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.
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!
Look out Slashdot, here we come!
Money for nothing, pix for free
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
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.
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.
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
The media is for sale. Period. Admit it.
And it is not illegal. But they do it.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
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.
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
...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!
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.)
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?
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.....