How Web Advertising May Go 229
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."
In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
.. 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!
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Funny)
i have to say "nose" was the last place i expected this sentence to end in.
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Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to block every single image.
There are Adblock filter subscriptions (ad server domains + regular expressions). I subscribed to 5 from them and update the lists every now and then. More than 99% of site advertising is blocked for me.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I run a few websites with services for certain groups of people. I support these websites with ads.
You see, as a webmaster, I basically have two options. After I developed the site for free in my spare time (it was fun!), I have to keep it running. This includes writing content, updating stuff, managing the user database (one of the sites has over 200.000 users). Which I also do in my spare time because it's still fun and doesn't cost me money.
That's not everything, though. At the end of every month, my hoster sends me a bill for each of my websites. Those bills are between 100$ and 250$ for each of those sites.
Frankly, while spending my spare time building websites is enjoyable, spending 500$-1000$ a month (!) to keep them running, is not.
I rely on people to click my ads. I place my ads carefully so they don't interrupt users reading, I blacklist bad ads and I only run AdSense ads. Currently, the revenue is about 20% more than what I have to pay for the servers. However, if 50% of my users would block ads or simply not click on them, I would have to shut down my websites.
Bottom line: Ads are a great way to fund websites run by small businesses and one-man-shows. If you think those websites are unnecessary and the internet would be better off without them and only big businesses should have the right to have a website, by all means block the ads!
Clarification: I do use Firefox with Adblock but I allow AdSense ads and ads from a few other publishers I trust enough not to show some ugly flash overlays/popunders/music playing ads etc. I also whitelist all websites I visit regularly where the ads don't bother me.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
*nods*
I'll see your advert iff:
* You don't use client-side JavaScript to insert it into the page.
* It's not a Flash ad.
* It's not HUGE. (mail.yahoo.com: I'm glaring in your direction.)
* The host you use to serve the ad has *never* shown me an annoying, flashy "OMG YOU MAY HAVE WON AN IPOD" style ad. (doubleclick.net and RealMedia.com are right out, sorry.)
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Anything with flashing colors or animation is going to get blocked by me.
Anything which causes the page to take twice as long to load (eg. loading Javascript from a dozen different sites)? Blocked.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
A very pessimistic conclusion. If you get enough pageviews (and you really have 200k users) there ought to be plenty of companies you can strike a deal with directly ($250 is peanuts for a large site). If you host the ads locally, there is a very small chance those ads will be automatically blocked with adblock plus.
Remember: with adsense you are only getting a small slice of the pie. If you have a large userbase try to scale up using companies that you know your userbase will be interested in. This way you know what kinds of ads you get on your site and both sides get a better deal. Cut out the middleman (even if it is the big G).
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Ah, this is a good recommendation. In fact, I already did that on the largest of my pages (the one with the 200k users). The problem I found with alternative ad providers was their requirements. The ad provider I'm using now is only for websites with 10.000 unique users a day! It took my site quite a while to reach that amount of users.
The good thing with Google AdSense is that everyone can implement ads on their site, no matter how small.
But I don't want to turn that into a discussion about Ad providers. M
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
maybe you'll answer equally forthrightly and reasonably.
I actually read your entire post and it's going to be pretty difficult to argue my point with you. First and foremost, I don't have a job in IT, as most of the /. readers do. In fact (*cringe*) I work for a marketing/advertising agency. We don't do web banner ads, though. Most of our clients are local businesses with a mid-range to high-range budget. My father also used to run a marketing agency, so, as you can see, I'm biased.
How many ads do /you/ know that have concise well reasoned explanations of why I should spend my hard earned money on their product?
A lot. As stated above, I'm not into web banner ads and personally have to agree that there aren't a lot of good banner type ads. But the regular
Instead, most are flashy "programming" ads aimed at the "programmable zombie"
To clarify: I only run AdSense text ads on my websites (the ones that are Adsense sponsored). So no images/flash for you.
Even more damning, experience suggests that any brand spending money on ads is in general going to be a relatively low value-for-money proposition, since they both are spending all that money on ads rather than directly increasing value for money, and tend to demand higher margins, than the generic alternatives that do NOT spend money on ads.
If by brand you also mean businesses, you are severely misled. If, say, a local hotel would not invest in advertising, they would be bankrupt within half a year. This is no overdramatization, it's a simple fact.
Also, generic alternative brands can only get away without advertising because the advertising for the basic product they sell is already done by another company. There are two types of advertising. Either you want to market/promote a product (say Aspirin), or you want to promote and increase the awareness of your company brand/name (in this case Bayer). Most Aspirin ads you see increase product awareness, not brand awareness. So what Bayer does at the same time, is making it easier for producers of Aspirin genericas.
I don't buy new cars and pay good money as a down payment for the "privilege" of having my car drop in value immediately as I drive it off the lot, to the point I only catch up to it a year or two later
I only buy new cars (in fact, I just did buy one two weeks ago). I can see why someone would only buy used cars but I want the comfort (no service for 2-3 years) and reliability (can't argue that) of a new car. I'm aware of the fact that I pay a prime price for this.
But I'm not normal (whew! relief!). I at least /hope/ the zombie programming method doesn't work so well on me -- and /know/ I take insult at it, and feel /far/ better when people appeal to reason to sell me on something.
I earn my money based on the fact that people like you (and I include myself, to a degree) are very, very, very rare.
Right. I'm simply lowering the click-thru and conversion-to-sale rate of the entire thing. Better I not even download the ad in the first place, so I don't unfavorably distort the statistics. People like me are a cost of business in terms of bandwidth, just as the people that come into a store and use the rest room or get water without buying anything are a cost of business.
This is true, and I'm glad if people like you block the ads on my sites. I'm also making it easy for the adblockers by calling the divs that contain the ads "ad" and making the whole layout collapsible, so nothing looks weird when the ads are gone.
But if Firefox and Internet Explorer both came with an adblocker preloaded, I couldn't pay for the hosting any more. Well, Google would also have a problem in this case I guess.
Me
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Over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with NoScript and AdBlock, but I find they are too much hassle. Oftentimes a website requires Flash and/or Javascript to be operational, and these two programs block those items. Therefore I have to go into the settings and click "okay for this site" in order to make it work properly.
It's reached the point where I'd rather just have the "ease" of webads versus constantly fiddling with NoScript or AdBlock settings trying to make broken sites operate. Besides
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Depends on your priorities.
I'd rather give up on the site. Requiring flash is annoying. If it doesn't work with flashblock I'll just go elsewhere.
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There's a few ad- and parasite-blocking hosts files out there -- they contain a list of known ad servers and redirect them to localhost. They were initially targeting malicious servers, but now include most ad servers too. Only problem is you get a bunch of error messages in the place of the ads, but you can for the most part leave flash turned on.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Nose? NOSE?!?
You're way too mellow about the annoyance of that thing. Call me when you're annoyed enough stuff an incandescent light bulb up an ad executive's ass, flip it on, and tell him that the burning stops when he clenches hard enough to shatter it.
Anyways, the light bulb thing was my second reaction when I first saw a Kontera ContextClick ad. (I'm sure they're not the only ones, they were just the first one I saw.) First reaction was that my machine had been exploited. Turns out it's a bunch of Javashit that gets sourced into the page, which automatically scans a served page's source, and then rewrites random keywords in the page, turning them into hyperlinks to ads. Really fucking annoying, and an insta-entry for the company into the router's blocklist, and into the HOSTS file on the laptop.
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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.
Wait, that's an option? Jesus... TAKE IT RIGHT NOW!
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why people are so bothered by ads.
Me, I hardly ever see them. My brain has a filter that blocks all the ads, so that they never register in my consciousness. It's almost as efficient as the "skip" button on my VCR; I just focus on the entertainment and ignore the commercials. I don't understand why other people don't have similar mental filters?
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Mostly because there weren't any. Of course, back then most of the ads were in the form of a banner at the top of the page. Those I didn't mind at all; scroll down a tad and away they go!
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There weren't any because the ad's didn't cause an itch that needed to be scratched. As soon as ads started to cause that itch to programmers they wrote the program to scratch it.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What we really need are "annoying ad blockers". That would gives sites an incentive to use less obtrusive adds, which would be less likely to be blocked.
The effects of ad blockers that block everything is to encourage advertorials and other sneaky ways to get past them, most of which are worse than the original ads.
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Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and the article is total bullcrap
Rule for reading any headline of the form "[noun phrase] may [verb phrase]". Always mentally add "but almost certainly won't." The headline will almost certainly be based on something like a 99th percentile, to make the headline seem dramatic.
More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean, like ummm, like paying not see advertisements right? *sarcasm*
That's like PAYING FOR PORN . You don't have too. Surfing the net without advertisements is as easy as getting free pictures of boobies on Google.
P.S - A little known fact is that 15-20% of all tcp/ip packets ultimately end up displaying a tit, nipple, ass, etc. It's true.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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A large proportion of technically capable web users look on ads purely as an annoyance that will 'never' be of benefit to them. They may well be right, most however are happy to ignore the site owners choice by blocking these adverts.
Over the years I have collected a very large amount of information on the visitors to the websites I control, and I have tested a range of measures related to people who avoid
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"I and no doubt 1001 other people know this and are creating software that can be used by site administrators to achieve the same thing, and in the long term this kind of thing is going to become more common."
Sounds good to me.
I am not prepared to put up with annoying flash or javascript ads. I will block them from being automatically loaded by my browser when I visit your page.
If that means you are not willing to provide me a service, so be it.
I have trouble with the idea that it doesn't affect your number
Re:More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a battle you cannot hope to win in the medium to long term; ad-blocking software can always, in principle, deceive the site itself in the same way that a television viewer can get up and make a sandwich. Ad-blocking software can just ensure the client looks and acts, from the server's point of view, like any non-blocking client.
So why bother trying? You'll simply force ad blockers to actually download ads the user will never see, increasing costs for everyone.
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there's a fallacy in there (Score:3, Informative)
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/ [thezeitgeistmovement.com]
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In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun.
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Err, right. No scarcity. So where do I pick up that Aston Martin that's scarce only by virtue of our monetary system?
Web ads have themselves to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Web ads have themselves to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
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AdBlock+ with EasyList USA seems to work okay for me. A HOSTS file just seems too hard to maintain. Plus, on some sites (Slashdot. RCGroups, and HeliFreak) I actually *want* to allow ads.
After AdBlock, I think the next logical step would be Privoxy. It probably takes a bit of time to setup and configure, but it works across all browsers equally well.
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Google.
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With the issues with Flash cookies and the annoyance of Flash ads, Flash is pretty user hostile. If it was not for Youtube and similar I would uninstall it.
If everyone did this, then any site that is big enough will switch to direct ad sales and serve the ads off the same domain as the content - this happens to an extent already.
Does your hosts file include ad networks that have good policies about not using annoying ads? Google, for example, does not do inter-sitals or popups, and their video ads only play
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There's a thing called "flashblock"... google for it.
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Can I add one thing to your rant?
No sound! When I am looking for something, I like to open several windows at once. I do a Google search, open everything that might have the information I need in a new window, and then scan over each window until I find what I want. (It's my computer, so I will not change my browsing habits to better accomodate the advertisers).
I HATE hearing that "congratulations you have won a free iPod" ad, and then having to find and close the window it's coming from. (and yes, I do clo
That's an assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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My exposure to actual advertisements is extraordinarily minimal. I almost forgot they existed till this article came out.
Adblock got the story from three days ago?
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I very much doubt that most people are seeing the ads. Most people do not even know its possible to block them. Certain demographics (IE, nerds) are going to block them in real numbers of course, but I can't imagine there's much money in marketing to nerds anyway (or /. would be worth a hell of a lot more than it is right now).
As for my part, I finally got adblock when shitily coded ads started causing crashes after Flash 10 was released. I actually like seeing ads, since I sometimes get the really bizar
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If you think that most people are going anywhere near the extent you say you are, then I think it's a lot more likely that you need to broaden your social circle.
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Come on. Other than the disposable OS that I obtain with virtualization and never committing the changes to the hard drive I am EXACTLY like most other people. I said "not much different".
Firefox with popups blocked in the preferences and the Adblock Plus add-on installed. So the vast majority of people are doing 2/3 things that I mentioned.
So please take your insults elsewhere if you are not going to add anything productive to the discussion. Thanks.
P.S - I never even mentioned Privoxy and TOR since tha
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Firefox with popups blocked in the preferences and the Adblock Plus add-on installed. So the vast majority of people are doing 2/3 things that I mentioned.
But most people don't even use Firefox. As long as IE is at the top of the heap, that statement can't be true.
Re:That's an assumption (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, you just love to be contrary don't you? Your post is perfectly meeting the definition of trolling.
Don't get hung up on the name of products, but focus on their features. Internet Explorer has built in functions to block popups. There are similar additions to Internet Explorer that have the same functionality (claimed at least) as Adblock Plus. I found that within 30 seconds with Google. I don't know a single person that does not block ads right now and most of them I didn't even have to tell them how to do it.
So if you want me to broaden my statement so as to not have any possible confusion let's say that the, "vast majority of people are using a web browser with built-in popup blocking capabilities and an installed add-on that allows advertisement blocking based on filtering".
There. Are you happy now? Disagree with that statement. Whatever. Just try writing something more than one line instead of continuing and/or justifying a personal attack. Try adding something valuable to the conversation instead of tearing away at my spelling, grammar, semantics, etc.
Give it a try. Seriously. Argue about the ethics of blocking ads. Talk about marketing, ad revenue, donation based websites, anything. Construct an argument for or against advertising on the web. Write passionately about social contracts, free markets, scarcity, etc.
It's okay. I won't laugh, call you stupid, or say your pasty white pathetic ass needs to get out the basement and go cry to mommy upstairs. I'll listen and respond to your arguments. I promise. It's how it works around here. Really. You can even get a +5 insightful, informative, or funny if you try hard enough. Those remind of the gold stars and warm fuzzies I used to get in kindergarten which strangely motivates me to try that much harder every day.
Don't be afraid... i'll hold you hand... we can take this journey together friend...
BiG HuG
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That sex toys in the shape of dead president's wives genitalia.
Does the fact that "Nancy Reagan" was the first thought to pop into my head mean I have problems?
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Does the fact that "Nancy Reagan" was the first thought to pop into my head and I grabbed the box of tissues mean I have problems too?
As a former Internet marketer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
As someone who uses the internet and hates ads (Score:5, Funny)
I ignored whatever it is you just said. You're probably used to that though.
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God, that is so true. That's why I'm a former marketer, nobody ever listened and now that campaign is run by a close cousin of the genius algorithm that causes Ebay to buy on "slave" and other embarrassingly stupid ads on google.
I spent years crafting a non-annoying campaign that wouldn't get added to everyone's block list, but Mgmt wasn't satisfied with ROI, they wanted blinky flash ads made by four year olds and wanted them shown on the Microsoft ad network instead of google(because google wouldn't stand
Anyone actually BUY anything because of web ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 ...)
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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
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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?
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Getting your page rank up so people can find you is advertising too, but hey, I get what you're saying. That's not how your average joes find stuff. Those banner ads work.
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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
Re:Anyone actually BUY anything because of web ads (Score:2)
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
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There's a cure for that, but it's rather costly.
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Meme-necromancy is evil
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We in post-scarcity now? For real? (Score:2)
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.
ad rates may fall down... (Score:2)
International Nature of the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I have this hunch that the first tech collapse was in part caused by web ads. Many businesses then had no clearer business plan than "put something on the web and make money off of it", which often turned out to be "put some content user want, and ad some advertisement".
But marketing people IMHO have always greatly overvalued the effect of traditional print/billboard/TV/etc ads. Only on those media there's no way to verify how much extra products they sell. They've been riding on that to justify their ve
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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.
Even that doesn't work. I'm an American working in Japan and browsing American sites half the ads I see are for Green Cards (in Japanese)
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I did say a reasonable amount of targetted advertising is ok.
However if you get sites that are in my opinion almost content free because the adverts take up more than 50% of the page space then the laws of diminishing returns take over. Many of the IT product review sites IMHO have gone beyong the 50%. You end up getting frustrated because the review spreads over many pages when it did not need to. You end up being unable to see the wood for the trees.
Don't forget that repeat site visitors are more likely t
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I think he's saying that if the ad were relevant, he'd be more likely to click, thus supporting that free content.
He's also saying if the adhost can't serve up a relevant ad, serve nothing at all. I know I browse with adblock because I'm on a quota (upload AND download) and I'd rather not spend my bytes on a (for example) dating service in Tucson, or pizza delivery in San Francisco.
Re:International Nature of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being so melodramatic please. Your make it sound like that if I don't look at 50 web advertisements in a day your gonna blend a cute little kitten.
I hate to point this out to you, but if you had a website that was supporting five kids and fifty little other kids in Africa and my eyeballs made all the difference each month ... well then fuck it. Seriously. Fuck the whole thing and I don't care. Let them starve. I don't give a fucking shit. If I could insure world peace by having my nuts hit with a ball peen hammer 10 times a day I might consider it, but I won't do the same just to allow some web site owners the ability to keep doing what they are doing. Yes, I do equate web advertisements with getting my balls traumatized on a daily basis.
I am not flaming you either here and this is not a personal attack . Am I little excited about this post? Yeah, a little. But, please seriously step back a moment and try to understand what I am going to say because I am not that different than most people on the Internet. I may be an 11, but most people are >=7 on this.
Please try to understand what I am saying. I HATE ADVERTISEMENTS. PURE BLACK SEETHING HATRED. They just get in the way of me being able to enjoy content and to enrich my life with said content. Think about that. I don't watch movie previews on the DVD or even in the theater. I walk in 8 minutes late. I don't even DVR anymore since the bastards sued the automatic commercial skip out of existence. I torrent all the television shows on TV (in 720p even) and watch them without ad content and I might even stop that since complete twats like the Sci-Fi channel are putting whole "footers" in during the middle of Stargate Atlantis that completely distract from the whole damn show. They are going to go broke anyways since Stargate Atlantis is over and the super genius media executives canceled such shows like FireFly and FarScape. I mean seriously, what's left that is worth sitting through ad banners during the shows and commercials between? But I digress....
I will never ever submit to advertisers. It is fundamentally dishonest as a practice. It insults our collective intelligence and provides absolutely no useful information about a service or a product. It is the equivalent of a woman flashing her titties at a bunch of guys to manipulate their wallets out of their pockets like a master illusionist, except 1/1,000,000 as enjoyable. If one learns about advertising and marketing they quickly find it is all about how to manipulate the consumer. How does that sound like an evolved practice worthy of humanity and its potential?
When I want or need something, I will seek the product out. Review sites, consumer reports, anecdotal information, manufacturer websites, etc. At least then the majority of the information will have 1,000,000 times more truth and reality in it than any single advertisement ever could. Period. Truth and advertisements mix about as well as sodium and water.
Web Based Advertisements are the equivalent of the Internet with a case of raging herpes. You lament that only way in your opinion to keep the Internet alive is to submit and accept that herpes is the way of life. Well not for me my friend. Sorry. I would rather not have the websites and their content. That is the cure and I have partaken of the sweet elixir.
Exactly that. Sell T-Shirts and other parapherna
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Until then, I expect that donation sites will thrive as long as they continue to provide great value to their audiences. fixed
I know it's a faux pas to reply to your own post but it's a little known fact that if you correct your own post a spelling/grammar Nazi dies off in the distance :) Couldn't resist.
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I would go so far to find ways to forbid the access to my sites to people with adblock&co. It's my content and you will see it my way or not at all.
You should not be so quick to initiate a technology arms race with the IT geeks over ad blocking. It is one that server operators, site owners, and advertisers will almost certainly lose and more to the point it is unnecessary. The most effective use of ad blocking requires technical knowledge of protocols, regular expressions, and the like. It is better to simply let the less than 20% of web users who are savvy enough to configure and use these technologies go, we wouldn't have clicked on or bought anythin
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The exact same way I expect to get use of interest-free money and cashback bonuses from credit card companies: I expect other people to subsidize it for me. Those people are either too dumb to figure it out, too lazy, too busy, or too disinterested. It's all the same to me.
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AFAIAC (As far as I am concerned)
I've often wondered what the point in people writing these acronyms and then explaining them immediately after and then never reusing it again. IANAL is another common culprit.
it's I ANAL - you missed a space... it means goatse
*Facepalm* (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Web ads are getting killed....by my FF extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Web ads are getting killed....by my FF extensio (Score:5, Insightful)
(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....
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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.
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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 sav
more suppliers means lower price (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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blame me!!! (Score:2)
I have personal (i.e. anecdotal) evidence of... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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In fact the correct strategy is to increase the spend, while possibly altering the message to suite the financial mood.
If you need to cut costs, cut them in other areas of your business - not on your advertising spend.
Advertising is cyclical ... (Score:2)
... 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 bu
When Adblock eats too much into revenue... (Score:2)
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.
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Two points. First, let me address the substance of your idea: there will always be ways of distinguishing advertising from content. They may be made more complicated by obfuscating the URLs, but as long as a human being can distinguish an ad from the content, a program will almost certainly be able to do it too. And if a human being can't distinguish the advertising from the content, the content is almost certainly no good anyway.
Second, you have no idea what you're talking about technically. This is a pet
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It's always possible to work around it.
If you fully randomize the URL, there are still things that say "this is an ad", such as the server it comes from, the fact that it's an image or flash, its size, etc. You could pretty safely block all large images, leaving the little ones used for the interface. Just blocking standard ad sizes goes a long way.
The advertiser could perhaps try splitting an ad into little bits. But that probably doesn't work for animated ads very well, and can be detected too.
The best an
Ads as Micropayments (Score:2)
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 me
wrong assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Online Ads - An Advertising Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Other than search ads, online is doomed (Score:3, Interesting)
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. [sitetruth.net] 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. [directmark...nsider.com]
Online ads may bring in enough revenue to keep your blog running, but they won't keep your car dealership afloat.
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They also sell the search engine directly and offer other services though the price is probably a bit inflated.
People want to invest in the winning safe .com and google is that site for most stock jockeys.
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It's a tad more complex than just text ads however I do think you are correct in questioning exactly how much these at least partially ad based companies are worth, especially when ad blocking software is on the rise. The dot com bust occured because companies were based on shaky business sustained by buzz and capital that *didn't actually exist* in that they weren't creating anything... sometimes I wonder if that is also the case with these ad based companies... Who knows- maybe they've figuVred out how
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It would seem that the market wonders that too [google.com]; GOOG has lost 51% of its value over the last 12 months. Compare to Microsoft (MSFT [google.com]), which even with the Vista debacle was down by less (41%) over the same time period.
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at the end of the day ad blocking is going to win that arms race
My comment further up partly covers this. How are ad blockers going to filter out advertorial?
If that is all that works, then that will be what people do to make money.
Re:usefulness and trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertorial isn't a problem.
People don't want to read advertorial, sites employing advertorial become useless and folks will stop reading them.
And yes, blocking will win the race because all they have to do is download the ads and not display them, then the server really is none the wiser. Unless you get into all sorts of crazy technology like embedding client-side javascript that validates the page layout before loading up the content, or some such thing.
Still, in the end it's the person controlling the browser (end-user) that has the power here. This is a fundamental difference from television, and one I really like.
(alright, I know, I can turn the tv off...)
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Unless we move to a totally amateur system, there needs to be some way for professional publishers to get paid for their work.
The only method that avoids any conflict of interest is if the consumer of the media pays directly for its use. But the subscription model is breaking down as the web democratises publishing. Only a suitable micropayment system can save it.
Other ways of funding
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What the hell?
You know it was communists and socialists who were the FIRST globalists?
"Workers of the *WORLD* unite"
It was the dream that each region produced only exactly what it was good at and exported that to other regions around the globe.
Get it?
How do people become so confused? Do you even know what you believe?