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:a part of my hosts file:

[donutz]

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