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This Headline Is Not for Sale

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nickel-for-the dept.

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."

4 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Does Slashdot do this? by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's been some speculation that articles like this are paid-for (NOTE: they always seem to be posted by CmdrTaco).

  2. A good idea for a FireFox plugin by BubbaThePirate · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Just like Adblock: parsing all hyperlinks in a webpage, and weeding out the ones you've previously marked as Ads, blocking them, and possibly even crossing them out (so that you'll know why they aren't working), or another visual notification.

    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..."

  3. Intellitext pitched OSDN (now known as OSTG) by Roblimo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. Don't block, hide by vadim_t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.