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Report on Last Decade of Online Advertising

Posted by Zonk on Tue Apr 19, 2005 02:53 PM
from the from-sleaze-to-sleazier dept.
The Internet The Almighty Buck Businesses
Eh-Wire writes "Doubleclick.com has an interesting 24 page PDF available covering the history of online advertising over the last decade. Interesting trivia include recounts of some of the first online ads presented on HotWired. Online advertising has become very competitive in the last ten years and last year saw a revival of activity in this form of advertising. The usual selection of graphs and charts are there to pretty up the document. Overall an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing."
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Report on Last Decade of Online Advertising 50 Comments More /

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  • Gee, I'd love to look at that... (Score:5, Funny)

    by adb (31105) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:55PM (#12285309)
    ...but for some reason Doubleclick keeps resolving to localhost.

  • Damn it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by oreaq (817314) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:55PM (#12285310)
    I really wanted to read TFA article this time but my ad filter blocked it.

  • The last three years have been ad free... (Score:5, Informative)

    by garcia (6573) * on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:55PM (#12285311) Homepage
    Over the last ten years, and especially the last three, I have become increasingly annoyed with online advertising and have done what I can to virtually eliminate it from showing its ugly face on my screen.

    squid and adzapper [sourceforge.net] which is currently replacing many ads with 1x1 transparent GIFs. This is especially handy because I tunnel all my web traffic at work over my 256k upstream DSL connection. Do I really want to be wasting bandwith with flashing or changing ads? /etc/hosts to eliminate things like ads.osdn.com, ads.doubleclick.net, and various others. Yeah, I could add them to adzapper but it's a lot more fun to just block them all together. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

    Any other ideas on how to surf ad free?

  • Shock and awe (Score:5, Funny)

    by BaldGhoti (265981) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:55PM (#12285316) Homepage
    I am stunned and amazed that it was a PDF and not an HTML page full of flash advertising.

  • I'm not falling for that! (Score:4, Funny)

    by stlhawkeye (868951) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:56PM (#12285324) Homepage Journal
    Ha! This "history" article is a subtle form of advertising for Doubleclick. Where's my tin foil hat?
  • Dag nabbit!

  • Online advertising saw a dramatic decrease today as one of the world's largest online advertising agencies, DoubleClick.com, mysteriously went silent.

    Sources pointed to a /. article that linked to a PDF on DoubleClick.com's website as the culprit.

  • Increasingly annoying.

  • Almost read this but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by IronChefMorimoto (691038) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:57PM (#12285345)
    ...a giant pop-up ad for boob enhancements caught my attention first.

    IronChefMorimoto

  • PLEASE (Score:5, Funny)

    by TechnologyX (743745) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:58PM (#12285348) Journal
    Everyone RTFPDF, the internet will thank you if you take out Doubleclick's servers for a few hours!

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by trurl7 (663880) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:58PM (#12285352)
    microsoft.com has released a PDF covering the history of online sado-masochism. Interesting trivia include the first recorded use of an Intercal interpreter in a webbrowser, and server-side VBscripting. The usual reviews of IIS version 234.33.5.8.83.stable are included, with pretty pictures of performance trumping apache. An interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing.

  • Smart or Dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaHat (247651) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @02:58PM (#12285354) Homepage
    I can't decide if the poster of this story is a genius... or an idiot.

    Traditionally posting a direct link to a 1 meg file on the front page of /. is dumb... but at the same time... DoubleClick is not a very popular company when it comes to the ads they sell or those like them... so such a /.ing can only hurt those most /.ers dislike... hum

    • Re:Smart or Dumb... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tassach (137772) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:31PM (#12285711)
      If you really dislike them:
      #!/bin/bash
      set URL=http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge_centra l/documents/RESEARCH/dc_decaderinonline_0504.pdf

      while (`true`); do wget $URL; done
    • you're kidding yourself if you think a 1mb file is gonna take down doubleclick even with slashdot's enormous traffic it's tiny copared to what they serve out in a day. but it's a nice thought :)
  • User: Aaargh! Ads! Ignore, ignore, ignore.

    Advertiser: Ignore my ad, willya? Fine, I'll make it blink!

    User: Ugh, it blinks! Block, block, block.

    Advertiser: Block my ad, willya? Fine, I'll make it pop up!

    User: Grrrr, I hate those pop-ups! Suppress, suppress, suppress.

    Advertiser: Suppress my pop-ups, willya? Fine, I'll wire your eyeballs open while I play this movie for you--

    (Sorry, that last step is from the near future.)

  • Its really difficult these days (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Saven Marek (739395) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:00PM (#12285386)
    As an advertiser not to get lumped in with the same bucket as people who spam outright or spread malware and scam people. I am employed by a bulk email marketing business used by several medical companies and more often than not our services are presumed to be spam and blocked by users.

    This is unfortunate as I see it, as it was easier in the earlier days before spammers took over the internet and all forms of advertising were acceptable and just known as part of the internet. I dont think the tools to block adverts are doing good either. sometime somewhere someone has to pay for the sites you visit. Not accepting their advertising banners and emails is a form of rippinbg people off I thnk.

    • Re:Its really difficult these days (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To quote the genius Bill Hicks...

      "By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borr
    • This is unfortunate as I see it, as it was easier in the earlier days before spammers took over the internet and all forms of advertising were acceptable and just known as part of the internet. I dont think the tools to block adverts are doing good either. sometime somewhere someone has to pay for the sites you visit. Not accepting their advertising banners and emails is a form of ripping people off I thnk.

      I wouldn't go so far as to say it's ripping people off.

      All large scale sites (including slashdot) n

    • I'm not anti-advertising by any means, and I'd like to jump in here before the hordes rip you a new one.

      I'm assuming that you have an opt-in only list, with addresses collected from people that knew exactly what they were opting in to? Otherwise it's unsolicited, and it's spam. Full stop. I don't htink there's anything wrong with opt-in lists, but if I get email I'm not expecting from someone selling something, I'm going to be right pissed. There's no way you can tell me that ditching email I receive witho

  • Nothing says fun... (Score:4, Funny)

    by glenrm (640773) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:02PM (#12285406) Homepage Journal
    Nothing say fun like the history of online advertising over the last decade.

  • History? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Shotgun (30919) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:08PM (#12285466)
    And next week we'll present the history of this week. And the week after that...

  • Content on Doubleclick? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Experiment 626 (698257) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:08PM (#12285474)

    Not that people RTFA on a normal article, but in this case any geek worth his salt will have Doubleclick blocked in their /etc/hosts, router tables, Adblock filters, or what have you and in the case of the tinfoil hat types, all of the above just to be sure. I really don't think it's worth turning my filters off just to hear Doubleclick spin the history of online advertising to make themselves sound good.

    • Why read what is obviously going to be a very biased bunch of bullshit. I can paraphrase without even RTFA:

      Online advertising works. It is highly effective and low-cost. This is the only way to sell your product to millions of people.

      People love to get up to date information on your products so that they can buy them.

      Double click are the people to deal with. We already have a great relationship with web surfers and we're the only way to go.

  • has an interesting 24 page PDF available c

    Wouldn't it be more appropriate, and just as taxing of resources to have the report in a Shockwave object that bounces around on your screen with embedded video and a 2-pixel wide "close" button?

    I mean that is what 10 years of online adverising has mutated to.
  • Brazilian advertiser Luli Radfahrer, in his book "Design/Web/Design", claimed to have created the first banner ad ever.

  • Headline got my hopes up (Score:4, Funny)

    by eyeball (17206) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:19PM (#12285584) Homepage Journal
    I misinterpreted the headline as "Report on [this being the] Last Decade of Online Advertising." It really got my hopes up.

  • Last Decade of Online Advertising (Score:5, Funny)

    by utexaspunk (527541) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:20PM (#12285606)
    That's "Last" as in final, right?

    We can only hope...

  • So the history of advertising is only doubleclick? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mcguyver (589810) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:22PM (#12285621)
    This article fails to mention any company other than Doubleclick as being involved in online advertising. It's naive to think that any 10 page marketing document produce by Doubleclick would be about anything other than Doubleclick however the title of this article is the history of online advertising over the last decade [slashdot.org]. Give any college student a day and they surely could come up with something far superior to this narcissistic press release.

  • Can it last? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:24PM (#12285641)
    As someone who has worked for several major media companies I am truly worried whether the current online ad boom (beyond dot-com peaks as the Doubleclick PDF shows) can continue.

    A great number of the ads sold these days are text ads, with Google the biggest seller. These ads are great because they are far less obtrusive for the user and the advertiser only pays per click. Many advertisers have been very happy with them, including lots of small businesses in once-small niches who have found loads more customers.

    But as we've seen in the last few months text ads can be gamed. Your competitor might set up a botnet to "click" your ad, stealing dollars from you, and you might never know. Or the same competitor can hire real live humans from impovrished countries to do the same thing.

    Also, even mighty Google has not been able to effectively stop link spam and SEO manipulation of the "regular" search results. Will people really keep advertising when they can be in the main search results section for possibly less money?

    Then there are the ad blockers you Slashdotters are so fond of. Not only do they screen big banner ads, many of them screen out text ads as well. This is a niche technology but then so was pop-up blocking a year or two ago, now it is being built into IE. As Firefox gains traction I expect ad blocking to increase.

    Then you've got the user registration schemes and technical route-arounds like bugmenot.com. The whole point of online advertising is being able to target certain customers, but users are sick of filling out registration forms and leery of being tracked in any way so we're seeing more technical tools to defeat the raison d'etre of online ads, targeting.

    These are not truths anyone can get paid or respected for saying right now, so no one is saying them. But that does not make them any less valid. Online advertising is probably here to stay but there are a lot of kinks to work out before it becomes more troublesome and expensive for businesses or users to game the system than to accept the ads.

  • In-game ads... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SharpFang (651121) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:36PM (#12285765) Homepage Journal
    There's still a huge untapped ad space. Inside the games.
    All the games along the race tracks seem to be some made up products and ads for the game producers. Posters on the walls in FPS games, billboards over Vice City, all that stuff is filled with fake commercials.
    It could be filled with real ones though.
    The question is only "when"...
    • Why would they waste time trying to advertise to people who have made it perfectly clear that we don't want annoying intrusive advertising thrust upon us. The best thing they could do imo for all parties concerned is use plain text ads, they aren't intrusive enough to annoy hardly anyone and therefore probably won't be blocked.

    • Re:One would also *think* qaulity would matter... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by EtherAlchemist (789180) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @03:55PM (#12285981)

      After 10 years you would think the quality of ads would improve as well.

      Take for example those debt consolidation and mortgage/refinance ads you see all over. Oh, not sure which ones? You know- the ones that feature a dancing cobra or a giant corn on the cob or a long fat pig, all with the abbreviations for the 50 states on them. Yeah! That's what those ads are for! Nothing says "trustworthy, serious company, capable of handling your financial information" like a pig or cobra! A cobra! Jebus, who the hell makes up this company's demographic?

      At least X-10 had ads relevant to the product, they didn't even pretend- remember the panning cameras that had the ad that panned up and down the chick in the pool?

      Then you've got what the ad-sales people at my company call "bottom feeders." These are the Gators, Fun Web Products (you know them, Smiley Central, among others) and ad space resellers. God how I loathe this tier of advertising.

      What I don't understand though, is how people (read: the ad geniuses) at these companies can seriously think that their cheesy ass ads will ACTUALLY draw customers.

    • Re:One would *think* (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MynockGuano (164259) <hyperactiveChipm ... ot@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 19 2005, @04:01PM (#12286040)
      With ten years of empirical research they'd *know* what motivates people to purchase. sigh.

      Apparently, they think they do. From TFA:
      The many forms of marketing and advertising it enables---permission email, keyword-targeted search engine advertising, floating animated page takeovers, interactive onpage rich media ads, streaming audio and video, consumer-fueled "viral marketing," to name a few--have excited early adopters and now mainstream marketers in ways that traditional advertising has not seen the likes of since the early days of color television.

      "Viral Marketing" -- WOW!
      "Interactive on-page rich media ads" -- SWEET!
      "Floating animated page takeovers" -- SIGN ME UP!

      It almost sounds as if they're proud of these things.

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