The State of Online Advertising 195
conq writes "BusinessWeek has an article looking at how internet advertising has changed and is changing. From the article: 'The race is on to find new ways to track customer behavior. Advertisers and agencies are progressing far beyond the standard arithmetic of counting clicks and page views. They're tracking the to-and-froing of the mouse on Web pages, and they're finding new ways to group shoppers by age, Zip Code, and reading habits. CEO David S. Rosenblatt of DoubleClick Inc., which serves up some 200 billion ads a month for customers, says that every campaign now allows for 50 different types of metrics'"
No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblock (Score:5, Interesting)
use Firefox, JS selective blocking, and Adblock to disable them forever (occasionally after getting a single hit). Spyware/adware sucks, I am not supporting them, and willing to invest my time to make my point and educate my co-users.
DoubleClick who? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, wait...
Online advertising had crossed the line of tolerance more than ten years ago. I'm afraid that with more and more sysadmins protecting their users against ads and trackers, most future analyses will show that most users are IE-using uneducated home folks...
DoubleClick Inc will kill the web if we let them (Score:5, Interesting)
Thier marketing practice is little more than virtual fish trawling - destroying vast tracts of future growth in order to reap thier rewards.
If they manage to piss off 1000 users to get one click through, they have achieved an objective. How sad.
It's the most disgusting form of advertisting, as subtle as unsolicited junk mail and just as annoying. But hey, they make money from it?
So how about a revolution against these dire marketing tactics, that would turn the web into one big advertising board - I'd say that it's entirely possible to thwart these corporate assholes at thier own game, track thier methods and just jerk them around until they start to lose revenue.
Unleash a mess of spiders onto the web to emulate the traits they are looking for in users - a huge zombie net of "fake users" who fry any attempt to gain "meaningful" information - just complete random noise at massive level.
How I would love that - possible? - perhaps?
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't block until the ads get annoying, personally. But once they're blocked, they're blocked.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry Slashdot, your ads just got blocked. They were screwing up the layout of the page and making it unreadable.
New ads = market research tools (Score:4, Interesting)
The article describes a banner ad campaign that was used to determine demand for different food products in the preholiday run-up. This kind of market research is taking the place of (or augmenting, in some cases) traditional market research like telesurveys, focus groups, etc.
The problem as I see it is that we're getting even more LCD goods as a result. All the people who want the same products I want are blocking the research tools. Not to sound elitist, but when only morons are hit up by the market research, more products for morons are released.
This is one reason why we get crap films, crap television, crap music, etc rammed down our throats.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, another link on the main page from hungry4revenue.com can query that cookie. Technically, it's still a first party cookie, because it was placed there by hungry4revenue.com's server. If it's rejected, they redirect you to a "Sorry, you are rejecting cookies from us and/or ads from ads-r-us.com, and that's how we pay for this site. If you really want to view our cool stuff, please reenable them."
At this point, of course, I'd personally say "no thanks, your stuff isn't that cool" and move on.
Is this the place... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the appropriate topic to vent about how the Internet's promise of customized ads -- ads tailored to the audience, ads that we'll want to look at, ads that are relevant to our lifestyles -- is a crock?
By way of example, I have three tabs open in Mozilla right now, each with a Slashdot story displayed.
And each with an ad for Lane Bryant.
Now, tell me, how are those ads tailored (ahem) to a 37-year-old white male geek with no unusual tastes in clothing, beyond the occasional geeky t-shirt?
Re:DoubleClick Inc will kill the web if we let the (Score:1, Interesting)
It has been this way for at least a year, and I have not had one person complain. I have had a few folks contact me and say that they noticed a drop in banner ads.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
One Interesting Point from TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
The ads placed on pages unrelated to the advertisements' message actually attracted 17% more looks.
This means that contextual advertising, whether by topic or keyword, actually has the reverse affect that it is intended to have. Contextual advertising is supposed to attract attention and therefore clicks, but according to TFA, contextual advertising is doing the exact opposite.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
My problem is not with ads, but with the ton of scripts and *annoying* ads that many sites use. Sometimes the page simply wont because an adserver somewhere is bogged down.
Very good observation; I've noticed even Slashdot suffering from this lately (at least from my experience).
Another really annoying thing is sites immediately wanting to set a cookie just for the "privilege" of viewing their pages. This is somewhat analogous to a store's salesman demanding to have your phone number before you even enter the store. The worst sites even deny access if you decide to reject their cookie.
The only time a website should place a cookie is if/when the user wants to interact with the site.
I don't do much adblocking (I use Firefox) but I do manage cookies on my machine.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
My objection isn't to ads per se, but against the ones that are intrusive or irrelevant. If a company wants my attention, they can put some thought into designing something that actually gets it via some method besides the 'abrupt onset' reflex to look at anything that flashes.
Frankly, I think an "arms race" between consumers and advertisers might not be a bad thing; the advertisers (in general, not just internet ones) have become far too complacent in just assuming that people will look at their tripe because they can insert it in between two halves of a mildly interesting TV program or web article.
If some new online advertiser came out, and only ran really subtle and/or interesting, funny ads, I probably wouldn't block them. I'm not blacklisting everything by default, every ad-serving company has one chance to make an impression before they get blocked. I probably add one or two new things to the block list a day, and so far nothing has come through that has convinced me I'm missing a thing.
Your argument strikes me as the same one that people make against using TiVo to skip ads, and I respond similarly. If the ads didn't suck so much, people wouldn't block or skip them. And if in the end, if so many people end up blocking or skipping ads that the entire ad-supported business model that drives commercial television and web content collapses, then the public will have spoken. The technical infrastructure and the public demand for quality content will still be there, and I have faith that someone will come up with a better compromise solution, in that situation.
Re:DoubleClick Inc will kill the web (yeah right!) (Score:1, Interesting)
That said, I have a greater distaste for marketing in most any form than your average person. What DoubleClick can do for internet advertisers is rather limited. They only deliver the content advertisers ask of them to websites that want them; no more, no less. Their privacy practices and their email practices are actually quite good (though both took a little work). The saving grace is that DoubleClick management is relatively clueless, so your really are quite safe. And they are an easy focal point for blocking unwanted ads with your favourite ad-blocking tool.
What the data miners do with your meatspace information (the stuff with a name, address and telephone number attached) is far more interesting than what DoubleClick does with anonymous internet user data. And, yes, it is anonymous for the most part.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Therefore, while we do have a "tragedy of the commons" type situation, you cannot claim it is "not his concern" - because the quality of the material he reads is influenced by his behaviour and by the same behaviour of other people. The grand parent poster was asking a constructive question : exactly *how* should publishers of "free" content be compensated by their users. Currently this happens to be mostly advertising revenue, but when this drys up or is no longer viable, possibly due to ad blockers, should these sites simply stop publishing?