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."
...but for some reason Doubleclick keeps resolving to localhost.
I really wanted to read TFA article this time but my ad filter blocked it.
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?
I am stunned and amazed that it was a PDF and not an HTML page full of flash advertising.
[insert witty sig here]
Ha! This "history" article is a subtle form of advertising for Doubleclick. Where's my tin foil hat?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Online advertising saw a dramatic decrease today as one of the world's largest online advertising agencies, DoubleClick.com, mysteriously went silent.
Sources pointed to a /. article that linked to a PDF on DoubleClick.com's website as the culprit.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Increasingly annoying.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...a giant pop-up ad for boob enhancements caught my attention first.
IronChefMorimoto
Everyone RTFPDF, the internet will thank you if you take out Doubleclick's servers for a few hours!
Slashdot sucks
microsoft.com has released a PDF covering the history of online sado-masochism. Interesting trivia include the first recorded use of an Intercal interpreter in a webbrowser, and server-side VBscripting. The usual reviews of IIS version 234.33.5.8.83.stable are included, with pretty pictures of performance trumping apache. An interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing.
I can't decide if the poster of this story is a genius... or an idiot.
/. is dumb... but at the same time... DoubleClick is not a very popular company when it comes to the ads they sell or those like them... so such a /.ing can only hurt those most /.ers dislike... hum
Traditionally posting a direct link to a 1 meg file on the front page of
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
You're a winner!
Advertiser: Ignore my ad, willya? Fine, I'll make it blink!
User: Ugh, it blinks! Block, block, block.
Advertiser: Block my ad, willya? Fine, I'll make it pop up!
User: Grrrr, I hate those pop-ups! Suppress, suppress, suppress.
Advertiser: Suppress my pop-ups, willya? Fine, I'll wire your eyeballs open while I play this movie for you--
(Sorry, that last step is from the near future.)
As an advertiser not to get lumped in with the same bucket as people who spam outright or spread malware and scam people. I am employed by a bulk email marketing business used by several medical companies and more often than not our services are presumed to be spam and blocked by users.
This is unfortunate as I see it, as it was easier in the earlier days before spammers took over the internet and all forms of advertising were acceptable and just known as part of the internet. I dont think the tools to block adverts are doing good either. sometime somewhere someone has to pay for the sites you visit. Not accepting their advertising banners and emails is a form of rippinbg people off I thnk.
Nothing say fun like the history of online advertising over the last decade.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
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. The best thing they could do imo for all parties concerned is use plain text ads, they aren't intrusive enough to annoy hardly anyone and therefore probably won't be blocked.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
And next week we'll present the history of this week. And the week after that...
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Not that people RTFA on a normal article, but in this case any geek worth his salt will have Doubleclick blocked in their /etc/hosts, router tables, Adblock filters, or what have you and in the case of the tinfoil hat types, all of the above just to be sure. I really don't think it's worth turning my filters off just to hear Doubleclick spin the history of online advertising to make themselves sound good.
I think this is the first time I've clicked a link here hoping the server would be down.
has an interesting 24 page PDF available c
Wouldn't it be more appropriate, and just as taxing of resources to have the report in a Shockwave object that bounces around on your screen with embedded video and a 2-pixel wide "close" button?
I mean that is what 10 years of online adverising has mutated to.
Brazilian advertiser Luli Radfahrer, in his book "Design/Web/Design", claimed to have created the first banner ad ever.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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
I misinterpreted the headline as "Report on [this being the] Last Decade of Online Advertising." It really got my hopes up.
_______
2B1ASK1
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
That's "Last" as in final, right?
We can only hope...
This article fails to mention any company other than Doubleclick as being involved in online advertising. It's naive to think that any 10 page marketing document produce by Doubleclick would be about anything other than Doubleclick however the title of this article is the history of online advertising over the last decade. Give any college student a day and they surely could come up with something far superior to this narcissistic press release.
As someone who has worked for several major media companies I am truly worried whether the current online ad boom (beyond dot-com peaks as the Doubleclick PDF shows) can continue.
A great number of the ads sold these days are text ads, with Google the biggest seller. These ads are great because they are far less obtrusive for the user and the advertiser only pays per click. Many advertisers have been very happy with them, including lots of small businesses in once-small niches who have found loads more customers.
But as we've seen in the last few months text ads can be gamed. Your competitor might set up a botnet to "click" your ad, stealing dollars from you, and you might never know. Or the same competitor can hire real live humans from impovrished countries to do the same thing.
Also, even mighty Google has not been able to effectively stop link spam and SEO manipulation of the "regular" search results. Will people really keep advertising when they can be in the main search results section for possibly less money?
Then there are the ad blockers you Slashdotters are so fond of. Not only do they screen big banner ads, many of them screen out text ads as well. This is a niche technology but then so was pop-up blocking a year or two ago, now it is being built into IE. As Firefox gains traction I expect ad blocking to increase.
Then you've got the user registration schemes and technical route-arounds like bugmenot.com. The whole point of online advertising is being able to target certain customers, but users are sick of filling out registration forms and leery of being tracked in any way so we're seeing more technical tools to defeat the raison d'etre of online ads, targeting.
These are not truths anyone can get paid or respected for saying right now, so no one is saying them. But that does not make them any less valid. Online advertising is probably here to stay but there are a lot of kinks to work out before it becomes more troublesome and expensive for businesses or users to game the system than to accept the ads.
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.
There's still a huge untapped ad space. Inside the games.
All the games along the race tracks seem to be some made up products and ads for the game producers. Posters on the walls in FPS games, billboards over Vice City, all that stuff is filled with fake commercials.
It could be filled with real ones though.
The question is only "when"...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Doubleclick is probably the only site on the 'net immunte to the Slashdot Effect.
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.
After 10 years you would think the quality of ads would improve as well.
Take for example those debt consolidation and mortgage/refinance ads you see all over. Oh, not sure which ones? You know- the ones that feature a dancing cobra or a giant corn on the cob or a long fat pig, all with the abbreviations for the 50 states on them. Yeah! That's what those ads are for! Nothing says "trustworthy, serious company, capable of handling your financial information" like a pig or cobra! A cobra! Jebus, who the hell makes up this company's demographic?
At least X-10 had ads relevant to the product, they didn't even pretend- remember the panning cameras that had the ad that panned up and down the chick in the pool?
Then you've got what the ad-sales people at my company call "bottom feeders." These are the Gators, Fun Web Products (you know them, Smiley Central, among others) and ad space resellers. God how I loathe this tier of advertising.
What I don't understand though, is how people (read: the ad geniuses) at these companies can seriously think that their cheesy ass ads will ACTUALLY draw customers.
R(k)
Apparently, they think they do. From TFA:
"Viral Marketing" -- WOW!
"Interactive on-page rich media ads" -- SWEET!
"Floating animated page takeovers" -- SIGN ME UP!
It almost sounds as if they're proud of these things.
Surely DoubleClick will be further down the list than, say, SCO, Spammers, Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, etc.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
What I don't understand though, is how people (read: the ad geniuses) at these companies can seriously think that their cheesy ass ads will ACTUALLY draw customers.
Get a free iPod, I did
Words fail here.
Online advertising works. It is highly effective and low-cost. This is the only way to sell your product to millions of people.
People love to get up to date information on your products so that they can buy them.
Double click are the people to deal with. We already have a great relationship with web surfers and we're the only way to go.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Can you give me one, solid, ACTUAL (not made up) bad thing that can happen to you because of a cookie on your personal PC? Just one. I'd love to hear just one. I'm also curious as to whether or not it'll involve Elvis or aliens...
I don't respond to AC's.
You see ... Most folk'll never click a pig, but then again some folk'll ... Like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel...
"Hey, I can call my Ma from this internet thingamy. HEY MA! GET OFF THE DANG ROOF!"
... and then they built the supercollider.
"Ford!"
Ford looked up from where he was sitting in a corner humming to himself. He always found the actual travelling-through-space part of space travel rather trying.
"Yeah?" he said.
"If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on advertising."
"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
"Let me see what it says in this edition then, I've got to see it."
"Yeah OK." He passed it over again.
Arthur grabbed hold of it and tried to stop his hands shaking. He pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen flashed and swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it.
"It doesn't have an entry!" he burst out.
Ford looked over his shoulder.
"Yes it does," he said, "down there, see at the bottom of the screen, just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6."
Arthur followed Ford's finger, and saw where it was pointing. For a moment it still didn't register, then his mind nearly blew up.
"What? Annoying? Is that all it's got to say? Annoying! One word!"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about advertising of course."
"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Increasingly annoying," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.