Slashdot Mirror
DoubleClick On The Blocks?
A reader writes: "Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies - may be up for sale. " There's also an AP report out as well. The online advertising market has been hard lately - but there's also been a widespread perception that DoubleClick has been resting on their laurels.
I'm not only one of the most hated businesses on the web, I'm also rich, and going to become a hell of a lot richer! Woo!
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: doubleclick.net
Address: 127.0.0.1
Punch The Monkey If You Want To Buy Doubleclick!
They were running this story on CNN International today!
Can't wait for Microsoft to buy out DoubleClick and TAKE OVER THE WORLD! :P
"DoubleClick has been resting on their laurels"
If by "resting on their laurels" you mean "Need to be taken out back of the Interweb and beaten to within an inch of their lives. Twice." then by all means: rest away.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
cant see many people shedding tears over this
DoubleClick hired a financial adviser to study options including a sale of part or all of its businesses, a recapitalization, an extraordinary dividend, a share repurchase or a spinoff, pretty much the same thing any company will do, especially when its earnings are better than expected.
Its 3rd-quarter earnings was $15million, up from $6.3million last year, and fourth-quarter forecast is $72 million. So I don't think DoubleClick is going through a rough patch.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They have a gajillion dollars, and they're worried about Google who now has a growing ad network.
If they really are the leading supplier of cookies, I think this is a golden opportunity for Girl Scouts of America to buy them out. Imagine the possibilities for increased profits!
I wish I could download a Samoa or two now...
Doubleclick was the very first host I mapped to 127.0.0.1 in my host file when web ads started to appear. I wonder how many people actully did that? I know that most of my co workers did it - even those that didn't know what it meant.
" It also lowered its fourth-quarter earnings forecast to $72 million to $77 million"
Obviously, not many, since they can make that kind of money.
Underholdning.info
Is this a sign of the apocalypse perhaps?
"DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookie"
So they finally acquired Mrs. Fields Cookies? That ough to be one heck of a bake sale!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Thank god for Firefox and ad-block. Doubleclick and it's clones are no longer an issue for me. I would hope that the demise of doubleclick and its obnoxious marketing would serve as a warning to others who would emulate its business model.
When all else fails, run.
Maybe we should take up a spreadfirefox.com-like donation and buy Doubleclick and then distroy all the data they have collected over the years.
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
Christ, Microsoft put a pop-up blocker in to stop this company.
Who would have thought it would have hurt their business plan.
Microsoft would never hurt another company...
Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies
DoubleClick is a terrible name for a cookie company. No wonder they are up for sale. They should have called it DoubleCrunch or DoubleCookie or something.
Do they have chocolate chip cookies?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Google is the new guard, highly targeted ads that actually work. DoubleClick is the old guard, banner ads, spam and other annoying crap nobody ever likes to see. No wonder Google is kicking their ass.
The click-through-rates on Google AdWords compared to DoubleClick's garbage are astronomical.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
What about those damned websites that won't let you "Continue" until all the ads on the page have loaded (e.g. javascript)? I used the hosts file for a while; when this became an issue I switched to Firefox's Adblock Extension.
Sing along! C is for cookie, it food enough for me! I dont think i can complain about being given free cookies when i am online. A company that gives out cookies must be good.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
All hail Adblock on Moz FF. And before that, HOSTS. I haven't seen a doubleclick ad for years (and servedby.advertising.com and all the rest of the usual suspects).
DoubleClick, you can't pass my Firefox's AdBlock! No clicks for you. Muuuuhahhahahahha!
About ninety percent of what I see filtered out on my windows machine that has the PeerGuardian P2P firewall is DoubleClick. I don't know about my Linux machines though. Using IPTables I don't get that slick automatic reverse DNS display to get to watch who is hitting my machines.
It's just sooooo sllllloooowwwww.
:)
Any page with doubleclick ads on it seems to get held up waiting for doubleclick's servers to do anything.
The words "Waiting for... blah.blah.doubleclick.blah" or similar used to be old friends, until I discovered the hosts file
Doubleclick was the very first host I mapped to 127.0.0.1 in my host file when web ads started to appear.
But even then, think about it: each time you hit a page with a link to some doubleclick url, you end up hitting port 80 of your own machine. That's right, even with doubleclick.com disabled, Doubleclick, Inc. manages to make you DoS yourself!
Talk about an evil company...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It would be "Is Doubleclick on the block"? Meaning, the auction block or potentially the chopping block. "On blocks" refers to rusting cars in somebody's front yard. Jeez, is even the Slashdot editing being farmed out overseas?
I don't respond to AC's.
Ugh, Microsoft could literally take over the world if they had DoubleClick... Just imagine, the newest version of IE/XP blocking out all popups...except for the MS/Doubleclick ones... >_
If every /.er puts in $10 we can all buy it up then fold the company and put it out of bid'ness perminently! :D
An anonymous investor, identified only as "C.M." was said to have put in a bid for $30 billion dollars to buy out DoubleClick today. Experts believe C.M. may have a personal agenda for buying DoubleClick, but could not speculate as to his reasons.
The anonymous investor was quoted as saying "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me."
Save the Internet.
If these bastards haven't surpassed doubleclick by now, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
Google is a much bigger company, with a bigger pull for those that want to advertise. They also probably target their ads better than doubleclick. Oh and Google's motto is "do no evil" not "all your personal information are belong to us."
It's easy to see why Google would have a superior position in the market now. Better technology, bigger reach and a more honorable policy toward Internet users.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Can't wait for Microsoft to buy out DoubleClick and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
Actually that makes a bit sense. Not the taking over the world part, but the Microsoft buying Doubleclick part. Microsoft seems interested in things like Search Engines, so why not advertising? Microsoft is trying to get into the "content serving" industry, so this seems like a sensible thing to do...
My cousin is a salemen for doubleclick (hey don't DoS me, I'm just passing on some info). When he took the job, I told him he was working for one of the top ten internet public enemies, but sales are his thing and doubleclick did generate sales. I don't recall thhe exact figures he quoted me a few months back, but the number of doubleclick related ads on the web was well into the billions (not hard to believe) so even relatively few sales generated via doubleclick translated into $$$ for them.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
The only times I ever click a DoubleClick ad is when I'm surfing the web at work and one pops up under my mouse.
Compared to Google AdWords, which I use all the time, DoubleClick ads are just annoying. I even use the gmail ads.
Just back up one song from the album, and a text file that says "more shit like this". Think of the space you save -Mant
What if some unscrupulous entity were to purchase Doubleclick?
What would happen to the millions of peoples' personal data that Doubleclick owns?
Who could guarantee that it would remain secure, and not fall into the wrong hands?
Oh, wait...
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Unless you all want to go to paid subscription sites how do you think these sites make any money?
Someone has to pay for bandwidth, servers, etc...
It's just like TV - we either have to suffer through commercials - or we have paid services like HBO. Personally - I'll take the commercials.
Not only do many of us supress popups and banner ads by default (go firefox!), the average web user has now been trained to let their eyes drift away from the banner ads at the top, bottom, left, and right of the screen and to the content in the middle. I can't imagine a lot of growth in that industry.
Doubleclick bought them years ago. They offered a free hosted form application. You could build forms online. Users enter data, and it's stored in the DB, easy to download/sort/sift.
Was a really great service. As a 14 year old shareware developer, I loved being able to get registration data via that system. Import it into ClarisWorks database.
DoubleClick bought and shut that down pretty quck.
One of my prayers has been answered! Now to pray no one wants it and it goes into Chapter 7...
> The online advertising market has been hard lately
The leading online advertising company, Google, made $805.9 million dollars last quarter. Maybe it's a problem with DoubleClick and not with a bad online advertising market?
A quote from Google's earning report: "This revenue growth reflects strong traffic and monetization growth in the quarter as well as advertisers' growing recognition of the Internet as an effective advertising medium."
Good riddance to them - they amount of time I've wasted over the years blocking ads via different methods is astronomical ! - er,well, quite a lot then ;)
...
Google have got the right method and thank god for Mozilla and Open Source !
The right click "block images from this server" I do without even thinking these days - on the odd occassion I have to use iexplore, I find myself right clicking on banners to try to block them and realise how far behind it is as a browser.
I'd rather they went belly up than get bought out though
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
"resting on their laurels" boy, I'd say. To see their stats on ads delivered vs Google's adsense... google delivers more banners than doubleclick by almost double. I think DoubleClick is fucked up & they can't be bothered to fix it.
Make that three- they (and many other advertisers and other sites) needlessly set cookie expiration dates to 2040 and whatnot; I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't collect like a plague; every few weeks I go through my cookie list and there are literally thousands of cookies from a hundred different advertisers all set to expire in a zillion years. It's absurd, and clearly they don't get it- these cookies should have an expiration of maybe one year at the absolute most. A month or so should be fine in most cases.
I think someone should write a plugin for the various free browsers that punishes bad cookie lifetime params- maybe it inversely sets the actual expiration date in an inverse fashion if the requested date is too far off. For example, over a year, start actually going back down for each year they add. So a cookie marked good until 2040 will actually be good for about a few hours- or less.
Users will bitch, site developers will be forced to look at why it's happening, and the answer from the internet community will be "set more reasonable cookie expiration dates and it won't happen". They'll be in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they need such long dates.
Either that or simply allow the user to set a maximum cookie retention time. What I'd REALLY like is a browser that doesn't save cookies for sites I haven't bookmarked, or combine the ideas- cookies for sites not bookmarked aren't saved very long.
Please help metamoderate.
"On the blocks" sounds like a misquote of having something "up on blocks" which refers to having a vehicle being serviced (Ie, up off its tires, on blocks).
"On the block" (No plural) would indicate that that it is on the auction block (ie, up for sale).
This message brought to you by your friendly neighborhood grammar nazi.
--
Ps: Is "grammar nazi" a godwins' rule violation?
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
" pops up under my mouse."
Wow, what kind of desk do you have?
is what is doubleclick going to do with all the data it has? if it sells that "non-personal" data, there is no guarantee that the purchasing will operate in a similar "ethical" fashion. i say those things in quotes because doubleclick maintains that it acts in an ethical manner and that it does not connect personal data with cookie information. however, i have made a conscious choice, which many others have done, to not trust them. and since doubleclick denies us access, i am concerned about what data they have acquired about me and what that data will be used for.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Anyone want to chip in, buy them out and shut them down, so we can browse the web in peace?
Hmmmm.... Could we sue them if the cookies get stale? Is that a public health risk? BTW, if they are the largest supplier of cookies, why don't I see them in Safeway?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
i wonder if this being hit hard thing has anything to do with windows sp2 having ie block popups by default :|
-judging another only defines yourself
1. Slashdot buys DoubleClick
2. ???
3. Profit!
Firefox lets you selectively block certain sites from setting cookies. I don't let Doubleclick set ANY cookies EVER on my computers. In fact, the only sites that DO get to are the ones where I shop at, or I use logins. Every time a site tries to set one I get a popup allowing me to deny it. On a new install there'll be a lot of these but as the block list gets populated with the major advertisers it calms down and now I don't see them very often. And I'd rather see the occasional notification than let these guys spy on me.
FireFox setting: Delete at end of Firefox session. Takes care of that problem.
What's the big deal? It's a cookie. It's a few K text file. I don't care how many sites you visit, all of your cookies combined will never equal to half of one 3 1/2 minute (regular radio song) MP3. So, while I understand that you're bitching, you haven't said what, exactly, you're complaining about. This sounds like a tin foil hat issue to me.
I don't respond to AC's.
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, before the CMGI buyout they were using DC for their banner advertising. AltaVista represented 40% of DC's business and we had difficulty getting ahold of them when we had a question or wanted to talk something over.
A while later I worked at Evite and those idiots couldn't do ad targeting correctly given a zip code, audience gender breakdown, activity type and gender split. They were serving Pampers ads on bachelor party invites.
Are you stuck using a bad browser policy or something?
I know in Mozilla I can set it to not accept cookies unless I allow for the domain. Once I've said no to doubleclick once, I don't get any more.
You're definitely right though, way too many cookies try to get created.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Insightful my ...
Yes, targetted advertising is best done with text and search.( By the way, Overture/Yahoo that invented that, not Google. Just an FYI)
However, banner advertising is like TV advertising. Its "presence". Sure X10 was annoying as heck, but everyone knew about it (and presumably still does).
Winton
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.
:-)
No, that's my IP address, you insensitive clod!
Ahem.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I haven't seen a doubleclick ad in well over two years now! Thank you Firefox and thank you Adblock!
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Except for a tcp stack derived from an ancient BSD that instead uses 0.0.0.0 as the broadcast address.
http://www.kbalertz.com/kb_108783.aspx
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't see any blocks to click on, much less double click... >_
Too bad DoubleClick isn't on the rocks.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"However, banner advertising is like TV advertising. Its "presence"."
X10 went out of business. That's how effective "presence" was. Who the hell cares, if "everyone" knows about it. Clearly it didn't work.
Google, on the other hand, generated about $800M in revenue in the last quarter. From what I've read that's almost entirely advertising revenue. DoubleClick, on the other hand, made $81M in their last quarter.
Looks like "presence" doesn't really pay.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
are they new ?
http://hostsfile.mine.nu/Hosts.zip
All those bazillions of transactions must waste a significant amount of bandwidth.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Doubleclick may seem like an antiquated giant however they did buy Performics, a small successful affiliate marketing network. It should also be said that a company positioning itself to sell is not news. Every company wants to be sold. What's newsworthy is when the buyer and seller agree. This news about Doubleclick hiring a financial adviser as a precursor to a sale is likely nothing more than an over zealous journalist with a penchant for generating conspiracy theories.
Is it a sick joke, or is there some documented incident in which AI's whole-wheat busybodies killed nine thousand people?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
voip01:~# ping -c 4 0.0.0.0
PING 0.0.0.0 (127.0.0.1) from 127.0.0.1 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.052 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.014 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.013 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.013 ms
--- 0.0.0.0 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% loss, time 2997ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.013/0.023/0.052/0.016 ms
voip01:~# uname -a
Linux voip01 2.4.26-1-686-smp #1 SMP Sun May 2 19:39:21 CEST 2004 i686 unknown
voip01:~#
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/01/1 539215
Greetings -
I understand taking issue with the collection of "personal data," its storage and its usage to target you without your express consent(1). Most of the loudest (and most highly-moderated) voices here seem to have the biggest problems with the Advertisements themselves.
NB: I nether use DoubleClick as a publisher or am a "fanboy" of them as a company. That said, the protests seem to miss the point that without online advertising - and therefore, DoubleClick - a good portion of the content we have available to us on the web would NOT be available to us on the web for "free."
This is a minority opinion - and no, I'm not new around here - but what's with all the contempt for a business proposition that lets DoubleClick to make a buck, web publishers to make a buck, and consumers to get content inexpensively or "freely?" Do you find the ads themselves that odious? Do they get in the way of what you're working to achieve in any appreciable way? (non-rhetorical questions)
Advertising in any medium is 99% horsecrap(2), but it's basically why the media exist: take away the ads and most of your favorite TV & radio shows, magazines, newspapers and web sites will go away. End of story.
IMO, the backlash seen here is not in proportion to the offense.
(1) - Users provide implicit concent when they visit sites with advertising run by DCLK or any ad network that'll track them with cookies.
(2) - And that leaves the ~1% that's actually entertaining and / or informative.
And all along I thought it was Mrs. Fields that was the leading supplier of cookies.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...or On the Rocks?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hot cookies for sale!!!
At work (a major university in colorado) we null routed doubleclick. Nothing useful comes from their network, so why pass packets to and from it ?
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Yep, mapping to 0.0.0.0 is the trick. I did this to *.doubleclick.net and 18,000+ other crapservers.
Anybody want me to post my hosts file online?
Can Double-Click be purchased thru One-Click shopping?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
doublewho?
127.0.0.1 dclk.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ae.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.be.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.br.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cn.doubleclick.net
etc...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Some rainy day, I've been meaning to whip up a light local server to return cute cat pictures instead of banner ads. Now that I've done my sound effects for Zone Alarm program, maybe it'll get to the top of my silly program queue.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Who not "http://*.doubleclick.net/*", and for that matter "http://ads.*/*" ?
I blocked theit IPs and domain names AGES ago.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
As much as I dislike doubleclick I like the fact that they make it easy to block their ads, perhaps a future company or future owner will make it harder, so double click going away or changing hands may not be so great.
Just reply to yourself and post it here. ;)
:P
I run an ISP and I've always considered doing something similar to that to our DNS servers. I'm sure the ad companies wouldn't be amused.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Doubleclick was one of the first sites to get added to my squids http_access deny list (now sporting 150 blocked sites), but once in a while I get bit by a click-through I actually want to visit. Usually I can look at the url and extract the final destination, but what I really want to know is:
How can I get squid to do that automatically for me?
ie if(dstdomain(url) = doubleclick) redirectTo(extractUrlFromDoubleclickUrl(url);
someone who cares already has.
-S
that neither Daryl McBride or SCO Group
will be buying DoubleClick. Somehow, I
think that they will get bought by a
front company for the CIA or NSA or DHS,
rather than any legitimate commercial
entity like Microsoft or Google.
The only "cookies" and "spyware" that
will not be illegal is that used by the
government to keep an eye on the people.
Expect the purchase to go through after
Bush "wins" again, along with the latest
USA Patriot Act II.
who used to say ... "I'll take the rascal out back o' the gluey and give 'im a tin ear!"
I think this is also a BIG problem for the future of DoubleClick. SP2 disallows 3rd party cookies by default now - IE won't even ask you if you want to allow them. They're just dropped - no warning or anything. This must be bad for DC since a large portion of the internet will soon be on IE with SP2. No more tracking cookies = no more tracking stats.
X10 went out of business. That's how effective "presence" was.
You confuse bankruptcy as a business tactic with "going out of business."
X10 is still alive and well.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
You may click on what looks like a close button in your OS... but are you closing or installing?
Wow - the lone voice of reason thus far. Thanks for the thought behind the comment. Odd that when it comes to the Internet, people forget about the benefit that this advertising provides.
Let's not forget that DoubleClick simply provides the infrastructure to serve these ads TO ITS CLIENTS. If anyone is to blame here, it's the ones who, god forbid, want us to find out about their products/services. Better pray for the demise of CBS, NBC and ABC while we're at it. And every newspaper and magazine in existence. Oh, and every article of clothing from the GAP.
Sheesh.
Doubleclick is the world's largest supplier of cookies? I am surprised; I always thought that Nabisco was the world's largest supplier of cookies. Keebler specifically states they are the second largest, so I'm guessing either Keebler is second to Doubleclick or second to Nabisco, I'm not sure which.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Yeah, but I've got Apache running on my OS X Mac at work and since I'm not using it for anything else, I made a custom 404 that prints "Another ad blocked!" in small green type. Images still just get a 'broken' icon but it brings a smile to my face every time I see it where an IFRAME ad is supposed to be. Doesn't seem to be a major performance hit on my dual-G5. And I don't think it uses too much network bandwidth, either. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Free (as in beer) software to do the same thing.