Slashdot Mirror
This Headline Is Not for Sale
r.jimenezz writes "Adam Penenberg's latest article on Wired News discusses the growing trend of inserting ads more directly into online content, as publishers strive to keep readers clicking and to stretch advertising dollars, most of which go to a few big companies. He mentions the example of Vibrant Media, which links 'certain words in an article' directly to ads, and has been covered before on Slashdot, as have Penenberg's previous
articles."
I use Mozilla Firefox and it's a breeze to block those ads using AdBlock
Just create a rule to either block 'vibrantmedia' and 'intellitxt'.
Easy as pie!
Not that Slashdot is guilty of it ...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
This is one of the promises of the early web coming true. Hyperlinked text that will take you anywhere you want to go. Considering that it is advertisers (usually) that pay the salaries of online media folk it is not at all surprising that advertisers get what they want.
There's been some speculation that articles like this are paid-for (NOTE: they always seem to be posted by CmdrTaco).
I find the trend of inserting ads into article text annoying and distracting. I, for one, would never buy anything off of such a link, but obviously people are, or else this practice would die down. See this is practice with any of the articles at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/
I'm not concerned about media outlets that push banner ads and journalists who sneak in keyword-link ads. Magazines like Car & Driver take ad money from the very companies whose products they review, and they've withstood the test of time. Online media will go through the same ethical quandries. The ones that don't make the right choices will wash themselves out.
What's your damage, Heather?
Advertisers will continue to find new ways to market to the public. These ways will inevitably become more and more invasive. They will rely on the public's apathy and penchant for "free stuff". But if you don't want to watch 10 minutes of commercials before every movie you see or you don't want to have you children's school walls plastered with ads then DO SOMETHING! Speak to the manager of the movie theatre. Call your children's principal. Stop using websites that have blurred the lines between information and advertisements.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
What's the problem with ads being interspersed anyway? I'm sure most of us are used to reading an article and then skipping down
a few lines to get back to the content.
Well, I guess it get's really really
annoying sometimes.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
This Headline is Not For Sale
How amusing... I just subsribed, and this is the first headline I paid to see before anyone else...
In addition, with all the astrotufing at Slashdot lately, I don't think it has to be for sale, because we're eager to see see it for free...
When the you go from a half dozen news channels and a few dozen large newspapers to thousands of news websites. The content is spread thinly across many sources and readers. Companies who advertise must spend more time than they did 10 years ago to figure out who to buy advertising space and how much. I think this is a great improvement over how things in the past because every news site can be a niche and have a focused audience.
As long as the advertisements themselves don't interfere with the content, I don't care. If I'm reading an article about an Audi S8 and there is an advertisement on the right of the screen for Audis, I'll take notice and possibly look somewhere else for my car reviews. But if I'm reading an article summary on Slashdot about kernel 2.6.8 being released and there is an ad for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 I won't care so much. Actually I'll laugh knowing Microsoft is funding these hours a day wasted on Slashdot. It all depends on the website and advertisement.
A while back this was heavily rumoured to be a feature in IE6. Microsoft were rumoured to be adding a "feature" where they would add contextual(i.e advertising)hyperlinks to plain text. Thank god they didn't! They must have realised no-one wants to pay or ad-ware...
--
Except, now there's apparently no way to tell the difference between an informational link inserted by the author and commercial crap that will just waste your time if you click on it.
Unless there's some way to turn this off, or filter it out, this just looks like another step in the removal of the internet's informational utility to me.
Here's a more blatant showpiece from our all-time favourite, Michael.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Marketers can have the sides, top and bottom of a page to peddle products and services, but the body must remain pure.
You can have your body...
AD AD AD AD AD
AD AD AD AD AD
AD ONE LINE AD
AD AD AD AD AD
AD AD AD AD AD
Click for next page
Hmmm, that *does* look familiar.
Slashdot is blatently guilty of posting "stories" that are nothing more than marketing blurbs for so-and-so product.
All sites with a sufficient amount of readers will sell out eventually. Even Slashdot.
I love how the article on embedded advertising has embedded advertising - great way to prove your own point.
There will probably be more of this type of marketing, as pop-ups get deflated and the up-front sign-up gets 'spoofed' (i.e.- false) user data.
This could spark the return of text-only browsers, or even web text readers that spawn on user-directed sites and remove the graphical content themselves.
They are the most annoying ads in the world. Lots of pages have words with hyperlinks in the paragraph going to other parts of the site or to references. All these do is make it more difficult to weed out real links versus ad links, although they are getting easier for me to notice which are which, by the general words they use, i.e., cpu, motherboard, networking, etc.
~S
remeber to use a custom hosts file. It increases browing sanity a LOT. Much more than just using adblock and flashblock (which I use too).
;)
Sometimes when I have to browse on someone's else computer I'm almost stunned by the number of ads that appear on sites. Yeah it's easy to get accustomed to comfort of browsing without ads.
So... don't wait any longer! install custom hosts file NOW!
BTW: I'm curious if it will soon be included into some of linux distros by default, it would be great - self maintaining and updating custom hosts file... (it works with windows too, but I doubt it will be a part of default windows install anytime
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Such a smart and simple idea - it's surprising nobody's thought of it before.
And yet, it's so wrong. The author's hit the nail on the head - journalistic content must be seen to be as free from outside influences as possible whether it's a personal bias, litigious pressure, or (as in this case) finacial incentives. Otherwise, the message becomes diluted as people begin to wonder what they're not being told.
In a way this reminds me of the data systems in Starship Troopers. This system could be adapted easily to provide information instead. But not a hope in hell of that, now the Marketing departments have got their teeth into it.
And yes, I do dislike marketers. Thanks for noticing.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Yes, it is.
Hate me!
Not only does Slashdot post items that are clearly puff pieces from marketing departments disguised as stories, they also accept advertising from Microsoft (has everyone seen the bar graph ad yet?). Slashdot deriedes all that is Microsoft, yet won't hesitate to accept some advertising cash from them.
Look out Slashdot, here we come!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Yep, I bought everything I was supposed to buy, but I'm definitely not going to enroll in that Clown College.
I think what we can take from this is that people are becoming "immunized" to ordinary advertisements...they just aren't clicking. So advertisers have to turn to other methods to try to pull in those dollars. One thing you can say for the ad-words thing is that at least it's not intrusive. Who normally runs their mouse over text in a news article anyway? And at least when reading a printed media article you're expecting to be advertised to, unlike with the DejaNews ad-words flap of a few years back.
Something I found interesting in the same vein was another Wired story the other day, about FreeiPods.com--an advertising site where, if you complete a trial offer from one of an assortment of merchants and get five other people to complete one too, they send you an advertiser-paid-for iPod (or $250 iTMS gift certificate). I've searched the web for stories about these people and everything I find suggests they're legitimate.
The whole thing seems to me to suggest that the advertisers participating in that program are finally starting to get the idea that if they want to advertise to us, they need to make it worth our while.
(Full disclosure: okay, so the FreeiPods link is a referral link for me. I was going to compare and contrast its advertising model anyway, and given that I was going to mention it anyway, it would be dumb not to include the referral link instead of just a plain-vanilla one, given that they both pull up the website just the same and I might as well benefit from the traffic as not. So don't accuse me of trying to sneak something by you.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I get those dumbass ad words on anandtech. Its always a technical word, and I usually am expecting some relevant information to be revealed. Instead its an uninformative advertisement.
It might make sense if say, anandtech was reviewing a Pentium VI, and say newegg.com had an advert showing their Pentium VI price. But they are hardly ever so revelant and only distratcing.
Will all this article adds (links) effect googles page rankings?
I just bought a Canyonero, and talk about a smooth ride...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
In AdAge, Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute
"McBride" and "ethics" used in the same sentence?!?! What next!.
Adblock works wonderfully (especially the Collapse feature), why shouldn't this?
Linkblock, anyone?
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
i only really get text ads from any website.
i use opera so i have built in pop up blocking and i set it to only display cached images. about the only ads i get are the google text ads here
I read an interview with Matt Groening about Futurama, where (as you know) advertising comes out of your pillow and into your dreams. Anyway, I thought this quote was interesting:
Is there anything you've changed your mind about in the last 20 years?
I used to be amused by how pervasive advertising was in our society. But seeing ads on the little divider bars on the conveyer belts at grocery store checkouts made me think, That's enough. I read Future Shock in the early '70s and said, Future shock will never happen to me. It has. At least in regard to advertising.
We said no. We have many editorial links in stories on all our sites, so having paid links mixed in wouldn't be right. Advertising is one thing. Mixing it with the actual news content is another. IMO it's simply wrong.
Part of Intellitext's pitch was that plenty of "respected" news sites are doing this. My response: "Didn't your mother ever ask, 'If all the other kids were jumping off a cliff, would that mean you'd have to jump, too?'"
Fah.
- Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
Editor in Chief, OSTG
Insightful.
'certain words in an article' directly to ads If only Slashdot got paid for every hit that was referred by the 'sometimes-over-abundant-use-of-links' articles, Slashdot would be richer than Bill Gates. Ok, maybe not . . .
I don't get it...
Oh, well, I know I'm no ObviousGuy.
Instead of blocking advertisements, the good strategy is to load them, but just don't display them. I was even thinking here of trying to patch some ad-removing proxy for that, and also making some kind of program that would "click" on ads at night.
Main point of that is that you get to see the site, and if it's well done, neither the advertiser nor the site have any way of finding what are you doing on your end, so the site still gets paid.
Of course, that'll probably accelerate the inclusion of links to ads in content, but that can be easily dealt with by the same proxy which already does pattern matching for URLs anyway. It won't take long until ad blockers start appending [ad!] after those links.
I just wasted a feww hundred clicks of thier bandwidth... how about you...what have you done good today?
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Let's assume they are payed ads, disguised as articles, should they still be visible to subscribers?
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Yay, a story about something everybody already knows about. Yee. Hoo.
Anyhoo.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
127.0.0.1 itxt.vibrantmedia.com
:)
and hey presto, they disappear!
or you could always install a much larger hosts file which takes care of quite a few nasties
Message boards nowdays even have sig saless - with some sigs going up to $1000 and over. Crazy how marketing gets
Business Voyeur
And you thought money grew on trees? You idiot! Money grows in news websites!
It's always fun when people come in and explain they have found a new way to generate money out of nothing. Fun or sad, depends on your local mood I suppose.
BTW, I have been quoting a quote (from Vibrant) in the article, not the article itself, which is really interesting and well-written.
The media is for sale. Period. Admit it.
And it is not illegal. But they do it.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Or if you have a proxy, and you want everybody who connects to it to benefit from it you can use bannerfilter. It works with squid. Alot of rules are automaticly created and you can set your own rules as well ofcourse. Works as a filter for banners as well as popups (it replaces the popup with a self-closing javascript page). I'm using it for quite some time now and haven't been able to detect any flaws.
Unless there's a mechanism that clearly separates the ad links from the links the author inserted to annotate his story, you won't be able to distinguish between the two.
Or IOW, ads become an editorial influence.
I created DNS lookup zones for ATDMT.com and DoubleClick.com on our local DNS servers and pointed wildcards at a fake internal host. Just by adding those two domains, the number of ads dropped tremendously, especially on some of my favorite sites. I haven't heard anyone else scream, so it must've been a good thing.
The Geek Crew
adverts ? what adverts ?
the internet worked when it was invented without advertisers so it can work again, perhaps it would be a nicer place to be when the financial incentives for creating content are removed, maybe writing will go back to its roots as an ARTFORM
if you cant afford to publish content on the internet then quite simply dont bother oh and dont let the door hit you on the way out
I only block certain kinds of advertisements that I consider egregious abuses of the medium. These include popup and popover ads and ads from companies that have abused their ability to track my movements on the Net in the past (like DoubleClick). For 'stealth' ads like these, I will block the ones that I can find a way to block, too. If you use fancy JavaScript ads that dance across the webpage I'm trying to read and I can't find a way to get rid of them, I will just avoid your site.
Banner ads and even clickthrough ads don't bother me. Yeah, they're advertising and advertising is inhrently annoying, but if it's an ad that interests me, I'll even click it to see what's up.
What is the price on a Pentium 6 these days, anyway?
The Geek Crew
The main content gets a small amount on space in the middle on the page but on the top, left, right, and bottom your competely surrounded by ads. Its all really too much and as a result the ads are all one big blur. In short they are getting the exact opposite effect of zero eyes when if they just had say one ad in the middle of the content people might actually pay attention. I mean banner ads in 2004? Who TF has looked at one of them since the mid 90's?
Lastly those "keyword" ads are just horrible. At work I use IE and it makes those sites even more annoying. Popup bubbles on mouseover's for like every other word gets to you after a while. Thank God for Firefox.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Having established why I want them blocked, here are some further thoughts:
- It is a free world. Web sites cannot actually require me to look at the ads, I am free to look at the content in any way I damn well please. If they do not like that they can change their methods (like including the contents and ads in a single block of flash, perhaps). In response I will decide if it is still worth it or not. Ultimately the market will decide.
- I *really* do not care about unsustainable business methods. I am under no obligation to keep anyones company afloat, unless I am actually paid to do so. This is not the case for websites.
- Finally, the notion that web sites for which I do pay (either through subscription or ads) would be impartial (even in the limited "non-sponsored" form) is laughable. Take a look at /., see how "impartial" it is, even with ads.
If bandwidth is the problem, website owners should come up with ways to keep cost down. I can see a future for a distributed web (ala bittorrent) - such a thing would be great to avoid the /. effect too.
AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased."
People are only interested in viewpoints they agree with. They don't care about the credibility of the source. They don't want the truth, they want to believe they are right. Publications are only concerned with readership and the readers aren't concerned with credibility. So, while IntelliTxt ads may damage a publications credibility, it won't affect its readership. And if confusing people into reading an ad increases their bottom line, credibility loses.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
... are the greedy going to stop it in time?
It amazes me how people in one breath praise the capitalist society we live in, but go out of their way to prove they don't like it. We want our Internet to be add free, so we run add blockers, we want our television and radio add free, so we time shift. People need to realize that ultimately a capitalist society and a technologically advanced society don't mix. You can embrace technology and have an advanced society where everyones happy, or you can cater to human greed. You think pirating movies and MP3's is bad? What happens when we achieve matter replication (and we will... it may be 10 or 20 years.... but we will) and you can download a toaster or a car, or whatever you want. We use rapid prototyping physical "printers" in the auto industry... when that gets perfected, everyone will have one on their desktop.
The human desire for there to be the have's and the have not's is becoming more and more unneccessary and things become available in infinite supply, such as songs on the Internet. But humans always want to acquire more then the neighors... or more specifically want their neighbors to have less.
hosts files do not work if you are using an explicit proxy server for web content (ie your ISP)
Windows MSIE users can add advertisers sites to their "restricted sites zone" this will stop javascript for just those sites and so will significantly cut down on adverts and other such cruft
I have noticed that both Tomshardware.com and Anandtech.com use these annoying DHTML-based ad links that are highlighted in the words of their articles. Have you seen them?
You are reading and article, and as you move your mouse around the article maybe following a line or something (I move my lips when I read -- leave me alone), you roll over these damned ad links. Sure enough, the scripting on the links creates a DHTML "pop-up" right where your mouse is, effectively BLOCKING the article you're trying to read.
Now, this sounds minorly annoying in an of itself -- you have to wait for the timeout before the ad will remove itself. But in addition to blocking text, the ad often has the unintended after effect of causing FireFox to lag. I've seen it on PCs ranging from my shitty 700MHz P3 at work to my 3400+ Athlon64 at home.
I am pretty certain that other websites have started using these sorts of sponsored links, and I really see it becoming as bad as traditional pop-ups or pop-unders. Even worse, I'm not immediately aware of any way to suppress them without turning off Javascript that supports DHTML. I'd be interested to know if AdBlock for FireFox will be able to adapt to these new advertising methods -- NOT because I don't want to see the ads -- I just don't want them to interrupt reading the articles.
I really think that these tech-savvy websites, although dependent on the ad revenue more so than their cheap ass readers (hey -- we buy all the shit they review -- we have no money), should reconsider using these sorts of links. Or at least review how they display in the context of trying to read a review or editorial on the latest and greatest hardware/software.
It's unfortunate, too, because you have to feel for these guys needing money to run their great websites, but at what cost to the integrity of their content?
IronChefMorimoto
Ads pay for stuff (especially web content), so that I don't have to. But when the advertisments get in the way of me enjoying the web content, it annoys me, which leads to me *NOT* respond to the ad. On the other hand, I personally make a conscious effort to support inobtrusive advertising. My hope is that enough people would have similar practices that advertising methods that interfer with the media they're placed in would be unprofitable. Google AdWords/AdSense, inobtrusive banner ads, etc. are the type of advertising I support. They are adjacent to, not in the content, and so they don't get in the way. The 'IntelliTxt' that the article talks about would be nice, except that the method it uses to deliver the ads (mouse-over underlined words) can be used for other better things, like definitions for jargon - and I'm betting they don't make it easy to tell the difference between an ad or a definition. It's better to just keep the advertisments seperate from the content.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Apparently, everyone is more concerned with their own wants (e.g. to receive something--content--for free in the way in which they want to receive it) than in supporting the bargain that the producers of the content have offered; namely, view a few ads in exchange for said free content. The marketplace will adjust. There will probably be less content available for free. Or, to be more accurate, less well-produced content with professional reporting, rich graphics, and so on. Which, I imagine, would suit this audience fine. But I do wonder, if people are so offended by advertising, why they visit sites with ads in the first place. Why not just avoid them altogether?
However, I have sympathy for places like Fark that are trying to figure out how to cover costs, and pay a few salaries. According to the logic of many threads here and elsewhere:
1) they should not sell subscriptions
2) they should not require a logon
3) nobody clicks banner ads anyway
So what's a good guy with a good site to do? (Hint: donations and t-shirts isn't the answer)
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
does this mean that the online content evolves to an "ads-inside-ads" model?
TV seems to be almost there - think all these BuyStuff tv-channels or the free-to-air channels where, amazingly, one can still see some old, low-budget and crappy movies between the ads.
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I can cope with advertising as long as it is the same style as a newspaper or magazine.
Fixed, static (relivent?) adverts work.
Google has shown this.
My eyes go funny when things move around, and the recent trend towards making adverts expand (without flash or plugins) when you hover over them is just damn annoying.
If I am watching TV or a movie, I expect things to move, when I am reading a page I expect things to stay still.
liqbase
"If you use fancy JavaScript ads that dance across the webpage I'm trying to read and I can't find a way to get rid of them"
Just disable JavaScript. While you're at it, also disable plug-ins, etc. I have all of this stuff disabled, and I find that pages download faster, too (over my 56K dialup). Also, a browser with all of that crap disabled makes my system more secure, since it provides one less way to break into my system. If a web site requires JavaScript, Flash, etc., to use, it doesn't get my business.
I suspect that the success rate we are seeing at the moment is due to people clicking on these Intellitext links because they expect the link to point to a dictionary definition or something interesting -- and my guess is, many of them are going to be disappointed to discover that the link actually points to an advert.
In the long run, this could actually do more harm than good. People will end up not clicking underlined words even when they are links to definitions, interesting factoids and so forth. The internet will simply disappear even further up its own arsehole.
If I were Prime Minister, it would be law that readers must be able to distinguish instantly between editorial content (which they presumably want to read) and advertisements -- ideally, in a paper publication, it should be possible to pull out all the adverts in one swift hand movement and file them in the recycling bin, without disrupting the real content. I would also implement a special kind of "broadcast flag" which could be used to temporarily turn off VCRs during the advert breaks -- this should save the fast forward buttons! Needless to say, attempting to pass an advertisement off as editorial content would be a very severe offence.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Dispite what some people seem to think, the internet did exist at one point without ads. Ads are not needed on the internet, or on websites.
There are still sites out there that don't display ads and get on fine, hosting is cheap these days, and only getting cheaper. The Best Page In The Universe has been without ads from the beginning, my personal site has no ads, my university site has no ads, a lot of business sites have no ads.
The internet is a way to share information, you give other people information by making a website in return, you ask others to make websites on information they know about. So that one day you can goto their site and find what you need.
The internet can survive without ads, and a minority will keep that philosphy. In the mean time, we will block the ads other attempt to push onto us.
P.S
If you really must have ads use a service like Google's AdWord. I personally find them a lot more unobtrusive, and even useful.
You shouldn't, however, be killing inline ads if you want the information from the source you are getting it at.
Inline ads are a corruption of the data, and the Internet should be capable of routing around damage.
Damn straight I'll use any available tool to kill inline ads, and if the resulting info becomes garbled, then I'll reject it and look elsewhere.
What is being discussed is a situation where, for example, an article is talking about caffeine containing drinks, and you'll suddenly find a random link.
Those aren't random rich, dark links. They're just bits aroma and pieces of a subliminal advertising virile strategy. Take a coffee drinkers look sometime at subliminal advertising. Ice cubes energizing in liquor ads become fascinating, while powerful if you use your peripheral Yirgacheffe vision you can pick up the S-E-X they airbrush onto Ted Kennedy's forehead as it appears must have now on the National Enquirer.
I think I'll go have a nice cup of coffee right now!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...from our all-time favourite, Michael.
/. editors and the very thought that he would ever use his power to further any of his own goals is ludicrous.
Michael is a pillar of journalistic integrity! He represents the most fair and balanced of all the
* The preceding message was paid for by the Micheal for Micheal foundation.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
NBC made a major push a few years ago to push this kind of technology, where almost every word in an article was linked to something or other. I don't remember what they called it, but it must have done the big belly flop.
Our audience is relatively advanced when it comes to technology and can easily differentiate between content and ads. We have never had a complaint about Intellitxt. I can understand the situation may be different for more "general" websites whose users are less technically inclined.
It looks like it's the way to present Int3eliT3xt into something nice : "But we are adding value to the article!".
Isn't it the job of the author ? I mean, deciding what is in his article ?
The value of an information lies precisely in the point of view of the author. He'll deliberately highlight some aspect and not some other. That is named "information": a critical look onto something + an interpretation within a context + a selection of elements. That is why the job journalist does (still) exist. Ad arbitrary content to it and it becomes noise.
Practicaly. I hit that Int3eliT3xt stuff. I was reading my very private emails. It turned me rather furious. Just immagine: you get a post from your best trusted friend, a man you consider as an excellent source of higly refined information and you end up sorting add from the content... Furious. The same apply to news article.
I will stop using things if I can't get them to work clean. And yes: I have no TV for the last 10 years. Am fine thanks.
Z.
(Now I use all the blocks from FireFox, I block images, I generalised the shock-wave-filters from the user.css. Today I added this host file list I saw mentionned in this thread.)
Give me a straightforward micropayments option, and they'll get their money. I'd much rather pay directly to those that deserve it rather than making an occasional product I'd like more expensive and getting deluged by the crap of all the others.
Given that the W3C closed their micropayments activity due to lack of interest in the industry, hurting the bottom line might raise their interest. And I make sure to tell those I like "hi, I really like your site, but I'm blocking your ads." Then follow up with a description on how I'd like to pay and a few links to sites about micropayments.
The ad market is going to implode, and I'll be there to cheer it along when it does.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I clicked the Vibrant Media link and got localhost. Well I guess is due to that big addition I did to the hosts file some months ago.
At least an ad embedded into an article is something you can identify clearly as an ad. Not that I see them thanks to Privoxy (you can allow ads at sites you want to support [/.] if you'd like).
In my opinion, the worst offense are ads that are disguised as articles. The local major news paper is made up of at least 25% ads disguised as articles, which is part of the reason why I refuse to subscribe. This has not been as prevelant online as in print, but I expect that it will get that way as more of us switch to digital news.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
... keeping things simple:
a previous poster complained:
"links are being incorperated directly into content because the web advertising model isn't working. There are many reasons for this, but certainly one of them is that people like you block adverts.
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?"
Errrmmm . . . how about just using plain text embedded in the content?
It could be made impossible to block, the sponsor knows that it always gets seen, and all they lose is the ability to use annoying graphics, pop-upos, balloons, flash, etc.
that the ad sites can be Slashdotted, one at a time?
PEPSI sure tastes good when I try to respond to difficult issues.
Especially the ice-cold DIET PEPSI I'm enjoying now. When I think of what to say on this issue, I'll put down my tasty PEPSI, and post it.
Until then, I'll just enjoy my favorite taste sensation, PEPSI.
When more links are ads than something meaningful, surfers will learn to beware of them, which in turn is poison to hypertext, rendering it into 'just text'. We should not have to steer clear of links just in case they turn out to be ad-traps that slow down our surfing with pop-ups or pop-intos.
The infrastructure of Web is common property. Are the advertisers allowed to corrupt and destroy something that belongs to all of us?
I have a comment here. One of the chief arguments as to why users shouldn't block ads is that if the website doesn't get their ad dollars, they would have to close up shop. The quality of content on the web would decrease, because few people would publish content if there wasn't a way to get paid for it.
I understand all that. However, thinking about myself as a user, I don't consider ad-surrounded content as "quality content". In fact, the more ads there are, the less quality I find the content. Annoying and intrusive ads detract from the quality of the article, because they distract from my primary task: getting to the content.
Remember what cable TV was SUPPOSED to be? You were supposed to pay a certain amount every month, and for paying, you were supposed to get TV with NO ADS. That's why you paid- so you wouldn't have to put up with ads. Then cable companies realized that if they all put ads on their stations, they could get even MORE money, because not only would they get money from advertizers but they also would get my from users.
Which is a load of BS. Economy is a two-way street. There has to be some compromises otherwise the system doesn't work. What I want on the net is content without the annoyance of ads. So change the system. If a company really feels that their content on their website is more valuable then content on someone elses, then charge a flat rate for people to see the content without ads. If the content is quality content, then I would pay.
The problem is, the content put out by companies IS NOT always quality content. First of all, a lot of the content is duplicated. News.google.com grabs news articles from multiple websites at once, and you can choose any source you want (one headline had 2000+ "related" stores from other websites). But the news is the news. News from any one source is not all that exceptional then news from any other source (IMHO). Another problem companies have, is that there are a lot of free sources of content which are just as good.
So how can they make their content distinct from any other? Many would argue that they can't. People just aren't interested in paying for news.
But wait a minute. My morning paper is a subscription. My cable TV (which includes the news) is a subscription. People don't have any problem with those.
I would argue that a lot of times, banners are a cop out, because the company has no brains/willingness to actually COMPETE, and produce some exclusive, unique content. These companies don't even TRY to make their content unique. They simply take the easy way out, making me view their stupid ads while trying to see what I really want to see.
And I am not going to reward that practice by removing my ad-blocking software. Companies need to learn that it is NOT all about THEM making a buck, it is FIRST about ME (the customer) being pleased with the product. If the product is a bullshit web page with ads that piss me off, I am going to block them. It's the responsiblity of the company to provide a product in a format that pleases me, not my responsiblity to comply with the way a company WANTS me to use their product. This is the distiction companies don't get, and I would argue it's the fundamental thing that's caused the current piracy/copywrite/IP crisis on the net.
So does this means Slashdot will soon be implementing this?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Fire michael and timothy.
Popups, pop-(over/under-between-whatever) and 10000k's of flash/java suck balls really!
.....
...
....
... .....
But what is wrong with text links and decent size banners ?
I am not talking about 100 banners on one page, just one on top, one on bottom and maybe some 125x60's inline
If you guys would realise please: the internet is not ruined by those who put ads on their pages; that keeps your content free...
the problem is SPAM advertisement, and the problem is search engine SPAMMING
As people will block decent website owners' normal ads, more and more people will turn to SPAM and blackhat SEO techniques
Since google denied to put pharmacy ads into adwords my get "X@N@X V|c0d|n cheap" SPAM vent up by about 600%, while my commissions from pharmacy advertisement went down by 50%
before there was decent advertising, now there is killer SE and MAIL SPAMMING
bottom line: KILL/BLOCK all ads and your mailbox will be doomed.....
You beligerant asshole, so everyone defending themselves from spammers are idiots & lazy? Sorry to inconvenience your research, but the real world (outside the oh-so-fabulous Indiana University) requires a certain amount of effort, not on the part of everyone else to accomodate you, but ON YOUR PART. That is why your research job is called a JOB - you are supposed to DO WORK.
So write what is called a "business case" and get the standards for the URL changed. By the way, try to avoid telling the world your techincal internals in the new URL, it just give hackers a road map. And we're the idiots??!
:-)
I love idiots that can't be bothered to put their own name to the works to post online.
Small children should not be allowed on the internet -- please ask mommy next time you plug the mo-dum in the wall.
Are you a fucking moron? Are you really that vain? Are you nothing more than a child yourself?
What difference would having a name associated with the post make any which way. You still don't know that person from the hole in your ass.
This isn't city hall.
If you didn't live in a free country, you wouldn't make such an asinine statement. You definitly would have such an arragant attitude, or you'd probably be dead.
Elsewhere in this thread there are points made about wifi articles and a few other recent links that have people wondering. The Nokia phone review the other day was another article that almost looked paid.
Could a policy be placed somewhere to completely clarify the issue? Also to stop a change to the policy being made in the future.
Hey, it's fine if there are paid articles, as long as they are market. A slashdot section 'paid' would be totally cool.
Paid placement in search engines affects the way people think, too. For example, if you search for "moolatte + mulatto" in Google, you'll find that Dairy Queen has purchased the word combination, in order to thwart 95 sites/blogs that discuss the homophonic qualities of "Moolatte" and "mulatto". This is a pretty tame example, but imagine more and more companies start doing it. Although newspapers have always acted as gatekeepers, many people may not consider that search engines also act as gatekeepers. When I was in university, my professors expressed concern that the limited number of library indexing software makers would affect social constructs. However, they could not even imagine the implications of advertisers encroaching upon those indices, let alone the advent of paid placement in search engines.
-- SYS 64738 --
I can see how Vibrant's marketing people could spin this to potential clients, though. The relevance of their machine-generated ad-links is incredible. I mean, how could you possibly tell the difference between one of my link-infested reviews and a page where the word "developers" in a sentence about game programming is linked to this page? Later on, "PC" links, just as spookily perfectly, to the Dell.co.uk Back To School Sale.
Well, actually, that link's broken right now. But I'm sure that's just because of excessive server load from all the people clicking on it.
The Hostway link's there again, from "control panel", as in "graphics card driver control panel", on the next page. In that same paragraph the laser-like specificity of the term "computer system" triggered another perfect-bullseye Vibrant Media link, to some remote network admin software.
If site operators can get themselves some useful income by defacing their pages with these mouseover-box-triggering, reading-interrupting irrelevancies, then more power to 'em. Lord knows I've cluttered my own site with pop-ups and banners galore (which I encourage my readers to block). But Vibrant must have some bad-ass sales people if they can convince anyone to pay any significant amount of money for this kind of advertising.
Comment removed based on user account deletion