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.

Comments

X10 ad museum

[pohl]

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?

Crazy pop-up/under ad blitz is alive and well...

[httpamphibio.us]

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.

Re:Pop-up ads are coming back

[drunkennewfiemidget]

I hear you on that one. tek-tips.com does it, which is where I find myself a lot when I search for various web development bugs, and tsn.ca, (Canadian sports news site) also does it, which made me start using nhl.com instead (since I only read hockey news anyway.)

Re:I like google as much as the next guy...

[hackstraw]

google may be the second coming of Christ, who knows, but let's try to keep their achievements realistic.

Their achievements are all they are cracked up to be. They started with basically nothing, used Linux, redefined searching as we know it, AND were able to be advertiser supported with very unobtrusive ads. I'm not talking about their popup ads don't popup other ads, I'm not talking about not so annoying animated gifs. I'm not talking about not so annoying flash ads. They use all text based ads that are effective and not thrown in our face like billboards, or product placement ads in movies, just simple text ads that are often less than 10 words.

Oh, and to my knowledge, google does no direct advertising themselves. A real product doesn't need to.

I think we all owe them a good thank you, and I wish other companies would learn from their success.

Re:I think pop-up blocking browsers helped too

[richlv]

lately it's even worse than that. because of the situation you describe, i have been browsing with flash disabled for some time (easy to do in opera, though it takes all other plugins with it ;) ). and somewhat lately i see some nasty, annoying floating ads that are coded in javascript (i think. maybe java, but i don't think so).

for some reason that crap floats on top of the content, and doesn't go away. usually i just hit f12 and deselect java & javascript, then reload the page, i have considered disabling java[script] by default, but at least for javascript that would require pretty often pressing f12, so i leave it enabled for now.

Re:Pop-up ads are coming back

[up2ng]

Flashblock !!

The second greatest plugin for Firefox, Adblock being the first

Re:I think pop-up blocking browsers helped too

[EdZep]

Try the NoScript extension for Firefox. Gives you a context menu from an icon in the status bar, where you can flip scriting on -- permanently or temporarily -- for a particular web site.

Re:I think pop-up blocking browsers helped too

[NickFortune]

firefox, adblock, adblock plus and NoScript

These problems are solvable :)

Re:The Google-fication of the facts

[Reziac]

The other day I got one through Mozilla's unrequested-popup blocking, which normally works 100%.

BTW *never* click on the corner X, that's not safe since a popup's corner X is sometimes a disguised "OK" button for installing something Nasty. Instead, use ALT-F4 (or whatever keystroke your OS uses) to close the popup window. So far, that cannot be spoofed (far as I know, anyway).

Google's impact was very important

[Infonaut]

As others have noted, Google didn't cause the radical diminishing of obnoxious ads all by themselves, but their role was very important. At a time when other search engines were still stuck on the "throw as much at the user as possible" model, which was intended to make search engines "sticky" destinations, Google went with a clean, user-centered interface.

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.

Re:The Google-fication of the facts

[Reziac]

I'm accustomed to an *old* Netscape (still my fave and everyday browser) where Alt-F4 sensibly only closes the top window, rather than killing the whole applications. Spoiled me, it has :) (I have javascript disabled in NS, so there I *never* see popups, and one benefit of being old and braindead is that it's hard to fool since it ignores what it doesn't grok.)

Your concept for popup management is very interesting, and could be extended into the functions for selective blocking. Tho from what I've heard of some sites, such a sidebar would rapidly be overwhelmed by dozens of ad popups. So there'd need to be some sort of pre-filtering.

Your concept could be further extended to generate user-specified behaviour for different types of popups, as best they can be automagically filtered.

But the ONLY sites I've heard of where unrequested popups are *required* for functionality are those run by banks and tax preparers, and in my experience even there they are totally unnecessary (in fact, are a symptom of poor usability overall... so maybe global death-to-popups is the best solution in the end).

As to the sneak-by-filter ads, yeah, I'm not sure what's going on there either. The one I saw lately didn't seem to have anything unusual about it, except that Moz failed to block it. Could be that someone's buggy script tickled a matching bug in Moz: Shortly thereafter I got the first hard crash I've seen with Moz v1.5, so my notion that it might have hit a bug may well be correct. (It did send off a crash report.)

As to flash killing, I use prefbar, tho an older version, and it only seems to block about half the flash ads. When I install Seamonkey I'll have to update prefbar too. Must be something different in how embedded objects are handled that lets flash sneak by.

Come to think of it, a selective blocker for embedded objects would be a Good Browser Feature. That way we could control flash, forced noises, forced video downloads (yes, I've seen that -- real fun on dialup), and whatever other annoying nonsense some webmaster with more ego than brains wants to inflict on us.

Re:The Google-fication of the facts

[ncc74656]

Most of the new versions of pop-unders use Javascript to sneak past the pop-up blockers. I really hope that you are not actually surfing with Javascipt enabled.

That's why you use NoScript. You can selectively enable JavaScript for those sites that really need it and leave it off everywhere else.