to pay. They turned many of those customers to pay customers. Same thing could be applied here.
It's like drung dealing. First you get them addicted then you start charging.
Evolution or ID?
Larry Laffer, I guess he got out of the pimps and hoes business and retired the leasure suit.
I'd much rather the hotspot be funded by charging an extra $0.10 for coffee, or whatever the business may be. Actually, I just set up a WiFi hotspot for a local coffeehouse and the "free" WiFi has brought him enough extra business that he feels quite justified in not charging extra for the service.
WiFi should be a condiment, like catsup or salt or paper napkins...
This will require software to be installed on the client's computer in order to display the ads besides the browser, I assume.
Does that mean that there is a 99.99% chance that this software won't install on linux (or Mac) and only windows laptops will be able to access those spots?
Isn't there a better way to do this that doesn't require software installation? like injecting HTML code for banner ads in the pages viewed by users on your network like free hosting companies were doing all the time back in the days?
Does that also mean that there will be no way to tell if there is malicious (or even vulnerable) code bundled with the software?
...they've found that the reason people don't mind ads other than pop-ups is that they don't notice them.
Oops, so much for that business model.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Amen. I'm just waiting for the deluge of "How dare they!" posts to begin from people with Hotmail and Gmail accounts.
Somehow I doubt they'll see the irony.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
If the free wireless internet access is funded via advertisements, then those ads are not spam. Television ads are not spam; spam is widespread and unsolicited advertisement.
This is not to say that advertising is not often irritating and intrusive, but beggars can not be browsers without being subjected to ads.
Of course, they could very well be monitoring and recording what you are doing online, above and beyond simple browsing information, in the name of 'targeted marketing'. But that is for the tin foil crowd to determine; I do not have a laptop, let alone use wireless access in public locations, so I am not too concerned about the privacy implications, 'First they came for the WiFiers' be damned.
Granted high speed has more value to it than POTS dialup, but is this company really going to be able to compete? Several states are starting to consider WiFi as a viable public utility that they provide for "free" using the Tax Base. Benefit to the people is seamless wireless access without ads. Benefit to the state is reliable high speed access for public safety and services such as fire, police, EMS, etc.. Plus, once they ensure that everyone is online, they can begin reducing costs by allowing a great deal of government red tape to be handled electronically. (i.e. paying speeding tickets or applying for building permits)
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Agreed. Advertising makes the market go 'round. If it pays their bills, and allows them to offer the service, then more power to them.
As long as the ads don't pop-up or pop-under what I'm viewing, or blare out annoying audio soundbites, I don't mind them.
Unobtrusiveness is the key.
I've never had a ThinkGeek ad try to commandeer my attention through brute force, but they still get my clicks now and then. The same can't be said for the ads that come with full audio and video presentations. If I can't block them, I stop visiting the host site until they're gone, or if there is a readily available contact for the advertiser, let them know just how annoying it is.
There's no chance in hell I'll every buy a "Solo" cell phone after the endless waves of annoying ringtone ads that permeated local news sites, and those using geo-specific adware. But if I could get free wi-fi at a local coffee shop and see ads for local businesses letting me know what they have to offer, I wouldn't complain. Heck, I'd even fill out an "interests" questionnaire to generate an *anonymous* cookie if it meant that the served ads were relevant to me.
Advertising does not have to be the enemy. They just need to learn how to deal with their prospective audiences. And then small businesses can offer great things like free wi-fi without eating the overhead themselves.
Long ago I took up updating my hosts file with data from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ which provides a list of known ad servers that you then point back to your local machine.
I decided to take this one step further and change the mapped to IP to be that of SCO, so that each time I come to Slashdot and don't see their ads, I instead see a small bit of the SCO homepage, what you might call a mini DoS
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
When you look at it, whats the cost for a small coffe chop of restaurant to offer free wireless in their place? Maybe $50-70 a month for broadband, then slap in a Linksys wireless router for $100, then maybe figure out how to lock the thing down a little.
/. for hours on end in a nice environment.
Let the customers know that this is a free and open network, and that you're not responsible to what happens to their machines, and thats about it.
Its been my experience that people will go to a place to pay 10 times over cost for a cup of coffee spedifically because they can boot up and be online without having to goof with their settings too much. Like these folks, I will even spend a little more just staying there a little longer because I can sit and read
10 people a week spend an extra $2.50 a visit because of the wireless and you get $25. 4.2 weeks in the average month adds up to $105.
Bingo. WiFi cost recovered.
This doesn't even take into account the Evercrack geeks that will sit there for hours on end mainlining shot after shot of espresso into themselves for that extra twitch speed while playing.
This is just yet another attempt at a useless industry trying to insert themselves into a place where they're not wanted or needed.
Hey Marketers, fuck you. We're not going to buy your shit no matter how many times you put it in front of us.
s'wut i sed.
I've stayed at a hotel (C??rty?rd) which, on top of $10/day for Internet access, has proxies configured to hijack requests for Amazon. If you try to buy something through their connection, they rewrite the headers to get the referral credit. This should be illegal... I noticed because at the time I stayed, their code was a little broken, at least with Moz/Linux, but it was clear from the error message what they were attempting. I just used an SSH tunnel through one of my systems for the rest of my browsing... but I'm sure they made some nice bucks from the victim class (MS/IE users).
If this business model works for Wi-Fi networks, could it works for water network?
Our water network, here in Montréal, Québec, is in a very bad state. It will cost billons of dollar to repair it, and neither municipalities, provincial or federal government want to pay for fscking it.
I personnaly wouldn't care to have an ad displayed in the bottom of my toilet. I might even enjoy using it, sometimes, depending on the advertiser!
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance." Isaac Asimov
Its a way to rope you in, then slowly increase your cost to actual hard dollars...
Look at what happened with TV.. used to be free.. then commercials.. then nothing but commercials...then cable... now you got cable and dish with a fee to watch the commercials.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Wait, I thought the consensus here was that everything should be free be and open. I for one find it apppaaaauuulling that they're not willing to offer a service that costs them money for free. I mean what if i'm at the park and the next kernel comes out and I can't update until I get home? This is just like the corporate fat cats, always trying to "make money to live off of!""
I know at least 20% of the people out there reading the headline to the article were thinking that. I'm also willing to bet that 40% of them are currently unemployed as they would be at work now and not slashdot. (I'm a college student so I got an excuse.) What's the big deal with this, everything "free" today is laced with ads of some type. Ads are everywhere, deal with them by not buying sugared water for $2 not by bitching on slashdot (which by the way is free to you and paid for by ads!).
Other than your internet connection, most of the content on the web is free but paid for by ads. If you're in the park and you get free web access and bitch because of some popup ad, then don't use it! Connect to the internet from your cell phone and pay for the minutes!
My question is.... how many slashdot readers who would use this service actually would be firing up a web browser to begin with?
I mean whenever I seek out a hotspot for some quick access the only thing I do is fire up putty and ssh into my machine. Pine be thy friend. So if there were ads, I'd never see them.
There's also ways to get around this.... some of Mozilla's features might be very good at stopping these ads. Or one could blackhole them using their hosts file if you were really determined to elimiante them.
There's nothing to complain about in this. For those who don't mind ads for some free service it's great. For those who rarely use the web while on the road, it's great. It's only those who feel the need to complain whenever they see the word "ad" that should be concerned.
> It's like drung dealing.
I'm sorry it's nothing like that. Dealing in one of the 56 ethnic groups in China is totally different to this.
I've never received a supply of free Chinese people only to have them turn around and ask to be paid.
John.