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).
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?
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.
"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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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?