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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...
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.
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.
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.
Rich
Flashblock !!
The second greatest plugin for Firefox, Adblock being the first
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
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.
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).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
That's why you use NoScript. You can selectively enable JavaScript for those sites that really need it and leave it off everywhere else.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.