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This Headline Is Not for Sale
Posted by
simoniker
on Thu Aug 19, 2004 07:29 AM
from the nickel-for-the dept.
from the nickel-for-the dept.
r.jimenezz writes "Adam Penenberg's latest article on Wired News discusses the growing trend of inserting ads more directly into online content, as publishers strive to keep readers clicking and to stretch advertising dollars, most of which go to a few big companies. He mentions the example of Vibrant Media, which links 'certain words in an article' directly to ads, and has been covered before on Slashdot, as have Penenberg's previous
articles."
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How to block them ... (Score:4, Informative)
Just create a rule to either block 'vibrantmedia' and 'intellitxt'.
Easy as pie!
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?
The only thing ad blocking does is push webmasters into new directi
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The site most likely pays for itself or its contributors through adverts. If you don't click on the adverts, their revenue stream decreases, and unless they can find new ways to advertise (read: more intrusive), the site will just close up shop.
So, you either have intrusive ads, or many fewer sites. It really is that simple :)
Parent
Re:How to block them ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertisers were playing fair, years ago. The banner ad was the ubiquitous form of internet advertising, and it always stayed within the little bar at the top of the page, and maybe one at the bottom. That was still too much for people, and so the ad-blockers were created. Soon, those sites couldn't turn a profit, and so their advertising department/provider (in order to save themselves) had to come up with new ways of improving the click-thru on their ads. That led us to pop-ups, flash ads, interstitials, pop-unders, etc. The more people block, the more intrusive the adverts have to become. If people left the banner ads alone, we wouldn't be in this state.
Parent
Don't block, hide (Score:5, Interesting)
Main point of that is that you get to see the site, and if it's well done, neither the advertiser nor the site have any way of finding what are you doing on your end, so the site still gets paid.
Of course, that'll probably accelerate the inclusion of links to ads in content, but that can be easily dealt with by the same proxy which already does pattern matching for URLs anyway. It won't take long until ad blockers start appending [ad!] after those links.
Parent
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves?
Exactly! It's my fucking bandwidth and I'm not paying to see their advert!
Parent
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Adverts are images. Images are larger in terms of bytes than text. Many ISPs have a download cap which if you exceed starts costing you money. As such more of my bandwidth is used by viewing adverts than it is viewing the content sponsored by the advert. Or - to put it another w
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Interesting)
If the viewer knows without doubt that there is no chance that he would be interested or even able to buy the product, is he obligated to pretend to consider buying it? Is he obligaed to not view the "advertising supported content" because he will be unable to buy the product? (Think carefully, how many pages do you flip through in the sunday paper that have half-page mercedes deal
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these systems do.
My day job is as a researcher at a university. Over the last two months I've been tearing my hair out because one of the evaluation tools we'd been using online has not been working right for the subjects. They get to a link and all of a sudden its not there. I had been trying to replicate this on a dozen browsers, going through all the validation services and unfortunately, these people are not the most technically advanced in the world.
Well, it all came down to our default DDNS names...at Indiana University, they are hostname.ads.iu.edu.
That ADS means Active Directory Services...not ADvertisementS.
Yes, Microsoft runs much of the back end of our campus, sadly, but its just a tool like anything else.
Anywho, it seems that any links that have this ADS name in it were being removed wholesale from the pages. Meaning my survey instrument was not working for idiots that ran this software. I'm told the Symantec internet protection tools (I forget the name) is actually sold on 7 out of 10 laptops in the US these days (lucky its probably only a 30 day demo).
This has pissed me off to no extent. Here I've been blamed for it not working, yet its these ad blockers that are ruining the content to purify things for idiots that can't be bothered with an ad here or there are the sole cause. You know what Symantecs answer to this was? Change your URL.
Fuck you symantec.
On the side, I run a website dedicated to music technology that is advertising based. Even my own stuff that we sell is using the same ad servers. I never wanted to have a whore'd link that said Store in the menubar, but after researching the pervasiveness of this at my university setting, I realized I had to. Otherwise, it would be destroyed in the content.
I can understand why folks kill popups. you control your browser and as such, should be able to say if you want a window to show up or not. You shouldn't, however, be killing inline ads if you want the information from the source you are getting it at.
Right now, I am running nonstandard sized banners on my site, much to my clients despise, but when I explain this to them, they are generally happy with it and send me a modified ad. I am thinking of using Apache's rewrite commands on my ad server so that nothing involved looks like a url coming from this particular software.
These few changes I've made have made several users ask me when I started postings ads, as well as my page views and my banner views are now coming into parity for this last month. I have a feeling its going to be an endless battle with the moochers of society vs. those of us that provide content.
So to answer your question, yes these fucking adblocking softwares do block as innocuous items as inline text so long as its pointing as something that looks like it might be an advertisement to the software.
Parent
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Interesting)
*ads* line is now:
/[^\w|&|=|\+](html|live|main|net|show|view)
Current Adblock ruleset is 2004-08-19a [geocities.com]
Parent
Of course! (Score:5, Interesting)
Fark on Wired (Score:3)
However, I have sympathy for places like Fark that are trying to figure out how to cover costs, and pay a few salaries. According to the logic of many threads here and elsewhere:
1) they should not sell subscriptions
2) they should not require a logon
3) nobody clicks banner ads anyway
So what's a good guy with a good site to do? (Hint: donations and t-shirts isn't the answer)
This was bound to happen sooner or later (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This was bound to happen sooner or later (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way this escalation will stop is if we either stop using ad-blocking software, or if the sites close down.
Does Slashdot do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just CmdrTaco (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Toms Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.tomshardware.com/ [tomshardware.com]
Re:Toms Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
I have tried browsing to a site with a useful HOWTO using my phone (P900 over GPRS) when I have no had any other Internet access and ended up using up to 10x as much bandwidth than was actually necessary had the article been true plain text.
(and GPRS bandwidth is hella expensive in the UK)
Re:Toms Hardware (Score:4, Informative)
As for the metrics on TomsHardware type ads, there are programs out there to request the page then request the ad page, to generate fake click-thru stats.
I don't mind google-style text ads - but what's really getting my goat nowadays is the stupid flash ads. Makes me really tempted to remove flash from firefox.
Parent
Just like traditional print media (Score:4, Interesting)
When has it gone too far? (Score:5, Insightful)
This Post Brought To You By Toyota (Score:5, Funny)
What's the problem with ads being interspersed anyway? I'm sure most of us are used to reading an article and then skipping down
a few lines to get back to the content.
Well, I guess it get's really really
annoying sometimes.
No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:This Post Brought To You By Toyota (Score:5, Informative)
I recommend the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, by the way.
Parent
This Headline is Not For Sale (Score:5, Funny)
This Headline is Not For Sale
How amusing... I just subsribed, and this is the first headline I paid to see before anyone else...
In addition, with all the astrotufing at Slashdot lately, I don't think it has to be for sale, because we're eager to see see it for free...
This is what you get (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the advertisements themselves don't interfere with the content, I don't care. If I'm reading an article about an Audi S8 and there is an advertisement on the right of the screen for Audis, I'll take notice and possibly look somewhere else for my car reviews. But if I'm reading an article summary on Slashdot about kernel 2.6.8 being released and there is an ad for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 I won't care so much. Actually I'll laugh knowing Microsoft is funding these hours a day wasted on Slashdot. It all depends on the website and advertisement.
Hardly new (Score:3, Interesting)
Information or commercial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, now there's apparently no way to tell the difference between an informational link inserted by the author and commercial crap that will just waste your time if you click on it.
Unless there's some way to turn this off, or filter it out, this just looks like another step in the removal of the internet's informational utility to me.
My content is getting claustrophobic (Score:3, Funny)
Marketers can have the sides, top and bottom of a page to peddle products and services, but the body must remain pure.
You can have your body...
AD AD AD AD AD
AD AD AD AD AD
AD ONE LINE AD
AD AD AD AD AD
AD AD AD AD AD
Click for next page
Hmmm, that *does* look familiar.
Re:My content is getting claustrophobic (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the future of advertising, inside our FPS games there will be billboards which have a simple web browser built in. They will display ads for shit like the latest Alienware hardware or NVidia cards, and you can cli
Money talks (Score:3, Insightful)
It proves its own point (Score:4, Interesting)
There will probably be more of this type of marketing, as pop-ups get deflated and the up-front sign-up gets 'spoofed' (i.e.- false) user data.
This could spark the return of text-only browsers, or even web text readers that spawn on user-directed sites and remove the graphical content themselves.
If this is what I think he's talking about (Score:3, Insightful)
~S
adblock, flashblock, hosts file (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes when I have to browse on someone's else computer I'm almost stunned by the number of ads that appear on sites. Yeah it's easy to get accustomed to comfort of browsing without ads.
So... don't wait any longer! install custom hosts file NOW!
BTW: I'm curious if it will soon be included into some of linux distros by default, it would be great - self maintaining and updating custom hosts file... (it works with windows too, but I doubt it will be a part of default windows install anytime
IntelliText (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, it's so wrong. The author's hit the nail on the head - journalistic content must be seen to be as free from outside influences as possible whether it's a personal bias, litigious pressure, or (as in this case) finacial incentives. Otherwise, the message becomes diluted as people begin to wonder what they're not being told.
In a way this reminds me of the data systems in Starship Troopers. This system could be adapted easily to provide information instead. But not a hope in hell of that, now the Marketing departments have got their teeth into it.
And yes, I do dislike marketers. Thanks for noticing.
This Headline Is Not for Sale (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh-oh... (Score:4, Funny)
Look out Slashdot, here we come!
I hope it fails (Score:4, Funny)
Normal ads just aren't effective anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I found interesting in the same vein was another Wired story [wired.com] the other day, about FreeiPods.com [freeipods.com]--an advertising site where, if you complete a trial offer from one of an assortment of merchants and get five other people to complete one too, they send you an advertiser-paid-for iPod (or $250 iTMS gift certificate). I've searched the web for stories about these people and everything I find suggests they're legitimate.
The whole thing seems to me to suggest that the advertisers participating in that program are finally starting to get the idea that if they want to advertise to us, they need to make it worth our while.
(Full disclosure: okay, so the FreeiPods [freeipods.com] link is a referral link [freeipods.com] for me. I was going to compare and contrast its advertising model anyway, and given that I was going to mention it anyway, it would be dumb not to include the referral link instead of just a plain-vanilla one, given that they both pull up the website just the same and I might as well benefit from the traffic as not. So don't accuse me of trying to sneak something by you.)
What about the page rankings? (Score:3, Insightful)
A good idea for a FireFox plugin (Score:5, Interesting)
Adblock works wonderfully (especially the Collapse feature), why shouldn't this?
Linkblock, anyone?
Future Shock! (Score:5, Interesting)
I read an interview [murderhorn.com] with Matt Groening about Futurama, where (as you know) advertising comes out of your pillow and into your dreams. Anyway, I thought this quote was interesting:
Is there anything you've changed your mind about in the last 20 years?
I used to be amused by how pervasive advertising was in our society. But seeing ads on the little divider bars on the conveyer belts at grocery store checkouts made me think, That's enough. I read Future Shock in the early '70s and said, Future shock will never happen to me. It has. At least in regard to advertising.
Intellitext pitched OSDN (now known as OSTG) (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of Intellitext's pitch was that plenty of "respected" news sites are doing this. My response: "Didn't your mother ever ask, 'If all the other kids were jumping off a cliff, would that mean you'd have to jump, too?'"
Fah.
- Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
Editor in Chief, OSTG
just add this to your hosts file... (Score:3, Informative)
and hey presto, they disappear!
or you could always install a much larger hosts [everythingisnt.com] file which takes care of quite a few nasties
How about just paying editors to run stories? (Score:4, Insightful)
And it is not illegal. But they do it.
DHTML ad links slow FireFox, compromise articles (Score:4, Interesting)
You are reading and article, and as you move your mouse around the article maybe following a line or something (I move my lips when I read -- leave me alone), you roll over these damned ad links. Sure enough, the scripting on the links creates a DHTML "pop-up" right where your mouse is, effectively BLOCKING the article you're trying to read.
Now, this sounds minorly annoying in an of itself -- you have to wait for the timeout before the ad will remove itself. But in addition to blocking text, the ad often has the unintended after effect of causing FireFox to lag. I've seen it on PCs ranging from my shitty 700MHz P3 at work to my 3400+ Athlon64 at home.
I am pretty certain that other websites have started using these sorts of sponsored links, and I really see it becoming as bad as traditional pop-ups or pop-unders. Even worse, I'm not immediately aware of any way to suppress them without turning off Javascript that supports DHTML. I'd be interested to know if AdBlock for FireFox will be able to adapt to these new advertising methods -- NOT because I don't want to see the ads -- I just don't want them to interrupt reading the articles.
I really think that these tech-savvy websites, although dependent on the ad revenue more so than their cheap ass readers (hey -- we buy all the shit they review -- we have no money), should reconsider using these sorts of links. Or at least review how they display in the context of trying to read a review or editorial on the latest and greatest hardware/software.
It's unfortunate, too, because you have to feel for these guys needing money to run their great websites, but at what cost to the integrity of their content?
IronChefMorimoto
I like ads, if they don't get in the way... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ads disguised as articles are worse (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion, the worst offense are ads that are disguised as articles. The local major news paper is made up of at least 25% ads disguised as articles, which is part of the reason why I refuse to subscribe. This has not been as prevelant online as in print, but I expect that it will get that way as more of us switch to digital news.