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."
Not that Slashdot is guilty of it ...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
There's been some speculation that articles like this are paid-for (NOTE: they always seem to be posted by CmdrTaco).
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?
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...
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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.
Yes, it is.
Hate me!
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
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 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
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 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
It's also the publisher's bandwidth, and as many others here have already pointed out, server bandwidth costs can be very expensive. If you don't like the conditions of viewing free* online content, then please don't visit those sites.
*Nothing is truly free.
Problem solved. Just updated my Adblock settings to allow universities foolish enough to use '.ads.'.
? ad[sv]?(ales|bot|center|click|client|content|counc il|count|data|ert|ertise?r?s?|ertising|erve?r?|iew |gifs?|id|images?|info|juggler|link|log|man|max|ne t|optimis?z?er|pics|popup|proof|redire?c?t?)?[\W_] (?!\w+\.edu)(?!aware)/
*ads* line is now:
/[^\w|&|=|\+](html|live|main|net|show|view)
Current Adblock ruleset is 2004-08-19a
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