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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'"
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?'
... whatever it is they call its ad-blocking feature.
Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore. Safari has PithHelmet, Firefox has AdBlock, and Konqueror has
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
Now we can use detailed tracking to figure out EXACTY how and where people punch the monkey for a free XBOX, or if they would rather enjoy shooting the ninja for a free Ipod.
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 !
I have found this host file from someonewhocares.org to be pretty good.
Let me be the first to say it. If you have 50 different ways to measure something, you do not have any measurements that matter.
When advertisers are looking at buying media, they want to use a standard metric so that they can do a rough apples to apples comparison. The question advertisers want to know is how much it costs and how many people that might buy their product will see it. In the world of three network TV channels, you could talk about cost per million and you basically have a homogenous mass, so it was pretty easy.
Nowadays, you have media fragmentation and advertisers do not know what to buy. Should you buy commercial time during the NCAA tournament? How about the Simpsons? How about on MTV? Since people are using DVR, maybe it is better to do a product placement and put that Coke can on American Idol. Maybe you should just buy search advertising on Google.
You get the point. While it may be interesting for advertisers to track purchase habits with loyalty cards at grocery stores, through capturing personal information via Google or targeted search results ads, the bottom line is that you can measure it 50 ways till Sunday and it doesn't much help with the central problem - what media do you buy and how much do you buy? Advertisers want an algoritm that breaks it all down and gives them the best bang for their buck.
There is an old saying in advertising, "I know I'm wasting half my money on advertising, I just don't know which half." The reality is that despite all the scary privacy issues that are starting to come into play - advertisers generally have no clue about what they are doing. And you know what? It's only going to get harder. People can talk about getting into the content tail, but it doesn't make the advertiser's job any easier.