This Headline Is Not for Sale 275
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."
This was bound to happen sooner or later (Score:5, Insightful)
Toms Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.tomshardware.com/ [tomshardware.com]
When has it gone too far? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Not just CmdrTaco (Score:4, Insightful)
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 directions to find advertising revenues. This latest spate of content adverts are just a result of this trend. I suspect soon we'll see adverts incorperated into a site's content at the server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl, JSP includes into the site's content) rather than the client-side (e.g. embedded images, flash from third party servers).
These will be much more difficult to block, but ultimately, unless you WANT a subscription based Internet, what is a webmaster of a large site supposed to do? Take out another job or extra mortgage to pay his or her $1000 a month server bills?
Yes, in an ideal Internet anyone would be able to publish any content for nothing, but we live in a capitalist society (all the countries that really matter on the Internet are free or nearly-free markets, even China).
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)
MOD PARENT UP, Slashdot = Hypocrits (Score:1, Insightful)
Money talks (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is what I think he's talking about (Score:3, Insightful)
~S
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.
Re:How to block them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the page rankings? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How to block them ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, I'd like to decide for myself what I want to display on my computer and what I don't.
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How to block them ... (Score:1, Insightful)
If content providers insist on popping up mind-numbingly deceptive ads like "hit the monkey" and fake Windows dialog boxes, I am going to block them. If they don't like it, they can try to make me subscribe to their site. Once they do that, then I simply move on to another site with similar quality non-subscription content.
I don't mind ads like the way Google incorporates them; text-only, and not SCREAMING IN MY FACE or popping up all over the place telling me my IP address is being broadcast to the internet.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
How about just paying editors to run stories? (Score:4, Insightful)
And it is not illegal. But they do it.
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!
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 way - it actually costs me, by virtue of my download limit, more money to view an advert than it does to view the content. I am no more obligated to view an advert than I am to remain on the same television station during a commercial break.
Besides, I would contend that the reason the on-line advertising market is in trouble is because the model is wrong. Advertisers believed that they could track the success of their advertising campaign on a particular site, based upon the number of people who clicked on an advert on that site. But advertising is not now, and never has been, about "click-through". It's about market awareness.
If you show your brand on 100 sites then you've increased your brand awareness, and you should pay those sites based upon the amount of advertising real-estate that you've used. You don't pay a magazine based upon the number of people who bought your product whilst reading an article, you pay a magazine based upon the number of people who read the article, and may have noticed your advert. Same with television, same with radio. Why should the web be any different?
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 :)
Re:How to block them ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow. You must go to some different sites to the ones I look at (no, I'm not talking about pr0n, before somebody says it :)
I've seen some hardware review sites with about 8 or 9 ads down the side of the page. All animated, and incredibly distracting.
If those ads were static, and not trying to install tracking cookies, maybe I'd leave them. But when they try to record a trail of where I've been on the net, or when they flash so much that I can't concentrate on the very thing I came to the site for, then in the trash they go.
Ad designers: less is more. Don't flash, shriek, wander about the page, disguise yourselves as system errors, or try and track us. You'll get more people actually seeing the ads - and even if they don't buy something right away, your brand image will be reinforced, which isn't going to happen if they don't see the ad in the first place, or if they block it straight away because you pissed them off.
Re:Why I block them (Score:1, Insightful)
Just disable JavaScript. While you're at it, also disable plug-ins, etc. I have all of this stuff disabled, and I find that pages download faster, too (over my 56K dialup). Also, a browser with all of that crap disabled makes my system more secure, since it provides one less way to break into my system. If a web site requires JavaScript, Flash, etc., to use, it doesn't get my business.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
IntelliTXT Is Good For Publishers and Readers (Score:2, Insightful)
Our audience is relatively advanced when it comes to technology and can easily differentiate between content and ads. We have never had a complaint about Intellitxt. I can understand the situation may be different for more "general" websites whose users are less technically inclined.
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
More like "buy more bandwidth dammit!" I get "stuck" on some pages where the damn adserver doesn't have the bandwidth to give me my damn ad, causing mozilla to sit there with just the top of the page rendered waiting for that banner to load so it can render the part of the page I actually want to see. This hasn't happened recently though, either everyone else blocking ads means the server has enough bandwidth to give me mine, or mozilla learned to render a whole page even if the image was missing, and I just haven't noticed anymore. Could also be the increase of banners using <iframe> to load a whole page including jscript and whatever other nasties they want to throw at the reader.
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.
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you've forgotten something. The purpose of advertising is not to display as many ads as possible, it's to people to buy stuff. If an advertiser has to make 2 million impressions to make a single sale, then the cost per impression will be very low. If he can make that sale with 10 impressions, he'll pay a lot more. It's not in anyone's interest to bombard people with ads if they're not going to buy anything. Since people who block web ads are pretty much saying "I'm not interested in what you've got to sell", it's actually meaning that the ads which do go out are better targeted - so they should be worth more.
Destruction of commons (Score:3, Insightful)
When more links are ads than something meaningful, surfers will learn to beware of them, which in turn is poison to hypertext, rendering it into 'just text'. We should not have to steer clear of links just in case they turn out to be ad-traps that slow down our surfing with pop-ups or pop-intos.
The infrastructure of Web is common property. Are the advertisers allowed to corrupt and destroy something that belongs to all of us?
Re:How to block them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
When advertisers start to put useful context sensitive ads that are relevant to the content I am viewing and are not intrusive then I will unblock them, but not before.
Websites can put premium content on their sites which you have to pay for as a revenue model rather than this advertising rubbish. I'd happily pay for quality premium content rather than have my eyeballs constantly offended.
Re:IntelliTXT Is Good For Publishers and Readers (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, though, your target audience may be advanced enough to differentiate between content and ads, but that is not the point. The point is mixing news and editorial contents with ads. Period. Even technically savvy users will have to stop and think sometimes to see cleverly disguised ads in an article. If differentiating content and ads is important to you, why not make the distinction clear? Why try to insert ads to make it as though it's being endorsed by the editor or part of the news? It's an annoyance that can backfire just as pop-up ads.
By all means, design clever ads, design clever layout or use clever JavaScript, but they should not be an annoyance. No blinking flash ads. No JavaScripts that is 150KB to load and locks up the system. No moving, bouncing image going from edge to edge of the browser. We understand you need to make money to serve the articles we read, but do it discretely. Non-annoying ads get more click-through. Simple as that.
What is wrong with ads really ? (Score:3, Insightful)
But what is wrong with text links and decent size banners ?
I am not talking about 100 banners on one page, just one on top, one on bottom and maybe some 125x60's inline
If you guys would realise please: the internet is not ruined by those who put ads on their pages; that keeps your content free...
the problem is SPAM advertisement, and the problem is search engine SPAMMING
As people will block decent website owners' normal ads, more and more people will turn to SPAM and blackhat SEO techniques
Since google denied to put pharmacy ads into adwords my get "X@N@X V|c0d|n cheap" SPAM vent up by about 600%, while my commissions from pharmacy advertisement went down by 50%
before there was decent advertising, now there is killer SE and MAIL SPAMMING
bottom line: KILL/BLOCK all ads and your mailbox will be doomed.....
Re:How to block them ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Then the LinkExchange kind of killed off the co-op style ads, on the promise that your website will be advertised after enough clicks from your end and your adverts would only be in your group. (in my case it was other programming websites, so I occasionally clicked my own adverts because they seemed useful). Ofcourse the LinkExchange, as agreed, would occasionally link to some kind of commercial website. It was all good and fun back then, and all the adverts were static.
If you talk of these adverts, then I don't mind viewing them. And occasionally I even clicked on them, if they were relevant and interesting enough. Ofcourse, now that the Link exchange had been bought out by Microsoft, it almost never delivers relevant content.
But really, believe me, those blocking adverts like I am, would rarely click the adverts these days. The grandparent is not a "rebel", but a normal person like myself whose sick of the epilepsy-inducing adverts that make you want to click them just to shut them up. Or the adverts that suck up your bandwidth delivering you a crappy flash movie promoting a product you don't give a damn about. On that note, I have to PAY for my downloads at university. So it's not just the "content provider" whose paying, it's me as well. It works both ways if you understand me.
When a website's adverts began abusing viewers like myself and the grandparent, you gave us no choice but to block ads in general. You can't do a damn about us removing the ads, just like we don't can't do a damn about stopping you from doing so. There's no laws (in Australia anyway) that force you to download or view adverts, and I don't think it's morally right to hold people to do it. Deal with it.