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How Web Advertising May Go
Anti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."
.. but unfortunately just doesn't seem to be.. these are some of the major failings I see in online advertising today:
Inconsistency! This to me is a huge one. Back in the day.. you'd be surfing your favourite site.. and you'd see the same ad over and over. Every day, there it would be. Sooner or later you'd get curious and click on it.. and the odd rare time, you would find a product that generally interested you. You don't see that any more. Now every time you visit the site.. a completely different set of random ads shows up. There is no longer that cumulative curiosity.
Relevancy! Ok.. google's adsence has made a lot of headway in this area... but automated tools (even really freaking complex ones) simply can't replace a web aster finding a product on his.her own that he/she feels visitors will want.
Slow freaking ad servers! Back in the day (cough) .. the ad was hosted on the same server as the rest of the page. Users didn't have to wait for some slow overloaded ad server.
Only getting paid on "confirmed purchases". To me this is a rip of for webmasters. The few times I have bought something I saw advertised on a web page.. I didn't access it through the ad. I googled for it later when a need for such product arose. Ads don't usually have an immediate effect imo .. they are cumulative. You see a product name over and over.. and eventually decide to buy it. You see the same ad for some web host every time you visit a site.. then one day you need web hosting.. and the name pops up. Chances are you are not going to go click on the ad.. but non the less the ad was effective.
Just being freaking irritating. The latest craze is these hover over links. Every time I see one.. I feel like heating up a steel spring with a blow torch, then carefully sliding it up the webmasters nose. Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
Anyway, that is enough drunken 3am rambling!
I still wonder just how is it possible that Google is worth $100 trillion (or whatever their market cap is now)... it's a search engine that sells text ads on its website for crying out loud
Publicly Traded
What I fear is that due to this, websites will end up having to host more intrusive ads (interstitials, the whole website being a Flash object that demands not just Flash enabled but the saving of shared objects) for the same money, as well as more code to try to block ad blocking programs (which makes it worse long term as people go elsewhere for similar content.)
Even now, a good number of Web forums will insta-ban someone just on the mention of Adblock and NoScript because the sites are so desparate for revenue.
Long term, I wonder if the solution is a page click clearinghouse, where people pay a central subscription center (in return for no ads and other membership benefits to all subscriber websites) which pays websites by how many pages that user browses from their account. Essentially, similar to how Slashdot does its subscriptions, except with member sites getting paid per view.
how can they make them targeted with out cookies etc? easy, only advertise on relivant website and use facebooks vote up down style. ads that are annoying to the web sites users can be weeded out.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity.
thing is, there's no scarcity any more, or, I should rather say, the scarcity is not in the resources themselves, but rather on the sharing of the token called money used to obtain goods and services.
The current monetary system based on debt creates virtual scarcity, and doesn't really mean anything anymore. it's time to evolve.
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/
I tried to let the model work, but after they finally started using Flash tricks to display pop-ups, I finally used the "nuclear option". Whats that? The hosts file. I call it the nuclear option because it takes out unobtrusive ads along with the nasty ones. I really didn't want to do it, but the web advertising industry left me no choice.
If major web sites ever decide to adopt a code of ethics, whereby additional window spawning, interstitials, and other obtrusive ads are barred, I'll stop using hosts.
Really, it worked fine for dead tree print guys, there's no reason it can't work for you. I don't even mind cookies. It was actually kind of cool when Yahoo started showing me ads for IC chips and network cards. Maybe they're still trying to do that, but I'll never know; because some worthless X-10 popup weenie is being blocked by my hosts file.
Get it? Is ANYBODY listening?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That assumes you even saw, or had the ability to see the ad in the first place. I block popups, surf anonymously via a disposable OS (virtualization), and use Firefox with Adblock Plus. My exposure to actual advertisements is extraordinarily minimal. I almost forgot they existed till this article came out.
Most people are not much different either. I suspect the value of the web advertisement is going down because the number of eyeballs actually seeing them is in a free fall. When advertisement campaigns cannot deliver any meaningful increases in sales or leads then their value must go down.
If people are not seeing the ads, how can it possibly lead to a sale, lead, click-thru, click-on, whatever, blah blah blah
I always get a kick out of these sorts of articles.
Advertising on the internet comes from the same premises as advertising anywhere else. Either you are building awareness or you are inciting the viewer to action, preferably both.
You buy ads based solely on if they are acheiving those two objectives. The value of an ad is from that alone. If your ads don't perform, pay less or stop. If they succeed, keep paying or even pay more to guarantee that they will continue to do so.
Sure, you can do interactive ad games, popups, popunders, little folding corner things, etc, but who cares unless your name sticks in their mind or it causes them to buy your stuff.
Sure, website operators will plaster their pages with ads, but who cares as long as your name stands out and people buy your stuff.
---
The main benefit for online ads over any other kind of ad is that the advertiser can have enormous feedback on the success of the ad that would normally take hundreds of hours of focus groups and thousands of dollars of wasted money.
The key failing of online ads is that advertisers are morons that think that internet ads are some magical moneymaking device that will work by itself. You have to use that wonderful deluge of information to guide your purchases and campaigns.
If advertisers, as a whole, stay ignorant, the market will boom and crash. Just like ignorant stock traders, just like any herd of morons that think they've found a golden goose and then cook it.
I've been surfing the web for at least 12 years. I've probably hit dozens of ad-infested pages per day during that time. I've probably seen tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ads.
I can't remember a single time when I actually purchased something because of a web page ad.
I may have been influenced a bit due to a few of them, but actual purchase that I wouldn't have made otherwise? If so I have forgotten about it.
If anything, the internet reminds me how scarce quality work (of whatever sort) really is. Being able to readily comb through all of it only makes that truth even more apparent.
but internet will be much more used as business tool now that is time to drop costs. This would bring balance to the force.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Hm, /. and i did buy some stuff from them in the past, so yes, i did purchase something because of a web ad.
I did discover thinkgeek from advertisements on
(to be honest, it was a while back when ads were more funny/static/interesting and noone was using adblockers ...)
You must have never been drunk and horny at 3 am.
I swear the advertisement for the Britney Spears sex tape practically took the wallet out my pocket by itself and started entering the information into the boxes. Then it's friends showed up.
Now I got a 3-inch VISA bill.
I ignored whatever it is you just said. You're probably used to that though.
I've been surfing the web for at least 12 years. I've probably hit dozens of ad-infested pages per day during that time. I've probably seen tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ads.
I can't remember a single time when I actually purchased something because of a web page ad.
I may have been influenced a bit due to a few of them, but actual purchase that I wouldn't have made otherwise? If so I have forgotten about it.
If you have been influenced by advertising, then the advertising has worked, plain and simple. It may have been something that you would purchase anyhow, but how would you know you wanted that specific brand, or its particular strengths versus it's competitors? Now, you may have other factors that may influence you to NOT chose a particular product, (obnoxious advertising being one of those).
Has left pretty well all these Ad merchants behind.
If I'm browsing some site in say the USA and I'm based in Europe I don't give a **** about ads for US services (and most products come to think of it). They just don't have any relevance to me whatsoever and just consumes the bandwith/download quota I PAY FOR every month.
Very few sites check your IP for location and serve you up an Ad free page if you are outside their target location on this wonderful planet of ours.
Don't get me started on the ever increasing number of sites that are replicating the sort of things that doubleclick does. Last month I added 78 new ones to my hosts files to block.
AFAIAC (As far as I am concerned), these people are signing their own death warrant. Eventually people will say 'Enough is enough' and start browsing only those sites with a reasonable (or zero) levels of ads. One site I visited recently had over 20, yes 20 other sites it was pulling ads and other crap from. Why do they do this? Greed obviously.
This business model is surely untennable for the future. Sorta like the 'sub-prime mortgages' that were sold to far to many inappropriate people.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Web advertising will continue, for the same reason that we still have spam today.
Despite the increasing evidence that it doesn't work, people will still pay to get their ads in front of people. And advertising companies will be happy to take that money.
No, never! If something gets through my filters I will make it a point to NEVER buy from the company that "placed" the ad. I can make one exception: Those are the ads that come from the actual site. If they use flash or move in any way, that halts at once. You cannot easily focus when something is moving.
Some may argue that ads keep the net alive. (Yes servers that take targeted ads pay many times more.) To that I say, I keep the ad, but it never gets to my eyes. This serves a second purpose -- Advertisers in print and on TV often have the control of the editorial content. Its therefore worth periodically taking a quick check on who advertises. Chances are I don't buy from them and __certainly NOT__ if it is through the Internet!
BillSF
There's plenty of places on the web that sell shit and advertise no-where else except on the web. How do you think people find them?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Before scarcity was defined by the medium -- a TV's dimensions or the number of pages you wanted to print. Now scarcity is the user's attention.
And a way to get most of that is to reduce the number of ads on a page and just have a few prominent ones. Or maybe have a daily sponsor. TV used to be that way (Exxon Mobile opera hour or something?).
The trouble is there's no payment system for a good site or the number of ads on a page. Right now payment is just based on page views and clicks, which means the webmaster is inclined to a) make multi-page articles and b) put dozens of ads on a page. If that model were fixed so that there were higher payouts to better quality sites then things might improve
Lots of confusion about terminology.
Half the people here didn't understand the article, the other half believe it was about something else based on the summary.
This was about the reduction of traditional advertising budgets (a rehash of stats) with a non-sequitor on how it might affect advertising online (with no stats).
Did they even think to mention that the money has simply shifted from print/tv media to online?
No, this is largely a attempt at fear-mongering about the economy.
There's a cure for that, but it's rather costly.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Do you recall ever buying anything because of a TV ad? Many people swear they never have, and yet TV ads work.
I don't know how many different extensions and add-on installs I've added to FireFox but I know off the top of my head that the overwhelming majority of them are designed specifically to eliminate or block advertisements.
And by advertisements I am not just limiting the scope to pop-up ads, but google ads, banners, and ad sponsored links and polls.
Any image that is from an ad shows up 404, every pop-up is blocked, and any link to an ad shows up 404 including sites that redirect to advertisements.
The less ads the better the internet experience is. I am not sympathetic at all to advertising and spam-marketing companies when there revenue falls.
Audience attention is still scarce -- the Internet hasn't changed this.
Print, radio and TV all had high fixed costs. As a result, the number of advertising space suppliers was low. When suppliers -- in this case, websites -- increase, supplier power decreases relative to buyer power. Prices fall.
I clicked on an ad once and bought something...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If Lorena Bobbitt was his wife, she'd simply cut off his "credit".
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
We spend a few hundred a month on Google Adwords (both on search results pages and the 3rd party "content" pages) on a fairly niche set of terms for our web based bingo card generator. I've noticed recently that our bids, which I haven't changed in months, have bought us both higher ad placements and lower costs per click. Similarly, the advertising revenue from the publisher side of AdSense (ads we show) on the same website have dipped a bit. All of these hint that other people have pulled out of the market. Granted, you have to take this with a grain of salt -- we're in a very niche market.
Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that in this economy, overall, more people are going to cut back on advertising budgets rather than expand. I think that in the case of Google, it's hidden by their growing market share and the growth of the Internet.
> How do you think people find them?
Well in my case, I typically find them via Google searches or because I found merchandise from them being sold via Amazon, either now or in the past.
(Although I don't use Adblock, I avoid a lot of ads using NoScript.)
Or was that what you meant?
Whats an ad? ...No, really - I haven't seen any ads online in 5+ years thanks to AdBlock! Before adblock it was an /etc/hosts blacklist. I am to the point that if I visit any site I frequent on another computer without AdBlock I am surprised to find out that yes, ads still do exist.
On another note, if I am looking to buy something but I don't know where to get it, Google AdWords is one of the first places I look. I am always pleased at how out-of-the-way and un-obtrusive it is when I don't need it, (not to mention loads quickly since it's all text) but how useful it is when I do need it. Thanks Google for not making us "hit the target" or "spank the monkey" or whatever other crappy annoying flash ad is the latest fad.
-Hobadee
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Anyone care to guess why Google's CHROME has no ability to use plugins/add-ons?
(And, I'd actually use Chrome if I could BLOCK THE DAMN ADS!!! Who cares if Chrome renders this well and/or is faster... CAN IT BLOCK ADS??, No?... OK! Fine... So, where's my FF icon? )
Therefore I use FireFox 3.x with NoScript, AdBlock Pro, and Flashblock installed...
(Sure, I find myself whitelisting certain sites often... but that is the way it should be!)
Try reading certain sites with IE7 at netbook resolutions and you will love FF with the ad killing plugins/add-ons....
Meme-necromancy is evil
Yay me!
A kdawson post from anti-globalism?
gimme a break, you might as well just rename the site to 'socialistworker.org' if you are going to take the anti-capitalist rants like this seriously.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I've been on the other side: setting up Google ads for two small companies. In one case, it did increase the web-traffic, but did not result in a single sale. In the other case, it has resulted in sales - but the total effect was very minimal.
This was with Google ads - which I suspect are among the most effective, because they are generally relevant to what the person was searching for. Even so, the results were marginal at best.
Web advertising would be more effective if there were less of it. Unfortunately, dropping prices mean dropping revenue, which will probably cause some sites to add even more adverts. Resulting in even less value, further price and revenue drops, and a vicious cycle is begun.
Even though all attempts to date have failed, I still think an effective micropayment system is the right answer...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
And yet they apply little to none of that knowledge to the WWW. Take TV, first off: You tune to the beginning of a show you want to watch, and periodically it's interrupted by a string of several commercials. Yet web adverting only uses interstitial ads at the beginning when you first go there. It does technically get an ad hit, but you immediately leave and see no others there. (Just like if you tuned in for something a minute after 8pm, and they were still running ads -- you expect some of the content first before seeing them having to pay some bills.) If marketing people actually owned dictionaries and ever looked up what "interstitial" means, they'd put a flash animation of several ads in sequence between each page of an article. That way like TV ads, we could just browse (surf) to another site (channel) while the ads were playing.
Or how about print ads: You're reading an article and turn to the next page and there's a full-page ad, you mentally skip it and resume reading on the next page. So instead of ruining the content by littering the article space with tons of crappy little things, break the content into sections that can fit on most peoples' screens in one screenfull without scrolling, and then randomly place between pages 0-3 ad pages to be clicked thru. (Random to discourage development of automated ad-skipping schemes.) Web site operators look too whorish allowing all kinds of tacky, vibrating and jumping shit to be placed all over their sites. As if they don't care about what kind of image they maintain. And neither do the advertisers. I don't know why they didn't just stick to what they know works, and what the public is already accustomed to.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
... so when the economy is up advertising is up and when the economy is down advertising is down.
When companies are struggling to make it to the next fiscal year, the first thing they cut is their marketing budget (surprise, surprise)
Advertising on the Internet is affected just like other advertising - so it's going down at the moment and will go up when the economy starts to pick up again.
All these explanations about how stuff done via the Internet is somehow special are just a throwback to the previous bubble when loads of "consultants" and "experts" made a living out of spewing bullshit about how the Internet was special and the "growth" it drove was permanent and would keep going forever (i think most of us remember how that went ...)
One solution : local caching. Have a php script download randomly named images or html files in a semi-randomly named folder. Can't see how it'd be possible to block the ads, especially if the html is put in a page via a php include. Obviously though it would require a fair bit of trust to give an ad provider write access to a folder on your server.
Away.
http://www.naturephoto-cz.com/photos/birds/great-tit-3066.jpg
http://www.nbstreams.com/pic/pipe_fitting/bras_pipe_fitting/big/07b008_brass_hex_nipple.jpg
http://www.tailored.com.au/uploaded_images/ass-758565.jpg
You've never bought anything from an ad, therefore they don't work. QED.
Oh, yet here we are, with people spending billions on web advertising... The fact they work is demonstrated by the fact that they're still around.
cf spam.
Most people who have are ashamed to admit it.
I think inadvertently, Ads have become the micro-payment system that was bandied about a few years ago.
The mistake the model had initially, was seeing the user as the client, where in fact the user's viewing is the product for sale - much like traditional print media advertising. The micro-payments are happening on a pay-per-click or pay-per-view basis.
As Print media slides further down the slope of obsolescence, online advertising will become more relevant as a means of gaining exposure to marketing messages.
The obvious breakthrough in this arena was context sensitive advertising pioneered by the likes of Google. I can see this becoming a more refined model and process. We are also going to see and hear more embedded advertising in the streaming media content.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Care to place a wager on whether Google will allow plugins that block advertising in their browser?
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I think the way to go as an advertiser is to select a site whose visitors you want as customers. Then pay that site for every sale to someone that is also a member of the other site. In this way you get away from screaming "Come and buy!" and get more into sponsoring which is generally giving a more positive thing.
I can't think of a single time I have. I did see an eBay ad for me, when I Googled for my name, but it turned out they didn't actually have any of me in stock, so I couldn't buy a spare. I've clicked on a few ads, in particular some of the hosting ones that I've seen here, but never bought anything as a result. I often click on Google ads when I'm using Google to find someone that sells something, but in general the people who advertise on Google cost more than the people who show up near the top of the search lists, so I haven't bought anything there either.
When I see a particularly irritating advert, I make a point to remember who it's for and avoid their products in future. I couldn't believe some of the adverts I saw on television in the USA last time I was there - just someone shouting the company name three or four times.
I do buy things as a result of recommendations though. I found my current hosting company through a Slashdot article, and I've been very happy with them for three or four years. They're a small company (I was one of their first customers), don't charge much, and have excellent support (as in, I have the owner's contact details and he replies quickly whenever there is any problem, even though I'm just a single customer with one small machine hosted there).
This doesn't mean that adverts are worthless though. The best kind of advert tells you a particular product exists just as you are thinking you need a product in that category. This is why targeting adverts is big money. I write articles for a big publisher, and they can easily cover the cost of my article from sales of a book they recommend along with it when they have a recommendation that matches the article well because a significant fraction of people who read the article are people that are in the market for a book in that area. As another poster pointed out, I think the expensive ad spots are going to be the ones where the webmaster puts some effort in to selecting relevant ads, not the ones where they are selected at random, or from a simple keyword lookup. I unsubscribed from The Inquirer's RSS feed last week because of one of these. They use the most irritating form of advert known to man, where a script inserts links with pop-ups on random words. One article I was reading had 'new laptop' turned into a link because of this, and in an article about new MacBook Pros, I expected to be sent to an article about MBP update rumours. Instead, as soon as I moved my mouse over the word, I got a pop-up for Intel Centrino systems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Micah:
All hail The Hypnotoad!
The tags placed on this entry here at /. are always enjoyable, this one particularly brought a smile this morning. stopsayingmonetize Hehehehe. Talk about an overused buzzword of corporate speak.
Admittedly off topic today,
--Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention.
That's marketing drivel. What it really means is: "The stuff that the user came for is being pushed aside by more and more and more aggressive advertisement."
Geez, wonder if that just might be one of the reasons that more and more people block ads?
The whole advertisement industry needs to get one important fact into their heads, and that is that nobody wants their crap. Once they've realized that, and start working on a way to push it out in ways that people don't mind enough to block and filter, the value of ads might increase again.
However, for the past 20 years or so, the solution to every advertisement problem has been "more ads". These days, when you walk down McDonalds street, past the AOL stadium, on your way to the Powered by IBM subway, you pass more ads than you'd have seen in an hour or two when you were young. But I said "pass", not "notice".
I remember times when the local stadium was named for its team, not some random company, when there were things that were not being "presented by" some logo, and when you could watch TV for 30 minutes straight without one advertisement.
Fact of the matter is: Advertisement has changed. It's a lot about brand recognition today. The problem being that there are hundreds, if not thousands of brands that compete for your recognition, and they compete by trying to scream louder than the others.
On the web, we can filter them, and the louder they scream, the easier it is. That's why what is really a global advertisement business crisis shows up as a problem in web-based ads first.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Try reading certain sites with IE7 at netbook resolutions and you will love FF with the ad killing plugins/add-ons....
Well, buddy, if you're dumb enough to run Windows on a netbook...
On a side note, this is why the iPhone's Safari is far and away the best mobile browser at the moment.
Simply double-tap the paragraph or column of text you actually want to read, and the browser will zoom in so that all the annoying, animated ads (and really, everything else excepting the content) are pushed off the screen and out of your field of view. Now, I will grant you that having an ad-blocker would be superior, as it would prevent the downloading and execution of such ads in the first place and save my battery life, but the high-resolution zoom is so effective that I can live without the blocker. The iPhone doesn't produce any hover events, which is a mixed blessing, but in this context it means that those annoying embedded keyword ads won't ever activate.
Until Fennec is release-quality, anybody trying to avoid ads on the go should look into the iPhone or iPod Touch. For the record, I use a Nokia E71 every day, but its mobile browser crashes so often it's basically useless. I carry an iPod Touch and seek out WiFi, or tether my laptop to the phone when I need to browse.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Recently Google acquired DoubleClick.
Yeah, using Chrome isn't a good idea anyway. Looks to me like it's essentially a giant spyware program.
I live and work in technology in New York. Back in the day I built e-commerce sites, but post dot-bomb I perforce moved into advertising. And as a consultant I have sat in the meetings with the tastemakers in many of the biggest Ad firms, such as McCann-Erickson (makers of the Mastercard "Priceless!" Ads), Ogilvy & Mather, JWT, etc, so I have some perspective on the question of web advertising.
First, let's get the common perception of an overarching, sinister council meeting in smoke-filled rooms to figure out how to manipulate the minds of America out of the way. The tastemakers are hipsters, almost all White, almost all male, in their 30's or younger, and far fewer of them are gay than you would think. They are voracious, almost desperate consumers of popular culture and are nearly all filled with self-loathing because they work in advertising instead of producing any of that popular culture.
At the moment they're all desperately trying to figure out how to monetize online, mobile, and gaming because print is terminal; out-of-home (that's billboards, bus shelter posters, etc) is limited; and the only people who still watch TV in respectable numbers are the least desirable demographic, that is, Baby Boomers in their 50's and 60's. The trendlines for middle-to-upper-middle income males ages 18-45 all show that they're abandoning in droves the activities that have been the mainstays for decades, such as TV watching and sports. So clients are demanding that Ad firms present them with good digital strategies.
But they are woefully ill-prepared to do so, because within the Ad agencies themselves the TV crowd still rules the roost and so does their "you'll take what I give you and like it" mentality. They do not fundamentally understand that within the digital media consumers have vastly more ability to shape what content they see, and how they see it. That is, they do understand that in digital consumers have that ability, but they have no idea what to do or how to behave in that brave new world.
Instead, they double-down on the same old tactics of interruption ("we'll be right back after these messages!"). That's why when TiVo got big advertisers responded by putting those annoying banners at the bottom of the screen during shows, and by making every show a walking product placement; you cannot TiVo those out. And at the moment they're on the eve of hammering the final nail in the coffin of the TV medium by forcing their last demographic, the Boomers, to switch their sets to those able to receive a digital signal. Little do they realize that will make it exponentially easier for consumers to edit out all of the banner and product placement crap and re-post and share them through P2P, while also alienating the elderly who might just remember that they used to play golf and bridge instead of watching TV all night.
That's why it's easy to predict which way web advertising will go: it will be relevant to the consumer's needs, or it will die. There is no place for the interruptive, one-way communication that the TV crowd in the Ad agencies are trying to push, because consumers can very easily switch all that off with AdBlock and the like. One-way, interruptive will not survive on the web, it will not survive on the mobile platform, and it will not survive in gaming. The days of forcing males, 18-45, to sit through tampon commercials are over.
Google has made some progress on serving relevant ads with AdSense, and they have prospered accordingly. But the problem lies deeper than the medium through which commercial messages are delivered. The corporations of the world, at least the ones more than 20 years old, still want to live in a top-down, command-and-control environment where they call all the shots. They want to produce goods and services that people will pay for, but they do not want the rabble to actually talk back to them.
But in digital media, that's precisely what consumers have grown to demand under the democratizing influence of the Web. They demand a
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Who cares if Chrome renders this well and/or is faster... CAN IT BLOCK ADS??, No?... OK! Fine... So, where's my FF icon? )
Chrome blocked it.
I find it quite ironic that the Thinkgeek add was directly under your post. Thank you or making my morning.
My $.02:
I have been occasionally tempted to click on an ad - especially when it was showing me the product I wanted to buy. However when I click those ads, I have to do a lot of work to purchase the product and I dont want to work that hard. It seems that ads are only there to get me to go to the site and spend 10-15minutes figuring out their e-commerce stuff. What a really effective ad would do is market a sale and link directly to the list of products that are being sold. I dont click an ad to go visit a site and explore it. I click an ad because it has shown me what I want to buy. If I have to spend a bunch of time to search out the product on the website that the ad referred to, then I leave and dont bother clicking any more ads.
Ads would never have been blocked if they had remained:
1) a small banner at the top of the page
2) not animated.
but all the extra bullshit is what brought adblockers to the market. Marketeers, as always, dug their own grave by overstepping their bounds. So now we have an arms race.
I don't think he was talking about ads in your quotation. I think he was saying that almost as soon as someone is done with a webpage, they whisk away to go do something else. Webpages always have hyperlinks to other parts of their page, videos, sound bites, other affiliated pages, and so forth. All of THAT freedom is competing with the advertisements, and the desire of the advertisers to sit you down and force you to watch their stuff.
There are ads that appear with search results, which are valuable to both advertiser and reader. And then there's everything else, which is merely annoying.
Search ads are valuable because they're presented when the user is looking for something and are relevant to the search. At that one moment in time, an ad isn't an interruption of other activity. That's why Google is so successful.
Google ads on other sites, though, are mostly noise. The overall quality of Google contextual advertisers is low. For most serious advertisers, opting out of the Google Content Network, but keeping the search ads, is a good move. Especially since the discovery that 10% of users generate 50% of the clicks, but don't buy much.
Online ads may bring in enough revenue to keep your blog running, but they won't keep your car dealership afloat.
Install The Proxomitron.
It does ad-blocking where it's supposed to go, at the proxy level.
That lets you browse ad-free on any browser you choose.
I run an ad-supported website, but I don't see a problem with ad blocking software.
The reason? I get paid for ad clicks, and people who block ads are very unlikely to click them even if they they weren't blocked.
The site visitor is not obliged to click or view my ads.
The downfall of ads certainly hurt both those displaying them and those paying for them to be displayed; an odd symbiosis has formed between the two, though it's not a strict 1-1 correlation.
To effectively both lighten the burden on websites as well as make ads more effective, the web in general needs to band together and figure out something effective for micropayments. Either some big site just does it (PayPal, Google, Amazon), or a number of semi-large sites (LiveJournal, Slashdot, major newspapers and webcomics) make a consortium to do it (something like OpenID, perhaps).
The problem with micropayments in the past has been two-fold:
1) Lack of adoption
2) Concerns over the majority of users (predominantly those under 13, or perhaps outside the region the service operates in) not being able to actually use such a service
Problem 1 can be solved by having what I described above. A huge backer (or group of large backers) would make it far more enticing. Make it easy to implement on a website. Then offer it up free at the beginning. Sites get to try it out so long to see how well it works on their site before actually going fully into it. Then, it's a flat monthly fee based on average income (over two or three months) instead of some percentage, which makes it far more appealing to users. (And under a certain level, say $5/mo average, it's just free.)
Make it prominent, even if somewhat unused, on many popular websites and it will gain adoption on smaller ones. Also, those doing the paying should not be charged a penny.
The infrastructure to solve problem 2 is already in place, it just needs to be modified somewhat and unified more. Lots of sites, such as Pogo, Moola, various feedback sites, "buy services get free stuff", etc., already offer "free" ways for people to get money or other items. Work with those kind of sites to set up an option to credit your micropayment account instead of whatever else they do. Voila, suddenly millions who don't have/want a credit card or check to do this have an alternative way to do micropayments. It could even be something like ad revenue sharing, where users who elect to still see ads on each page (perhaps an interstitial instead of a normal one) can share in a percentage of the money made on that ad that is credited to their micropayment account, which they can then use on that site or on other sites. For an example, one could do their normal reading on WSJ with this system, then go to use their credit on Youtube in order to view a certain video in high quality.
However, this doesn't mean that that the internet suddenly becomes a pay-for service. No site can switch to micropayments entirely and survive. Instead, make it an alternative: using a micropayment to read an article or something will remove all the ads from the page (so it loads faster and has less clutter), or perhaps offers various extras (many sites already lock things behind regular restrictions; I used to subscribe yearly to IGNsider, but there just wasn't enough stuff to hold my interest--being able to just make a small payment for each interested page would have worked much better, IMO). So stuff that is read now can still be read with all the ads as usual. Eventually, as more of the world comes online (and the current generation gets older), micropayments can become more prevalent.
Finally, I often here people talking about micropayments of $.25; in my opinion, that's just wrong. While profit is surely a motive, the idea is to allow them to replace ads. An average view for a page full of ads is lucky, if I remember my numbers correctly, to even bring in two cents. Micropayments should be limited to 10 or 15 cents; the majority of micropayments should only be a penny. This not only eases the burden on the payer, but also turns micropayments into a huge impulse purchase opportunity. If someone wants more for micropayments, say for viewing a long-ish video or downloading a song, then they should enroll in some secondary service from whoever offers the m
Anyone care to guess why Google's CHROME has no ability to use plugins/add-ons? (And, I'd actually use Chrome if I could BLOCK THE DAMN ADS!!!
Just install Privoxy. There are Windows and Mac versions available, as well as Linux.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
prevent the downloading and execution of such ads in the first place and save my battery life
Knowing nothing about the Iphone (never seen one in real life that I'm aware of) could you simply browse through a proxy set up on another machine where you're running Privoxy? Firefox, for example, has a very simple proxy setup that you can use to push all of your data through a proxy somewhere else via ssh tunneling -- perhaps something like that would work for you.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I have almost stopped with buying AdWords ads myself
Where you've managed to spam your site at least twice in this topic. Bravo.
Not clicking it, don't care. Especially don't care when your posting what amounts to an ad (an unrelated, and unqualified one at that) in a discussion largely decrying unsolicited ads.
Please, just put it in a sig and aim for +5 comments.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Who in their right mind would even consider clicking through on an advert?
There are proven instances of rogue content in ads, proven instances of rogue ads, page hijackings, the works.
You see an ad but you have absolutely no idea of whether the person who placed it is a) honewst or b) the person you THINK placed it.
The ad could have been planted by a company with pretty low integrity - one, say already acknowledged to have stooped low enough to indulge in deploying rootkits, or an organisation partnering such a company. I won't mention either BT or Phorm.
Sorry, but if you click through, especially if you may end up ordering, you heed your head examining.
Nope, but I have plenty of copmpanies I'd think twice about using!!!