Slashdot Mirror
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'"
At the places where I am the root, doubleclick.net and the likes are DNS-null-routed (to a localnet IP 127.0.0.127). At other places, I
use Firefox, JS selective blocking, and Adblock to disable them forever (occasionally after getting a single hit). Spyware/adware sucks, I am not supporting them, and willing to invest my time to make my point and educate my co-users.
VKh
DoubleClick? Aren't those the guys who have just for any URL within their domain?
Oh, wait...
Online advertising had crossed the line of tolerance more than ten years ago. I'm afraid that with more and more sysadmins protecting their users against ads and trackers, most future analyses will show that most users are IE-using uneducated home folks...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
DoubleClick Inc really are the enemies of the internet that we enjoy today, yet they will argue ad naseum about revenue stream keeping the internet alive.
Thier marketing practice is little more than virtual fish trawling - destroying vast tracts of future growth in order to reap thier rewards.
If they manage to piss off 1000 users to get one click through, they have achieved an objective. How sad.
It's the most disgusting form of advertisting, as subtle as unsolicited junk mail and just as annoying. But hey, they make money from it?
So how about a revolution against these dire marketing tactics, that would turn the web into one big advertising board - I'd say that it's entirely possible to thwart these corporate assholes at thier own game, track thier methods and just jerk them around until they start to lose revenue.
Unleash a mess of spiders onto the web to emulate the traits they are looking for in users - a huge zombie net of "fake users" who fry any attempt to gain "meaningful" information - just complete random noise at massive level.
How I would love that - possible? - perhaps?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Using non-annoying advertising that doesn't drive users to block?
I don't block until the ads get annoying, personally. But once they're blocked, they're blocked.
Selling advertising space online isn't what it used to be. Sometimes, the goal isn't even to get people to buy your products -- the goal is to learn more about what products consumers want.
The article describes a banner ad campaign that was used to determine demand for different food products in the preholiday run-up. This kind of market research is taking the place of (or augmenting, in some cases) traditional market research like telesurveys, focus groups, etc.
The problem as I see it is that we're getting even more LCD goods as a result. All the people who want the same products I want are blocking the research tools. Not to sound elitist, but when only morons are hit up by the market research, more products for morons are released.
This is one reason why we get crap films, crap television, crap music, etc rammed down our throats.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Is this the appropriate topic to vent about how the Internet's promise of customized ads -- ads tailored to the audience, ads that we'll want to look at, ads that are relevant to our lifestyles -- is a crock?
By way of example, I have three tabs open in Mozilla right now, each with a Slashdot story displayed.
And each with an ad for Lane Bryant.
Now, tell me, how are those ads tailored (ahem) to a 37-year-old white male geek with no unusual tastes in clothing, beyond the occasional geeky t-shirt?
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
The ads placed on pages unrelated to the advertisements' message actually attracted 17% more looks.
This means that contextual advertising, whether by topic or keyword, actually has the reverse affect that it is intended to have. Contextual advertising is supposed to attract attention and therefore clicks, but according to TFA, contextual advertising is doing the exact opposite.