Slashdot Mirror
Report on Last Decade of Online Advertising
Eh-Wire writes "Doubleclick.com has an interesting 24 page PDF available covering the history of online advertising over the last decade. Interesting trivia include recounts of some of the first online ads presented on HotWired. Online advertising has become very competitive in the last ten years and last year saw a revival of activity in this form of advertising. The usual selection of graphs and charts are there to pretty up the document. Overall an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing."
Over the last ten years, and especially the last three, I have become increasingly annoyed with online advertising and have done what I can to virtually eliminate it from showing its ugly face on my screen.
/etc/hosts to eliminate things like ads.osdn.com, ads.doubleclick.net, and various others. Yeah, I could add them to adzapper but it's a lot more fun to just block them all together. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.
squid and adzapper which is currently replacing many ads with 1x1 transparent GIFs. This is especially handy because I tunnel all my web traffic at work over my 256k upstream DSL connection. Do I really want to be wasting bandwith with flashing or changing ads?
Any other ideas on how to surf ad free?
If it helps at all, opt out at the top of the page. You'll still have a cookie, but, in theory, it instructs them not to track you.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
It's worth a look, if only for an insight into how far the technology has come in the last ten years. I never suspected you could embed pop-up ads in a PDF.
--MarkusQ
Here's the Coral cache should the worst happen, and Doubleclick get /.ed..
That should help out those with the hosts file protection, but not those with adblock stuff that pick out D-Click and the like from content, which maddeningly I fell for ... for a few minutes anyway. UGH! Slashdot has ads?!?
On that point - since I'm the kind that deploys ad-blocking measures, and having skimmed the report and seen mention of "impressions", I hope they don't count the likes of me as someone who consumes their ads. Even when I'm on a browser that isn't covered in tinfoil, my eyes tend to keep clear by themselves. How can they class me as a pair of eyeballs? Every "page impression" statistic they publish should be annotated with the following: "All figures inclusive of 20% who use adblocking tech, and 25% who just take no notice"
"Why would they waste time trying to advertise to people who have made it perfectly clear that we don't want annoying intrusive advertising thrust upon us"
I can think of two reasons of the top of my head.
1. People actually click thru the ads!
2. Most people aren't willing to pay subscription fees for the sites they visit, and the sites have to "thrust" ads upon users to get by.
you're kidding yourself if you think a 1mb file is gonna take down doubleclick even with slashdot's enormous traffic it's tiny copared to what they serve out in a day. but it's a nice thought :)
meep
Before getting started way-back-when, Kevin O'Conner (Chairman, and once CEO) and Dwight Merriman (CTO) of DoubleClick itself forecasted that people would map an advertiser's domain name to 127.0.0.1 in their hosts file to avoid ads, and that people would create ad blockers and cookie blockers.