The State of Online Advertising

conq writes "BusinessWeek has an article looking at how internet advertising has changed and is changing. From the article: 'The race is on to find new ways to track customer behavior. Advertisers and agencies are progressing far beyond the standard arithmetic of counting clicks and page views. They're tracking the to-and-froing of the mouse on Web pages, and they're finding new ways to group shoppers by age, Zip Code, and reading habits. CEO David S. Rosenblatt of DoubleClick Inc., which serves up some 200 billion ads a month for customers, says that every campaign now allows for 50 different types of metrics'"

Comments

Metrics

[Kadin2048]

How much do you want to bet that one of DoubleClick's "50 metrics" isn't 'number of customers driven to using AdBlock because of our ads?'

Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore. Safari has PithHelmet, Firefox has AdBlock, and Konqueror has ... whatever it is they call its ad-blocking feature.

Re:Metrics

[sessamoid]

My problem is not with ads, but with the ton of scripts and *annoying* ads that many sites use. Sometimes the page simply wont because an adserver somewhere is bogged down. That earns an adblock.

What you need is Firefox with the NoScript extension. Its default is to disallow all javascript, and you can selectively whitelist sites allowed to execute Javascript, without allowing the advertisers on that site to run their scripts. All the annoying pop-ups and pop-under ads are now gone.

Re:Metrics

[plover]

I found noscript to be a pain in the ass. It killed a lot of sites' menuing systems, and pretty much got in my face too often. It became as bad as the nuisances I was trying to block. AdBlock is much nicer -- if an ugly flashy site makes me want to kill stuff, then I do it. If they leave me alone, I pretty much reciprocate.

I have taken to AdBlocking virtually every site that delivers third party scripts. I started out blocking just the annoying ad scripts, but I'm now blocking falkag, google-analytics, interclick, scripps, sageanalyst, adsonar, statcounter, sitemeter, feedburner, tribalfusion, linksynergy, atwola, imr-worldwide -- virtually any third party site script I encouter, and specifically sites that are trying to track eyeballs.

Sure, I have to go look at AdBlock to see if there's a script to kill, but it usually works out that sites that have an in-your-face advertisement also have a set of scripts. So in the bin they all go, with the bonus that blocking the tracking scripts from the ugly sites blocks them from the good sites, too.

a part of my hosts file:

[Anonymous Coward]

127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net #[McAfee.Cookie-Doubleclick]
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net #[MVPS.Criteria]
127.0.0.1 ad2.doubleclick.net #[Panda.Spyware:Cookie/Doubleclick]
127.0.0.1 ad.3ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.3au.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ar.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.be.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.br.doubleclick.net #[SunBelt.DoubleClick]
127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ch.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.cn.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net #[Tenebril.Tracking Cookie]
127.0.0.1 ad.dk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.fi.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.fr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.hu.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.jp.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.kr.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.it.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.no.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.nz.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.pl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.pt.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ru.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.se.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.sg.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.terra.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.tw.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.us.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.za.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.n2434.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 creatives.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 dfp.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ir.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 iv.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ln.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m3.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 mi.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.us.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n3285ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n3349ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n479ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 n609ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 optout.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 optimize.3optimization.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 rd.intl.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 se1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.ne.jp
127.0.0.1 www3.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www2.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www3.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.com

ref: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

you're welcome

Re:a part of my hosts file:

[donutz]

I have found this host file from someonewhocares.org to be pretty good.

Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo

[sfeinstein]

That would be a great way to block the previous generation or two of web analytics providers like DC. These days though, many solutions in that space rely on a first party domain for their data collection, which they use DNS to send to the vendors data collection server. This is easy to set up and requires nothing to be hosted via the website being tracked...they just have to set up their DNS appropriately.

Online advertising?

[halivar]

They still have that on the web? For some strange reason, the entire internet shed its ad clutter the day dowloaded Firefox + AdBlock + Filterset.G.

Mike Skallas' HOSTS

[arrrrg]

I've found this ad blocker to be exceptionally good: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html. Just install and you're good in any browser.

Re:Cookies

[plover]

Then this extension is for you. Cookie Button adds a widget you can place in your toolbar (I placed mine next to the reload button) and it features a drop-down menu with four choices: default, reject, accept session and accept always. I already have "third party" cookies disabled, so it only has to control cookies delivered by the main page.

I run with "prompt always" too. I differ from you in that for the most part I reject all cookies by default, unless it's a forum or some place I'm interested in creating or maintaining a longer-term relationship. Occasionally I'll be too quick to say no, and Cookie Button makes it darned easy to go back and reenable them. Firefox's cookie manager is horrible to navigate -- it's virtually unusable after you've built up a list of a thousand different sites that you've rejected or accepted at some time in the past.

Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo

[cciRRus]

I strongly recommend the Adblock Plus extension for Mozilla Firefox, together with the Adblock Filterset.G Updater extension. The dynamic duo has kept my web browsing experience fast and clean ever since I discovered them.

With the advent of these powerful and extensive adblockers (supports regular expressions!), and the ease of installation and usage, it makes me wonder how online advertisers could survive...