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How Text Ads Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web
securitas writes "In Sunday's New York Times, Randall Stross writes about How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web and how it is largely responsible for the demise of the odious pop-under ad. From the article: "Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no images, no animation.... Google introduced these ads at the very moment when X10 ads were strewn like chewed gum on every square of sidewalk. X10's pop-unders were accepted at mainstream sites run by companies including Microsoft, Yahoo and The New York Times." Remember that "in mid-2001, X10's company Web site was the fourth-most visited" on the Web. Thank you, Google." I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.
In case anybody does not remember the X10 ads, I was able to find an online gallery of old X10 ads. Not at all subtle about who their target market is, are they?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I see... so Google saved us all from ourselves did they? I seem to remember that even though Google was much talked about in 2000, it had yet to become the preminent search engine it is today.
Perhaps this has more to do with it: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,590,000 for Pop-up blocker software. (0.20 seconds). Taken from Google itself. Pop-ups weren't simply replaced, they were stamped out. They still exist, but not at the staggering, nauseating level they were once.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
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I'd actually that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made a large difference as well.
He might ADD, too.
I wouldn't be surprised if pop-up blocking browsers also helped end the era of pop-up ads. Personally, I didn't know pop-ups were dying. I've been using Galeon and Firefox, often thru a personal filtering proxy, so I never saw many pop-ups.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
On those damn pop ups that exploit IE/Firefox bugs and somehow pop up anyway, despite having popup blockers enabled.
Maybe google can give negative pagerank to sites featuring such nonsense.
...but what a stretch. Even Hemos notes it:
I'd actually that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made a large difference as well.
( ignoring missing words and all. I have no room to talk in that dept )
Can we please attribute things to where they belong? google may be the second coming of Christ, who knows, but let's try to keep their achievements realistic.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Lately thanks to animation-plugins and other technologies, I've seen a rash of annoying pop-up and "peel-back" ads. Anything that covers existing content without me explicly asking it to do so is by definition annoying.
I'm waiting for someone who has the skill to update Firefox so plugins cannot overwrite areas of the screen already used by text and graphics. Either that or put in white space for the part of the screen the ad will eventually take over, so the ad doesn't obscure the real content.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Interestingly, if you're an Adsense publisher nowadays there's a lot more options for banners and graphical ads for what used to be a text only scheme. The banners seem to get a reasonable CTR too.
I think what killed the old style banner ad was not so much text ads, but the fact that the Google text ads were well targeted compared to the moronic "hit the monkey!!" banner ads. I know many ad publishers also became annoyed at the banner ads which seem specifically designed to get a low click-through rate, thereby getting maximum branding exposure for the advertiser at minimum cost. I reckon any ad publisher is forever grateful to Google for revolutionising this system.
Maybe for the big corporate sites. But massively invasive advertising is alive and well.
Turn off your pop-up blocker, turn on flash and check out PWInsider for a great example. If you have access to a Windows box check it out with IE, it's mind boggling...
Obviously, they are including tons of ads not for the purpose of gaining ad revenue as much as they are including tons of them to get people to buy a membership.
sig.
thy servers brightly seaaaarching! Okay...while I'm not a big fan of the rampant Google-worship, I do have to give Google kudos for their text ads, I suppose; they're much less intrusive than even the ads on Slashdot. On the other hand, I never click the Google ads -either-, so.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
Let's not forget why text ads and pop-up blockers became popular in the first place... People demanded it! I don't know a single person that likes intrusive advertising like the pop-unders and the flash animations that come on top of everything else. What the google ads show is what everyone should have known before... The internet is a place where people come looking for you, and when that's the case, you don't need loud, fancy graphics, you only need enough information for them to identify your product (text).
I remember in the early days of the bot com boom I worked at a startup where we would host websites for free in exchange for the right to add unobtrusive text advertisements. Strangly while many people were interested in having us host their sites, NO advertisers would make a deal with us. They insisted on banner or popup ads only.
X10 was basically the reason I decided to do my best to block pop ups and etc. If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have become that frustrated with popups/banners.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Maybe Google had some effect, but I think they were just part of the more general backlash against such ads.
Nobody but the parasuits liked them. Everyone savvy enough to know how to turn them off did so. I'd wager some people even quit web browsing over them.
Google didn't want them because 1) they slurp bandwidth and B) they can't be tracked for content and $) because they don't fit the Google "no evil" culture.
Those reasons pretty much coincide with how the rest of us saw them, too. Except for the pervs, that is. (Camera to spy on wife in shower? Ooh, baby!)
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the massive growth of popupblockers? i don't have any actual figures on that, but to be honest, i imagine it to be rather similar to the massive growth of firefox users (or opera, which i use ;) )
i honestly can't imagine the greatest part of the people on the internet, who still use IE and hardly know anything about computers all got popupblockers installed... (unless their son/nephew/.... passed by and "fixed" their pc...)
are there any real figures on that?
I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.
but i'm pretty that annoying ads, even tricky pop-under ones, never had the kind of click % that google ads to.
-- lol pwned
I wouldn't say internet ads have been tamed. Sure there are less popups and popunders. But whatabout all the new ones which cover the page (Fox is a major offender here), or noisy ads (I don't know if America got subjected to the jamster ads much).
But X10's upskirtings and downblousings were NOT. Where is the justice?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Kim Jung Il has been seen on eBay alot recently, he just bid on a new reactor for his WMD collection.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think I just had a seizure...
This brings back some fond memories of a song that I once heard by Kompressor about the said X10 popups...
girl is naked, take a movie
girl is looking, picture cutie
you buy thing from pop up banner
you get wallet, purchase camera
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
window pop up on the screen
taking control of my machine
making all internet user insane
x10 profit goes down the drain
girl is naked, take a movie
girl is looking, picture cutie
you buy thing from pop up banner
you get wallet, purchase camera
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
the economy failing is x10 fault
popping up window is computer assault
window popup again and again
only solution is crush x10
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
I'm sorry but why does everyone have to praise Google for everything that they do. They are not the only ones that have ads like this. Try Adbrite[adbrite.com] and several others that I cannot name right now. They probably had as much to do with this ad Google did.
I've always seen this the other way around. With people increasingly blocking annoying advertisements with pop-up blocking (either built-in to the browser or separate), AniDisable, and FlashBlock on Firefox, it may be that the only advertisements that many people see anymore are simple text ads. With me at least, the more annoying the ad, the less likely I will see it. A pop-up will be blocked. Flash animation is replaced with a play button. Animated GIFs are displayed without animation. Text ads get through every time.
I use Firefox which has a built in pop-up blocker, I rarely see pop-up ads, but recently they've started to show up more often. The arms race is still going on. I just upgraded to FF 1.5RC3 because I hope it does a better job of blocking this new kind of pop-ups. At this point the advertisers know that users despise these tactics, but some are still willing to keep up with the war. So I do my part and use Flashblock and Adblock all other ads on sight. If the sites go under due to lack of funds, so be it; I'm tired of their crap.
I'm a performance artist... professional wrestling has very very strong ties (not necessarily overt, but certainly implied) to performance art. Most things in performance art that have been lauded as influential and important took place in professional wrestling decades before they took place in the art world.
I've gotten a substantial grant to research this and it will eventually be compiled in book form to be published by a major Boston area university. As much as I'm a "homo" and love to "suck a dick" I'm doing what I believe will be fairly important research in a historical context.
sig.
Are there adverts on the internet then? WTF...
True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.
Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://rip.mozdev.org/index.html
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
http://www.pierceive.com/
And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.
Pop-up/under blockers are only so effective. The can, no matter what, be circumvented -- and often are.
How many times have you clicked on a link in a site to have a pop-up appear? Legit? Not? You have the option to approve every single freak'n time... or just use the block-on-load/close blockers (Opera has the options 'unwanted' which will only open pops when you click on a link or a button, I don't know about others).
The decrease in the attempts to utilize these more obviously invasive ads comes from somewhere; either the ads are not all that successful... or?? It is NOT because of blockers though, at least not directly.
Personally, I want a piece of software which will detect large amounts of flashing/motion in a rectangular area on my webscreen. Upon detection said software should first write a few lines to my hosts file, blocking both the company linked to as well as the adserver. After, it will run a whois, find the owners of all sites concerned, and send a commando unit to kill them and all progeny.
But thats just me.
>> "X10 ad museum"
Funny how I read that as "X10 ad nauseam". While we are there, anyone remember "punch the monkey"?
I'm so glad my browser let's me block image animations, and that it does not have Flash.
thanks for this site. I just added all the crap it produces to my Adblocker list. As I had FF with pop ups blocked I only managed to get 2 pop-unders... still its more moronic ads being nixed
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
Adsense text ads are just more pervasive because of a broader publishing network.
I almost dread the pop up blocker functionality, it just made the approach for direct sell advertisers get that much more insidious, with splash ad pages and ads that fly around within the content of a page. That's alot more annoying to me than being able to just click out a window....
A friend of mine wanted one to fly it with his acrobatic kite. I don't know if he ever did, but I'll sure ask, the movies shold be very cool.
I got several of those cameras and was disappointed with the results. Apparently, bikini clad women were not lounging around my house when I was away at work. If they had been, I would have asked them to do a litle vacuuming.
Sure Goolgle may have only had text ads when it started up and X10 ads were every where but I don't think that Google had all that much to do with the decline of popup/under ads. X10 was becoming obnoxious enough that people were starting to use popup blockers to keep them from showing up. It is just a coincidence that this happened at or about the time that Google came on the scene. If Google's text ads really were what killed X10 popunder ads then how come I am again getting innundated with popup/under ads even though I am using Firefox with its built-in popup killer turned on. The answer is that the advertisement battle is still on. Once advertisers get too agressive the users fight back with blockers. Once the blockers become effective the advertisers find a new way to push their ads until the conumer finds a new way to block them (and the cycle continues).
Everyone who is using AdWords knows that Google introduced standard (graphical) banners in skyscraper format a while ago... The only reason why text ads became so popular is that AdSense was made available in a very simple way to many small web sites that would have a hard time finding paying advertisers otherwise (and of course Google's popularity helped too).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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Wwwyzzerdd. Three ws, two zs, and two ds.
However, I did let them know that their ads tend to be very obnoxious and intrusive and they almost lost me as a potential customer because of it (they asked how I'd heard of X10-- who hasn't heard of X10 that's used a web browser??!). It's a shame when good companies alienate potential customers in that way. And it wasn't even one of their ads that got me, anyway. It was PriceGrabber or MSN Shopping or something like that. They happened to have the best price. My purchase was actually in spite of their ads, not because of them.
Google Ads made it possible to target advertising dollars in a way marketing managers could only dream of before. Text ads provide pinpoint market segmentation to advertisers, and was probably a strategic move do avoid higher bandwidth costs associated with Images. Once Google lights up their dark fibre, watch for an increase in Google Banners by companies looking for brand recognition rather than sales. Those like x10 (maybe your favorite VOIP company)who have no focus and listen to their ad agencies blow millions dollars by tossing stuff at people who are interested in their stuff.
Why? the Netscape browser was dying, IE Version whatever was the buggy, proprietary, virus-target of the day only other thing out there, and because MS is also in the advertising game via MSN, etc., they weren't about to give users the ability to turn off a specific class of advertisements without making it odious.
Then Firefox declares war via pop-up blocker, and within a short time the early adopters (who are really the most important predictor of future technological trends, methinks) were moving in droves away from IE, and I don't think I was more than a few days behind them.
Same time, Google's model saves me bandwidth and eye strain, and --ka- boom!!-- between the two the 'Net returned to being a useful tool with one tenth the amount of pain.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
These always remind me of X10 ads.
Another reason is Google ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site, it makes more sense to visitor to click on it. I do not think so before Google any one offered ads where any one could sign in to Adsense and earn money. So it is like small publisher grows with money and google makes more money.
But hold on Google Adsens offers Onsite Advertiser option too i.e. If some one likes your site they might able to advertises it via Google Adwords program. It is an extension of Google site targeting that makes it easier for advertisers to bid on *any* site.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
There is no moral here, people go for what works. For the webmasters (hosting the ads), AdSense text ads means more money because these ads are targeted and received more clicks. They are also less annoying. For the advertisers, text ads means less money because these ads are targeted and received only valuable clicks. They are also quite well perceived. So I would say the decline of popups is not due to text ads but to *targeted* and *less* intrusive ads. BTW, popups (being for ads or not) are considered something bad (in terms of ergonomy).
Million Dollar Screenshot
The individual components of Google's success had been tried with for several years. But it was their combination, especially with the best search engine to date that revived internet advertising.
There were countless IPO prospectuses in the 1998-2000 touting how internet advertising was going to make them lots of money. But most of these failed because they were "before their time" or the wrong mix of components.
IMHO Flash is seriously overused on the web. I'd love to just get rid of flashplayer, but too many sites are built around it.
Many sites have even more invasive ads now that everyone is using pop-up blockers. Things like the annoying paid links (double underlined) with huge tooltips inserted in the middle of articles, dhtml pop-overs, "infomercial" style text ads in the middle of articles.
There was some research done recently showing that the sheer number of (non-internet) adverts we see every day has just caused people to develop better ways of filtering them out.
text advertising is beginning to show its age as well. Like any new medium, the early adopters were the smaller sites, and many had great success. Then the big guys jumped in and it became a bidding war. While I like the idea of relevence being a factor in which ads get displayed, it's very tough to distinguish yourself in 100 characters if you are looking to get noticed in popular keywords.
"It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions."
Although I would argue that if a guy needs one of those cameras in order to see his wife naked, there are bigger issues afoot.
"in mid-2001, X10's company Web site was the fourth-most visited"
Hmm, I may have been "benchmarking" their web server around that time.
I know at least one Java web site that freezes. AFAIK there are no ads on the page that causes the freeze.
I'm chalking it up to a bad interaction between Firefox, Java, and Windows.
Still, the web site owner or in your case advertising agency should've tested this combination since it's fairly popular.
I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.
I'd guess that far more users are met with Google text ads than the users of MSN Toolbar + the ~10% users of non-IE.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm one the millions of users on the Net who stil use 56k. Yes, there are still people who use dialup! WHOA!
Google is good for users like me because their search pages, customizable homepage (which is love because I can add my own RSS Feeds to it) and Groups page have few if any graphics. GMail loads up really fast also!
So if your a low-bandwidth users on 56k, slow DSL or WiFi connections then Google is the way to go.
I'd welcome FREE WiFi from Google here in Michigan. Oakland County government, that's north of me since I live in the middle of Wayne Co., is installing FREE 512k high-speed Residential WiFi for the ENTIRE county! Looks like I'm moving up north!
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Is it true that the Slashdot crowd is complaing about the X10 adds with hot young scantily clad women? I kinda miss seeing the adds showing how I can catch the babysitter "exercising" or 18 year old model burgler breaking in to use my hot tub!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I hope the vacuuming would involve something else than the carpet!!!
:-)
Errr... vacuum cleaner?
I never intentionally clicked a banner AD but I frequenty click on Google's sponsor links because they are often exactly what I'm looking for.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Lately I am getting loads of pop-unders in Firefox, whereas before(let's say, two months ago) they were never there: Anyone knows a solution to this (besides turning off Flash and Javascript) ?
who can't remember that lovely triangle guy?
There were proxomitron filters for geocities, xoom, etc. Too bad the author died and never released the code. I still miss the alter-headers feature where I could change the outgoing HTTP headers.
``I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.''
...).
How common are pop-up/under blockers, really? For the longest time, MSIE didn't have them, and I'm sure there are still many users who run versions of MSIE that don't have ad blockers. Sure, you can get them third party, but none of the people I know who haven't taken the step to axe MSIE have taken the step to install an ad blocker (or a tabbed browser plug-in, or a PNG-deborkifier,
I would have said the reason that pop-ups and pop-unders disappeared is that website owners realized that annoying your visitors is not a good strategy, and these ads look highly unprofessional, so they simply quit running them.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
FasterFox, a network optimization extension for FireFox not only improves the performance of the browser but also helps block some ads. Its can block adds that use Macromedia popups which are designed to bypass standard pupup blockers.
Don't know if this stops X10's ads or not but you can try it.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
They were busy making X-10 popup ads.
Despite pop-up blocking, I still get tons of pop-under ads these days.
I block the Google text ads too. Who needs any of that crap?
As a publisher that mainly caters to the network/systems administration crowd (google network administration - feeling lucky), who has been struggling since 1997 to even pay for hosting, I often ran popunders and other obnoxious ads just to keep my site from being a cost. I already put thousands of hours into it, because I loved doing the work. At that time, until Google AdSense, nobody bought much real. I tried affiliate programs that were targeted, etc. The only thing that people clicked on were the most obnoxious "you have one an ipod", "your computer is at risk", "i'll be your date" ads. Seriously, I could put up targeted books, negoiate with systems management software companies, etc., but nothing came close to popunders. Googe completely changes this, now, because their text ads make much more money for me. I can actually make a bit of profit now, somewhat making up for the years and years I ran at a deficit. And, no, even as of a year ago, the popunders aren't really blocked well. The advertisers are one step ahead of the blockers. But, that doesn't really matter because Google pays better (if they approve your site).
I don't believe for a second any competing technology was responsible for the demise of the pop-up ad.
The pop-up ad went away because 1) it sucked and pissed people off; 2) it demonstrated how to exploit browsers, which were eventually patched; 3) see #1.
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Company"
Their emphasis on the user was applied to ads as well. They recognized that text ads are less visually intrusive than image ads. So their refusal to allow banner ads in their results was great for users. But the real importance of this move was made important when advertisers began migrating to Google in droves. They discovered that text ads actually provide better long-term results than banner ads. Google forced advertisers to examine an approach web interface experts had been advocating for some time.
Yes, all this excitement about Google's role seems like deification, but Google really did change the landscape. They did it with a user-centered approach, which the prevailing players at the time simply did not have. Whether Google will continue to keep the interests of its users in mind is an open question, but their advertising model has radically altered the playing field in a good way.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I almost had to give up porn. Most of the time, just another porn site would pop up and I could continue my business. But sometimes, an ad for a camera or something would pop, and then I'd need to battle windows until I could get back to what I came for. Thank god for Google.
I use my router's URL Blocking feature to hide most ads on sites. For example, if I add googlesyndication.com to the list, I don't see google ads on any site I go to.
PS - This is what part of the alphabet would look like if the letters Q and R were removed. ~Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005)
Well I though firefox was safe until I visited this website.
Beware, link above not safe for public environments, loud sound and massive popups, even on firefox.
The other day I was looking into a solution on how to display text only ads, when the advertisement image or flash player could not be loaded. Proves that trying to get something that works consistently across browsers is very difficult. I think the only real solution would be to use Javascript for this, since anything lighter just screws up. The simplest one that I tried was an image with an "alt" tag, but even that doesn't work. I can't stand ads, but I would rather have ads than have to pay for a site, within reason of course.
For those of you blocking adverts, do you tolerate the text ads better, or do they get blocked too?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
Thanks for the 15 seconds of unsolicited laughter.
Google did one thing.
They made a good product.
In the long run, everything becomes unimportant except whether your product is good.
The other sites were trying to figure out how much they could screw over the user. This is not sustainable.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The amazing thing isn't that there's such a thing as a "popup blocker", but that there was ever a "popup enabler" in the first place.
Network software *always* needs to assume that the remote end is malicious. It is much better to constrain functionality than to allow abuse.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Without ad-blocker turned off. (though Firefox is set to block ads), I still get 2-4 pop-unders per session. I wonder how many Firefox itself is blocking.
Forget popup blocking. Popup *enabling* should never have been allowed in the first place. Software like web browsers needs to assume that the remote end is always malicious. Limiting functionality a little is a lot better than trying to slap patches over broken software. There should be *no way* for a website to be able to open new windows.
I've yet to see a single site that I *want* to change the function of my left-mouse-button. If I want a new window, I'll use my middle mouse button, goddammit.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Turn off your pop-up blocker, turn on flash and check out PWInsider [pwinsider.com] for a great example. If you have access to a Windows box check it out with IE, it's mind boggling...
I thought that I'd never see the day that a web site would would make me think "gee, I would much rather see a goatse page right now".
Well here that day is and I'm pretty sure that the Apocalypse is almost here.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
Indeed text-only ads are the majority of the AdWords program, but Google does do image ads. They are, however, syndicated out to selected websites and will not be served on Google.com.
Temporarily allow slashdot.org?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
"As I had FF with pop ups blocked I only managed to get 2 pop-unders"
And with IE I got... ZERO. Seriously!
Google's text-only ads were a really good thing when they first came out, then they got popular, so every sleazeball with a make-all-the-money-now sense of doing things started figuring out how to capitalize on it, tweak it, and bend the system to work with their own sleazy methods.
Now it's mostly useless, like most ads.
Then again, I never really bothered to use ads in any form other than my own personal entertainment anyway.
If I want to buy sommething, I'll go look for it. Oddly enough, when I WANT to see an ad for something I'm interested in, it never seems to show up. Typical. Nice job at targeting, guys.
s'wut i sed.
My wife and I bought one of their wireless kits, with 4 cameras. We set them up in the barn to monitor the goats. Works great! When it gets to kidding season, we just leave the lights on in there at night, and monitor them on a spare TV. (we use florescent lighting, doesn't cost much)
We put two of the cameras outside, to watch the field for dogs and coyotes. Never did see any scantly clad women like the pop-ups promised.
In my defense though, we bought them after googling for "wireless video camera", not after looking at a pop-up. (I saw the pop-ups, but never paid attention to what they were about)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
I agree with you to a degree, but you also have to be able to make money at it. Plenty of companies that made great products are now dead and gone because they couldn't figure out how to make money selling their great products. Google has thus far been able to make great products and make money at the same time, without pissing off their customers (users and advertisers). That's a very difficult thing to do well, and to me is the real reason for Google's success to date.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Antigravity online
Shop Target.com
www.Target.com
What do you find there? Shower massagers.
California Business and Professions Code:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
I make a pretty good chunk of change from Google's text ads. I love them. Google itself has changed the face of the Internet in several ways. (This is just my opinion.) I think their widely used popup blocker is what helped make popup ads almost totally disappear and I think because of them X10 isn't the monster on the Internet is used to be. I'm 110% for Google in most cases.
I'd rather watch them much carpet.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Once I got Mozilla I never even saw the popunders. Why, you may ask? Because every time I tried to close my top Mozilla window it crashed every other Mozilla window. I saw no ads, but I got really familiar with the Quality Feedback Agent :)
Each action (selling non-popup ads and making a popup blocker) helps reduce popup ads. Each action is a good, fighting against an evil. The fact that they make money in the process seems irrelevant to me.
If I were to, say, invent a device that prevents people from killing other people while at the same time running a mediation service that targeted people who feel like killing each other, would that make me evil?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
A Business Proposal to Improve the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Advertisement Yue Ji Guangzhou, China A problem that I have observed for a long time is the website browsing and advertisements on that website. No matter people browse the content of the website, or talk to their buddies through ICQ, or play online games, or do their work, to say a few, what will they feel about those web advertisements which try to attract their attentions? This is a big problem, and many people discuss it a lot. Some fancy ways of advertisements are launched to achieve their expectations. They usually make the viewers to stop what they are doing, and click the web advertisements, and read the further content prepared in the related ad webpages. This is a problem, because it interrupts the original process of people. They are distracted from browsing the Web. How can we overcome this problem, to let people carry on their job continuously without being interrupted, and read the web advertisements carefully? I propose a solution in the following. My approach allows the viewer click (or by the similar way) that web advertisement, and the web ad will be automatically transferred to a website called MyStore. The viewer continue his/her browsing without the interruption. Later (maybe after a few days), this person could visit his/her MyStore website, to check out all the information presented in those web advertisements he/she have already collected so far. After that, the person can decide whether or not to buy the commodities online. At the same time, MyStore website can make money when the viewer read the web advertisement, and when the viewer purchase the product/service online. It's well known that we are facing with various kinds of advertisements in the daily life, say, newspaper advertisements, magazine advertisements, radio advertisements, TV advertisements, advertisements (or even business signs) on the streets, and so on. Using mobile phone, I can extend the approach to collect advertisements previously, with some modifications. For example, when you see somewhere an advertisement about mobile phone "Nokia", you just press the keys of "ad:" and " Nokia" on your mobile phone. Then the Internet version of advertisement information about "Nokia" will be transferred to MyStore for your further reference later. This business model integrates Internet, Mobile Phone, Advertisement, and Electronic Commerce. It's a totally new business model, which will greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of advertisement.