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."
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.
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/
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.
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.
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]
The reason links are being incorperated directly into content are 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?
The only thing ad blocking does is push webmasters into new directions to find advertising revenues. This latest spate of content adverts are just a result of this trend. I suspect soon we'll see adverts incorperated into a site's content at the server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl, JSP includes into the site's content) rather than the client-side (e.g. embedded images, flash from third party servers).
These will be much more difficult to block, but ultimately, unless you WANT a subscription based Internet, what is a webmaster of a large site supposed to do? Take out another job or extra mortgage to pay his or her $1000 a month server bills?
Yes, in an ideal Internet anyone would be able to publish any content for nothing, but we live in a capitalist society (all the countries that really matter on the Internet are free or nearly-free markets, even China).
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.
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
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.'
I never click on the banners, and since most revenue is now derived from click-throughs, I don't see the point in displaying them on my machine. Why should I be *forced* to see some ad when I don't have to. In any case, those greedy bastards would expand advertising into every possible medium, not because they aren't already making money (they are) but because they always want more money. On the very few sites which carry ads I am interested in I let the server display them (Penny Arcade, SlashDot).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Will all this article adds (links) effect googles page rankings?
No, I don't think bandwidth and whatever pays for itself, but like many others have also said, I simply don't click on ads, so the difference for the advertisers is the same.
Also, I'd like to decide for myself what I want to display on my computer and what I don't.
A click-through response isn't necessary. These days, a great deal of online advertising is sold on a Cost-Per-Impression model, where the webmaster gets paid a small amount each time an ad on their page is viewed. So by blocking the ads, you're cheating the webmaster out of their ad revenue.
The internet was around long before there was advertising on it, and it will be around long after all advertising is gone. The internet is a pull medium, not a push medium. I don't want to see any ads, and I have the power to control that (unlike television).
If content providers insist on popping up mind-numbingly deceptive ads like "hit the monkey" and fake Windows dialog boxes, I am going to block them. If they don't like it, they can try to make me subscribe to their site. Once they do that, then I simply move on to another site with similar quality non-subscription content.
I don't mind ads like the way Google incorporates them; text-only, and not SCREAMING IN MY FACE or popping up all over the place telling me my IP address is being broadcast to the internet.
"Does AdBlock block ads such as, err, I dunno, the one in my sig?"
Some of these systems do.
My day job is as a researcher at a university. Over the last two months I've been tearing my hair out because one of the evaluation tools we'd been using online has not been working right for the subjects. They get to a link and all of a sudden its not there. I had been trying to replicate this on a dozen browsers, going through all the validation services and unfortunately, these people are not the most technically advanced in the world.
Well, it all came down to our default DDNS names...at Indiana University, they are hostname.ads.iu.edu.
That ADS means Active Directory Services...not ADvertisementS.
Yes, Microsoft runs much of the back end of our campus, sadly, but its just a tool like anything else.
Anywho, it seems that any links that have this ADS name in it were being removed wholesale from the pages. Meaning my survey instrument was not working for idiots that ran this software. I'm told the Symantec internet protection tools (I forget the name) is actually sold on 7 out of 10 laptops in the US these days (lucky its probably only a 30 day demo).
This has pissed me off to no extent. Here I've been blamed for it not working, yet its these ad blockers that are ruining the content to purify things for idiots that can't be bothered with an ad here or there are the sole cause. You know what Symantecs answer to this was? Change your URL.
Fuck you symantec.
On the side, I run a website dedicated to music technology that is advertising based. Even my own stuff that we sell is using the same ad servers. I never wanted to have a whore'd link that said Store in the menubar, but after researching the pervasiveness of this at my university setting, I realized I had to. Otherwise, it would be destroyed in the content.
I can understand why folks kill popups. you control your browser and as such, should be able to say if you want a window to show up or not. You shouldn't, however, be killing inline ads if you want the information from the source you are getting it at.
Right now, I am running nonstandard sized banners on my site, much to my clients despise, but when I explain this to them, they are generally happy with it and send me a modified ad. I am thinking of using Apache's rewrite commands on my ad server so that nothing involved looks like a url coming from this particular software.
These few changes I've made have made several users ask me when I started postings ads, as well as my page views and my banner views are now coming into parity for this last month. I have a feeling its going to be an endless battle with the moochers of society vs. those of us that provide content.
So to answer your question, yes these fucking adblocking softwares do block as innocuous items as inline text so long as its pointing as something that looks like it might be an advertisement to the software.
The media is for sale. Period. Admit it.
And it is not illegal. But they do it.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves?
Exactly! It's my fucking bandwidth and I'm not paying to see their advert!
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?
Adverts are images. Images are larger in terms of bytes than text. Many ISPs have a download cap which if you exceed starts costing you money. As such more of my bandwidth is used by viewing adverts than it is viewing the content sponsored by the advert. Or - to put it another way - it actually costs me, by virtue of my download limit, more money to view an advert than it does to view the content. I am no more obligated to view an advert than I am to remain on the same television station during a commercial break.
Besides, I would contend that the reason the on-line advertising market is in trouble is because the model is wrong. Advertisers believed that they could track the success of their advertising campaign on a particular site, based upon the number of people who clicked on an advert on that site. But advertising is not now, and never has been, about "click-through". It's about market awareness.
If you show your brand on 100 sites then you've increased your brand awareness, and you should pay those sites based upon the amount of advertising real-estate that you've used. You don't pay a magazine based upon the number of people who bought your product whilst reading an article, you pay a magazine based upon the number of people who read the article, and may have noticed your advert. Same with television, same with radio. Why should the web be any different?
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
The site most likely pays for itself or its contributors through adverts. If you don't click on the adverts, their revenue stream decreases, and unless they can find new ways to advertise (read: more intrusive), the site will just close up shop.
So, you either have intrusive ads, or many fewer sites. It really is that simple :)
Wow. You must go to some different sites to the ones I look at (no, I'm not talking about pr0n, before somebody says it :)
I've seen some hardware review sites with about 8 or 9 ads down the side of the page. All animated, and incredibly distracting.
If those ads were static, and not trying to install tracking cookies, maybe I'd leave them. But when they try to record a trail of where I've been on the net, or when they flash so much that I can't concentrate on the very thing I came to the site for, then in the trash they go.
Ad designers: less is more. Don't flash, shriek, wander about the page, disguise yourselves as system errors, or try and track us. You'll get more people actually seeing the ads - and even if they don't buy something right away, your brand image will be reinforced, which isn't going to happen if they don't see the ad in the first place, or if they block it straight away because you pissed them off.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
"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 know on my site, we have 2 ads down the side of the site.
:P I'm very picky about the folks we do business with and I ask for review products before I ever consider taking the advertisement. I've sent both the check and the product back when they were shit.
My general manager wants more. I say no, and as I hold almost a majority of the interest in the site, all I have to do is to get one of the partners to agree with me, and its cool.
I've also been told this is why folks don't want to partner with us
Honestly, I don't know why other sites can't do this too.
Any site that has 8 or 9 ads down the side isn't one that is too interested in quality. As such, why visit them. You are going there for hardware reviews...are you really getting anything out of a review site that blatently whores itself to each and every advertiser that shows up?
No.
Go somewhere else. Just don't fuck with the inline content -- of which banner advertisements are a part of (not popups aren't inline -- I have no problem with blocking those because I use to be quick with the close key command anyways and never saw them).
So an ad here or there isn't a problem. Its reality. Even more isn't a problem -- take a look at a newspaper -- some pages are nothing but ads with a single article in the middle. I don't read these papers, but you get the point.
Vote with your dollars. Don't go to these sites. Fuck them if they don't respect you. Just because they don't respect you, doesn't give you the right to not to respect their requirements for admission to the site -- the advertisements.
I might see it differently if I didn't product content -- and for years I was against advertising on my own site -- but you have to pay the bills some how (and a hobby can only stay interesting so long before you get pissed about the credit card bills).
Advertisers were playing fair, years ago. The banner ad was the ubiquitous form of internet advertising, and it always stayed within the little bar at the top of the page, and maybe one at the bottom. That was still too much for people, and so the ad-blockers were created. Soon, those sites couldn't turn a profit, and so their advertising department/provider (in order to save themselves) had to come up with new ways of improving the click-thru on their ads. That led us to pop-ups, flash ads, interstitials, pop-unders, etc. The more people block, the more intrusive the adverts have to become. If people left the banner ads alone, we wouldn't be in this state.
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.
my bandwidth! my precious bandwidth!
More like "buy more bandwidth dammit!" I get "stuck" on some pages where the damn adserver doesn't have the bandwidth to give me my damn ad, causing mozilla to sit there with just the top of the page rendered waiting for that banner to load so it can render the part of the page I actually want to see. This hasn't happened recently though, either everyone else blocking ads means the server has enough bandwidth to give me mine, or mozilla learned to render a whole page even if the image was missing, and I just haven't noticed anymore. Could also be the increase of banners using <iframe> to load a whole page including jscript and whatever other nasties they want to throw at the reader.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
So I take it you never flip TV channels during commercials, take a leak, make some coffee etc - after all, it's your duty to watch the ads or who'll pay for the shows?
I think you've forgotten something. The purpose of advertising is not to display as many ads as possible, it's to people to buy stuff. If an advertiser has to make 2 million impressions to make a single sale, then the cost per impression will be very low. If he can make that sale with 10 impressions, he'll pay a lot more. It's not in anyone's interest to bombard people with ads if they're not going to buy anything. Since people who block web ads are pretty much saying "I'm not interested in what you've got to sell", it's actually meaning that the ads which do go out are better targeted - so they should be worth more.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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?
When advertisers start to put useful context sensitive ads that are relevant to the content I am viewing and are not intrusive then I will unblock them, but not before.
Websites can put premium content on their sites which you have to pay for as a revenue model rather than this advertising rubbish. I'd happily pay for quality premium content rather than have my eyeballs constantly offended.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Popups, pop-(over/under-between-whatever) and 10000k's of flash/java suck balls really!
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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.....
Back in the old days I was actually excited to see online adverts, though they were to other related websites, and it was done as a co-op effort (as in no one paid each other, they just linked to each other). These were actually useful, since the content didn't waste your time.
Then the LinkExchange kind of killed off the co-op style ads, on the promise that your website will be advertised after enough clicks from your end and your adverts would only be in your group. (in my case it was other programming websites, so I occasionally clicked my own adverts because they seemed useful). Ofcourse the LinkExchange, as agreed, would occasionally link to some kind of commercial website. It was all good and fun back then, and all the adverts were static.
If you talk of these adverts, then I don't mind viewing them. And occasionally I even clicked on them, if they were relevant and interesting enough. Ofcourse, now that the Link exchange had been bought out by Microsoft, it almost never delivers relevant content.
But really, believe me, those blocking adverts like I am, would rarely click the adverts these days. The grandparent is not a "rebel", but a normal person like myself whose sick of the epilepsy-inducing adverts that make you want to click them just to shut them up. Or the adverts that suck up your bandwidth delivering you a crappy flash movie promoting a product you don't give a damn about. On that note, I have to PAY for my downloads at university. So it's not just the "content provider" whose paying, it's me as well. It works both ways if you understand me.
When a website's adverts began abusing viewers like myself and the grandparent, you gave us no choice but to block ads in general. You can't do a damn about us removing the ads, just like we don't can't do a damn about stopping you from doing so. There's no laws (in Australia anyway) that force you to download or view adverts, and I don't think it's morally right to hold people to do it. Deal with it.