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The Ultimate Destination of Banner Ads 117

Posted by Hemos from the when-is-not-enough-too-much dept.
The SatireWire article concerning banner ads was a ray of sunshine in my day, in light of recent events.
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The Ultimate Destination of Banner Ads More

The Ultimate Destination of Banner Ads

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  • That page was full of <img ALT="Click to learn more..." ...>, as are many other sites heavy on banner ads. What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images? If you want IE users to know they can learn more about the product by clicking on the ad, use the TITLE attribute so it's just a tooltip and not a replacement text, and give an empty ALT. If you want Lynx users or people who have disabled cross-site images to click on the ad, give meaningful alt text. But don't fill their pages with useless "click here"s!
  • I need to add the two that got throught to my Junkbuster blockfile. :) Only one really they where both from the same spot.
  • This is the 4th article about ads and they already had one poll IN THE LAST WEEK.

    Perhaps they are decideing to remove all ads from Slashdot since we know they read our comments and see how much we love ads. yeah.... thats got to be it....

  • Net Advertisers Say

    Copyright 2001, SatireWire
  • Maybe I'm just cheap, but i'd rather put up with a few adds than have to pay to see sites. As long as they don't effect the time it takes to load the page I don't mind. It's not like they're that hard to ignore. Even easier than parents, teachers, PHB's, etc. ps What's up with all the racists comments I've been seeing?
  • I wonder how much slashdot makes on that silly little ad they got on top of the page.

    Could it ever be enough to support this gigantic web-site and all of it's employees? Or is Slashdot really painting themselves into a corner by bashing ads, and making it harder for them to get more revenue streams in the future?
  • How about /dev/null?
  • Here's a radical idea. Why don't web sites try to develop a profile of who their target visitors are and then sell advertising space to compatible products for small name-recognition ads? It's worked for over a century in real world publishing, why not web publishing? Why is advertising success determined by click-thru rates? Budweiser is quite happy that an ad in Playboy might be seen by a million people, a billboard by perhaps 250,000, a placard at a rodeo several thousand. Why don't we ever see something similar on the web - just a nonclickable, nonobtrusive "Hi - remember us when you get back to the real world" jpeg/gif? The only advertising going on at web sites now is for other web sites - break out of the circle jerk and a site could be profitable.

  • I really don't see what the point [pointlessgames.com] of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" [massmog.com] of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything [nearlyeverything.com] that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain [soothingrain.com] in a world of miserable over-commercialization!

    *sigh*.. (at least all mine are little sites that aren't just doing this to make a /.'ed buck... well, not really anyway...)
    ----
    PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
    MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.

  • I only had one make it through iCab's image filtering. I am not even sure it was a real banner ad, though (came from their actual site, and did not seem to have an attached A HREF tag).

    I am happy.

    I do hate banner ads stuck in the middle of articles. At the top and the bottom is acceptable, on the side is marginal. In the middle of the article, though, is unacceptable.
  • Actually, right after the page loaded, I was like 'where _is_ the article??', and it was right in front of me. But because of all the ads, it was invisible. It took me like 6 seconds to disable the 'filter' on my head and start reading.

    The filter is back on now.

    --

  • How the hell did you ever get the +1 Karma bonus, when you can't fscking figure out that a site called "satirewire" is about humor. Ah, he did. He can recognize satire, and add to it, so he gets modded up. You don't recognize satire and not only do you end up pisssed off, but you stay moded to zero.
    --

  • I disagree (Score:3)

    by Midnight Ryder ( 116189 ) <midryder.midnightryder@com> on Friday March 02, 2001 @03:58PM (#388237) Homepage

    I totally disagree with that. Why?

    OK, go to your favorite search engine, or shareware search engine. Pick a game style, say.... puzzle games. Now then, how many hits do you get back? As a consumer, how long will you spend looking? While it's cheesy (and I DON'T do this) quite a few people just keep re-submitting thier game so that in a dated list, it shows up first. Or they do things like put '++' at the beginning of the name to try and make it show up first (that was the case back in the BBS days, but, no longer really works that well.) So, if you are looking for a game, how long do you expect to spend clicking 'next' to find a game that you like? Not very damned long on the Internet anymore.

    The problem isn't just getting your name out there - I don't do any 'brand recognition' advertising. It's trying to compete with the miriad of other programs of the same genre to capture the prospective customer's attention. I advertise in places where people look for games (two game search engines, a game fansite, and a game news portal.) So, the idea that someone just pops into a game search engine and finds something interesting is a bit of a problem - have you done that lately? This helps those who really want to push thier product stand out just a little. That's why I advertise instead of just putting it in the search engines and shareware game engines. Other people's reasons may vary. And if you don't like ads - well, I'm sure you know the address for Junkbuster! ;-)

  • That's correct. I didn't want to say "under linux" because, well, I'm not running linux. I don't think the OS has anything to do with it really.
  • I've heard that no news is good news. But puh-lease. This is sad.
    Joseph Elwell.
  • That is wicked cool! Took me a minute to figure out that WebWasher [webwasher.com] had blocked it at first, though.
  • You mean there was actually an article there? All I saw was lots of ads informing me of wonderful products that I went out and bought right away!
  • That story was on slashdot some time ago. That's why it was rejected. Sometimes the editors do actually remember previous posts.

  • I'm browsing with Lynx this morning.

    What banners?

    Won't be awake until I down another half litre of coffee.

  • The page that you linked too was already featured in an older Slashdot article. Maybe that's why it was rejected when you submitted it.

    I know this is a bit off-topic from the original discussion, and I hope the moderators aren't too vicious with me, but...it would be really nice to have stories that are rejected given a reason why. Nothing fancy. In this case just "Already run" or something.

  • What you describe works only when the people doing it have some scruples. The sites you mention obviously do, they found a different way to support themselves when the ads became annoying to their readers

    But, and this is a big but, what would happen when the proffesional AD guys saw this method was an effective way to do buisiness?

  • It is obvious the AC, by pretending not to understand the original poster, has realized an even higher form of humor.

    Ommmmmm....

  • Amen re: TomsHardware. I stopped visiting that site, and I let Tom know about it via an email. Then I found WebWasher [webwasher.com], which blocks ads, popups, cookies, webbugs, javascript, etc. Very cool app and I can visit any site without a worry.
  • banner ads are easily skipable - the blinking ones are instantly ignored by my eyes, like most regular internet users. After a few months on the web, most people have come to ignore the approximately 460x60 size ads that are everywhere. However the most annoying feature of a webpage is the onclose(? I'm not a coder) tags that automatically open the SAME website [alexchiu.com] in another window as soon as you close the first one. If only I were fast in my window closing abilities I wouldn't have a permanent window to Alex Chiu's eternal life device open on my desktop.

    ---
  • /. gets several hundred story submissions a day, most of them probably trolls or duplicates (think about how many they got when the 2.4 kernel came out). They don't have the time, or incentive, to specificy why they reject a story, although I agree it would be nice

    ----

  • Re:K5 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that was a different ad one that was also mirrored over here :)

  • Re:Seriously, though... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why not just write a script to do it? :)

  • It's funny because it's true.

    --
    Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.-- Cool Hand Luke
  • Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:

    Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.

    So, just don't read what you're not interested in.
  • ...I'd have to gouge my eyes out.

    Think about how many retards would just post goatse.cx [slashdot.org]/hello.jpg.

    -------

  • Shudder (Score:4)

    by sonofepson ( 239138 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @03:08PM (#388255)
    At least banner ads are better than a PBS style pledge drive. Think of the fun, every half hour or every 50th hit the sites content gets replaced by a plea for money (this story made possible by viewers like you, please donate so we can continue to bring you banner free news and entertainment)

  • Actually, I tried clicking on that one. Imagine my disappointment.

    --
    Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
    HAL: Screw you, Dave!

  • I really don't understand why advertisers like myself (MidnightRyder.Com [midnightryder.com]) get such a bad name. I mean, how else am I supposed to tell people about the games I produce [midnightryder.com] without advertising it somewhere? Heck, sometimes it's not even a matter of trying to sell a game [midnightryder.com], but, instead trying to generate site traffic [midnightryder.com]. So what is we throw money at websites that will link to us for a fee [midnightryder.com]?

    OK, all kidding aside - while the SatireWire link did it to the extreme, there are some websites that are really starting to look like that, and I've seen a couple of news articles that looked much more like advertisements based on the way they were linked (see my sarcasam above.) Yeah, I pay for advertising - not much, mainly cause I can't afford it. But, you know, I don't think I *EVER* want to see my product stuck in the middle of an article on CNN.com or News.COm, etc., where it ends up smack-dab in the middle of an article - I figure if that starts being the case, people will start to associate my name and my games with BAD, ANNOYING THINGS! What I can't understand is - why don't other advertisers start seeing it this way? I understand the concept of 'brand recognition', but, if it starts to become negative, what the hell good is it doing?

  • Banners ads, ack.

    Where do banner ads go after they have been filtered? Digital Hell?

    I prefer to filter them. Send them off into the ether. Sometimes I miss the flashing little buggers. But an hour on someone else machine rekindles my hate for them.

    Now there is a new threat. Flash commercials, Aargh. It's going to be hard to filter just the flash movies and not the flash apps.

  • The page that you linked too was already featured in an older Slashdot article. [slashdot.org] Maybe that's why it was rejected when you submitted it.

  • That's wierd... there should be a "" in there at the beginning, and "" at the end of the first paragraph. Apparently, /. hates fake HTML tags llike that....

  • This makes perfect sense. But, unfortunately, with the huge number of sites that are featuring banners, advertisers are demanding much more than simply their banner being seen.

    The banner company I dealt with for my site asked me to pull off all their banners because the people who're clicking through my site are not making purchases at the target sites.

    Now I'm not supposed to only make a site that's good enough that people visit on a daily basis and want to click on banners featured in it, but they must buy something for me to be good enough!
  • Agreed. I'm on a T-3 at work that's shared between 100 people max and the site is painfully slow most mornings, sometimes to the point where the server just gives up and times out. On second thought, I'd be willing to put up with a few more banners if it meant Tom could buy a real server and I could actually load the site.

  • Ok, it REALLY hates fake HTML tags, no matter HOW you put them... it should have been (SARCASAM) and (/SARCASAM), with the appropriate >'s in the right places!

  • Why is *your* post on Slashdot? (Score:4)

    by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @04:13PM (#388264) Homepage
    Remember rule 1 (*) of online discussions:

    Any post pointing out the irrelevancy of a post is itself even more irrelevant and will generate even more uninteresting traffic than the one that originally offended you did.

    So, just don't read what you're not interested in.

    (*) Or is it rule 4? Nevermind.
  • When I first went to the site, I almost didn't get the point.... there was only 1 ad! I had to disable my use of junkbuster to get the full effect. :-)

    If anyone doesn't know about junkbuster [junkbuster.com] it not only can filter out all the banner ads, but also the cookies you don't want.

  • It's easy to bash banners because they're:

    - Annoying
    - Take time to load
    - Distract from the content

    But what's the alternative?

    If you're a guy with a website that you want to see grow by having more bandwidth and disk space without having a corporate sponsor who's willing to pay for it, the only way is banner ads.

    Are there any other alternatives to pay the expenses for maintaining a site today?
  • March 2000: Correlation Found Between Adding Banner Ads to a Web Site and Incrased Traffic

    Researchers have detected a correlation between adding more banner ads to a news web site and subsequent incrases in traffic.

    "I did a least-squares fit for traffic changes versus banner ad density changes over the last month, and even though the points I could see to be slowly going down with increased banner ads, the line had a distincly positive slope", said high school student William Peterson. "Clearly, adding banner ads to an existing news website increases traffic."

    Advertisers welcomed this news. "We expect to see an increase in <strike>percent of web tracked</strike> banner ad sales this quarter", said Paul Brooks of DoubleClick, Inc.(www.doubleclick.com).

    Some content providers who recieve most of their revenue through advertising other sites were less ecstatic, however.

    "This incrase in traffic seems to be mostly due to the Slashdot effect, which is notorious for sending low-quality traffic to our sites," said Eliza Gregson of SatireWire (www.satirewire.com).

    Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) is a fun and useful news-and-discussion site frequented by computer nerds. SatireWire is a "humor" site that usually isn't [satirewire.com] funny [satirewire.com].

    Gregson continued, "Sure, those users are curious and click on ads, but they never buy anything because they think advertising is 'evil' and out to 'trick' them into buying products. Our advertisers use this spike of anti-corporatist users in calculating our CPM [revenue per thousand banner impressions], and so over the next few months we end up getting less banner ad revenue."

    Popular slashdot community members "Signal 11" and "Bruce Perens" were not available for comment.
  • Actually, I'm an Internet Explorer user and a Mozilla tester. But thanks for the flame.
  • My favorite banner of all time was a java add from SUN. But the really nifty part was that the banner was really a mini-miniature golf game, complete with 9 very differant holes. It was actually pretty fun to play. Anybody else remember this one?
  • Now that's a troll...

    I've seen this bug from time to time using Netscape in linux. I had created a web page a few years ago that produced this effect, but I fixed it after a few people complained.

    It's likely the Netscape, well know for shoddy 4.x browsers, is at fault and not BSD.

  • Here [useit.com] is Nielsen's actual commentary on this topic. As he points out, "Hypertext should not be used to segment a long linear story into multiple pages...Proper hypertext structure is not a single flow 'continued on page 2'."
  • Zeldman [zeldman.com] has some very amusing "banner adverts that never made it" - check out This one [zeldman.com] and this one [zeldman.com] are my faves.

    -----

  • The URLs on those adds are suspicious and I tried rightclicking one and opening in a new window. It wanted me to run an executable. I wonder if it is a joke of of the ads are for real.

    Anyway, I thlaughed all thoughout this page. I thought it was great.

  • Its pages like these that have made me fork out for Opera - it has two extremely useful buttons on its toolbar.
    1) Dont show multimedia content on this page
    2) Override document CSS with your own.

    Now if they can also put in a toolbar button for Javascript and popups, I'd be in heaven.

    BTW - these settings are per page basis, not system wide so your other Opera windows are still singing and dancing. Navigator had this eons ago before coming under the influence of marketting people (otherwise, Netscape would have remained the no#1 browser in Win32 world).

    So everyone, have a look at Opera if you still haven't. You know the saying - things are free when your time has no value.
    Have fun.

  • Ok, it REALLY hates fake HTML tags [...]

    Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this Friday evening; it's not like anyone will actually read it now, but...

    I see others have already posted about how to escape special characters, but my take on the logic behind the "Plain Old Text" formatting option might still be of interest. Anyway:

    <EXPLANATION>
    You'll find it likes them better if you escape the '<' and '>' characters with "&lt;" and "&gt;" (and '&' is "&amp;"), assuming you're using the "Plain Old Text" mode, which, except for inserting a <BR> for each newline and filtering for forbidden stuff, inserts the text that you type directly into the generated page. Thinking about it that way makes it clear (in my opinion) what to expect it to do, though a lot of people seem to feel that it is exactly backwards because they expect the name "Plain Old Text" to refer to the results that they will get (i.e., tags not evaluated) rather than the mechanics of the page generation. Just keep thinking about it in terms of the HTML source -- special characters like angle brackets and ampersands will have the same meaning as if you were just to type everything into a text file "mycomment.html" (inside of the "<HTML><BODY> ... </BODY></HTML>" tags, of course) and drop that on your browser -- and you should have fewer surprises. Oh, and Preview, too.
    </EXPLANATION>

    David Gould
  • To add something that'll appear like

    <sarcasm> links to own site </sarcasm>

    into your post, you need to actually type it like this:

    &lt;sarcasm&gt; links to own site &lt;/sarcasm&gt;

    ... and use that preview button!

  • But, and this is a big but, what would happen when the proffesional AD guys saw this method was an effective way to do buisiness?

    Okay, what happens then?

    To get people to donate money to your site, you have to a) convince them that they want your site to keep existing, and b) that they need the money to continue existing.

    A) happening is good for me, no matter why they're making the site, since the only real reason they can do it is by making a site that's useful or entertaining.

    B) is a deterrant to coprorations who need to seem professional and want to keep their stock price high.
  • if only we could add graphics to our responses...
  • Hilarious! Sounds like the guy who wrote the rules of poetry which have the piss taken out of them in Dead Poets Society! Can we get him to do a little list of do`s and dont`s for music, art, cooking etc?
  • http://www.junkbusters.com/ never knew you could block ads. thanks alot man. i too hate the advertisements but i think it's better if i click on them because i never buy software (as i just download the backup of the stuff i already own...lol). i think advertising isin't really good online. and with talk of television blocking ads, they will mostly die (i hope)

  • Jesus Christ (Score:4)

    by Will The Real Bruce ( 235478 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:51PM (#388281) Homepage
    I couldn't read the damn article because of the sheer number of *cookies* it requested! Those are real banner ads!

    But once I killed them all, it was damn funny. :)
  • And you are going to believe what comes out of that movie? Wow...and I thought I had heard it all...I will pray for you.

  • I wonder.. (Score:4)

    by tedtimmons ( 97599 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:49PM (#388283) Homepage
    I wonder how much money they are going to make because their "ultimate banner page" was slashdotted. You've gotta figure there's a sucker born every minute, and some of those suckers are going to click through the ads :-)

  • Couln't read the article... (Score:3)

    by Overt Coward ( 19347 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:51PM (#388284) Homepage
    Too many damn ads in the way...

    --
  • This [uberbanner.com] is what banners will end up like, IMHO. Long live überBanner!
  • If you're a guy with a website that you want to see grow by having more bandwidth and disk space without having a corporate sponsor who's willing to pay for it, the only way is banner ads.

    I have a little web site, which was started about 6 years ago, that's mostly free resources for electronics projects, programming firmware, and similar technical subjects. For almost 4 years, it was hosted at a university web site, which cost me nothing, but 2 years ago they were no longer willing to host it, and I had to start paying. The site runs on it's own local-to-us server (not virtual hosted), so it's not exactly cheap to run, but I really need that local access to expend the creative energy to author reasonable web pages.

    Well, over the years people have sent emails from time to time, asking where to get some of the parts and materials shown on the pages. A couple years ago, shortly before moving the site, a friend-of-a-friend agreed to offer a couple of parts from his site, which had other e-commerce going on. Their price was much too high and their service wasn't so good. They eventually sold the boards they had paid to get made, and I decided to set up shop myself.

    Robin (girlfriend, partner, accountant) tells me that we've actually made a tiny profit, after having paid for the site hosting and all the other expenses. Of course, that tiny profit is based on working for free, but hey, I did that before.

    Now I'll agree that this model can't work for a lot of sites, like news sites, but it is sort-of working for us. The point is that banner adds are not the only way. My site has never carried a banner ad, and probably never will. Maybe someday we'll even make enough money that I can work on producing new material full time instead of just doing it on-the-side. As it is, I'm pretty damn excited that it's managing to cover the expenses, which I had been paying out-of-pocket !!

    If you're interested in the site, here's a link [pjrc.com].

  • Give the people at Slashdot some credit. When I submitted my L.A. getting nuked [network54.com] story, I got a pretty quick email reply with the answer I was looking for.

  • Site design (Score:4)

    by atrowe ( 209484 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:49PM (#388288)
    What I find even more annoying than multiple banners scattered around the page, are sites, like TomsHardware [tomshardware.com] that only have one or two ads per page, but trim the content down to one or two paragraphs per page, and have a 30 page article. I'd much rather deal with multiple banners on a static page than have to click through 10-30 pages to read a single story.

  • K5 (Score:4)

    by PhatKat ( 78180 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:53PM (#388289) Homepage
    Anyone interested in the topic may also want to read the thread [kuro5hin.org] over at K5 [kuro5hin.org]. Considering how much connection there is between the /. and k5 communities, avoiding redundancy between the two would be greatly appreciated.

  • A little test. (Score:5)

    by washirv ( 130045 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:53PM (#388290)
    Once you've read the article and come back to the slashdot page, try to remember what ads you saw on that page. Pretty impressive isn't it, how we've all learnt to ignore the noise and just read the article. So long as the advertisers don't get savvy to this...
  • Where do banner ads go after they have been filtered? Digital Hell?

    I would guess that they don't go to Digital Hell because they never existed in the first place. Would you send them there if they did?

  • Banner Ads Now have Banner Ads! Yow! (Score:4)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @02:54PM (#388292) Homepage Journal
    Well, it's a good satire piece [segfault.org] anway ;-)

    --

  • oblivion. How? By fooling my computer as to the source of the banner ads. Just bind the server carrying the .gif files to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts, and the banner gif won't load. This also works for those Flash banners and banner-sized Java applets (though you have to hunt around the webpage source to find the culprit!). If you still want to support a site, you can still blindly click on the .gif banner ads (i.e., to fund an impoverished website), but you won't know or care where the banner ad leads to.
  • Lets see...

    There were 2 banners about credit card debt.

    Careerbuilder.com

    Wall Street Journal.

    Something about weight loss.

    Thats all I can remember.
    -Restil
  • Oh, good, dozens of other people did the same thing. (-1, redundant) here I come!

    -------
  • Advertisers just want you to see them. If you don't click, they don't care. Just like they don't care if you throw away the 80% of your mail that is garbage. They know that 100 out of 1 million people will notice them, and that is enough. They're here to stay.


    Scratch-o-Matic
  • When you think about it, ads on the net are less invasive visually than ads in print. Most magazines, especially those rags from Ziff Davis, with names like EWeek and Interactive Week come with 1/2 page of ads with 1/2 of text and the opposing page is one solid ad. Banners on the net are annoying, but we should be thankful they haven't gotten huge. Oh wait, what am I talking about, here's a huge one [zdnet.com]!!

    On television and radio you have no choice but to watch ads, banners can be easily filtered or ignored.

    A small 450x60 banner isn't that big of deal, as long as it doesn't spawn endless windows. We should be thankful that is all they are and try to keep them that size.

    =-=-=-=-=

  • Dude, just change your comment spillover on the prefs page to like 20 or so, and bingo... You can also check the low-res box to make it faster-loading, too.
  • I really don't see what the point [pointlessgames.com] of this post is about. It doesn't figure into what's really happening to the massive "mog" [massmog.com] of sites out there. It seems that nearly everything [nearlyeverything.com] that's being pimped is more of a bit of soothing rain [soothingrain.com] in a world of miserable over-commercialization!
    ----
    PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
    MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
  • I agree completely. And the funny thing is, they do that because all the usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen say you should never make your user scroll - break up that text into several pages.

    Makes you wonder how they figured that was more usable, because its not.

  • Why ads are unnecessary (Score:5)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @03:38PM (#388301) Homepage Journal

    how else am I supposed to tell people about the games I produce

    Submit your site to the appropriate search engines and directories, so that when someone is looking for games, they find you.

    Yep, it's true: The Internet is interactive, and people have started using it to search for things. There's no longer any reason to "push" in a media when people are able to "pull" whenever they need to. Couldn't do that with newspaper, magazines, TV, or radio. Can with Internet.


    ---
  • What a useless post....and now a useless comment...
  • New York Times
    Some job site
    Some platimum credit card
    Some nonprofit that did something about credit improvement
    See, I remembered a bit...
  • Aren't articles at a site called SatireWire supposed to be funny? Can anyone tell me what the joke was?

    As for ad banners, I just meditated for 30 days at the W3C temple of semantic purity, and succeeded in training my optic nerves to block them before reaching my conscious mind. You could put a dozen banners on a page, and I wouldn't even notice!

  • What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images?

    well, because only a fraction of 1% of the general surfing population surfs without images (or with text-only browsers). additionally, those that do surf without images are probably the type that don't click-through to too many advertisments anyhow. that "ALT" attribute is much better spent teaching those who use, say, IE (the majority of the surfing population), how to "follow" the advertisement (hence "Click to learn more...").

    makes sense to me!

    - j

  • I saw only some boxes with ... and some promotion text. Ahh, I got it! it is Test Page For Filtering Software (proxomitron) !!!
    Need to write some filter to recognise satirical pages though...

    tandr
  • The best of both worlds: print view.
    (1)In most cases has all the parts of an article
    (2)Less pics=>loads faster
    (3)If you`re lucky, it`s ad-free
    (4)It`s easier on your eyes
    (5)It prints better too :-)
    Granted, not all sites got it, but if youn do see it in a multi-part story you`re interested in, you`re in luck.
  • Seems to me (and I Am Not A Browser Design Expert) that since Java code is sent as source and clearly marked (so it can be run) that it should be possible to design some kind of plug-in or filter that would massage it before giving it to the browser.

    I write code for an embedded device that requires source in the EPROMs after a download -- you can extract the program. No problemo, I wrote a filter that removes all comments and whitespace, uppercases everything, and while leaving known language keywords intact replaces all the variable, subroutine, and function names with random 4-digit hexadecimal numbers in the range A000-FFFF.

    Seems like it would be child's play (for one who knows the right hooks) to insert such a beast into any Java to turn ONCLOSE into ONHELLFREEZESOVER.

  • Hmm. So I post a perfectly factual and reasonable post about Tomshardware, and your post manages to flame me, mention god and hitler in the course of only two sentences.

    And yet, I'm the troll here.

    Sure thing, buddy.

  • Heh. That sounds even worse than my confusion, which resulted from using squirm [freshmeat.net].

    --

  • What do you use to make the ampersand less than show up as typed instead of getting "translated" into a "birdmouth"?
  • Unfortunately, no one clicks these ads, forcing sites to deploy ever larger and more intrusive banners.

    Absolutely. My bank now sports ads that require the latest version of Flash. As I don't have it installed on my machine, I get to see a nice annoying "this page requires you download a plugin" dialog every time I go there. And this is a company I'm actually doing real business with!

  • I'm pretty sure that most sites break up their articles into multiple pages to boost ad impressions and add more opportunities for banner placement, not usability.

    Sometimes I wish /. would consider breaking up huge pages, for those of us with antiquated computers and connections...

    -j
  • proxomitron! It'll filter just about anything out of the page...

    that is all.

    itachi
  • This is [uberbanner.com], or rather, should be, the alternate to banner ads.
  • While the article was amusing, we need to keep in mind why banner ads are getting so annoying.

    For better or worse, most websites are unwilling to operate permenantly at a loss, and thus seek to earn money. Unless the site is a retailer or requires paid registration, the most practical way to accomplish this is banner ads. Unfortunately, no one clicks these ads, forcing sites to deploy ever larger and more intrusive banners.

    The simple solution is for the community to organize an effort to click banner ads, particularly the more bland ones. Once sites notice this trend, they will realize that they can earn revenue by deploying small ads, and we will no longer have to put up with blinking neon monstrosities.
  • I didn't get any of it until I disabled my filters.

    Now I'm ROFL

  • Even better.. (Score:4)

    by Apache ( 14188 ) <foonix@nospAm.yahoo.com> on Friday March 02, 2001 @03:14PM (#388320)
    What I find really interesting is that in netscape 4.76 under FreeBSD the banners actually cover up part of the text from the article. I wonder if this was intentional or not...

  • Mountain View, CA - A number of low-traffic commercial sites that had been attempting to draw users to their sites were suddenly awash in unexpected hits this Friday, bringing them to a grinding halt. The apparent source of this traffic surge was a reference to a banner-laden page on Slashdot [slashdot.org], known for bringing down sites simply by posting links to them.

    A member of the Slashdot staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "Banners are annoying, it's a good thing those advertisers went down!" This may also be the first time a second-order Slashdot effect has brought down a web server. The advertisers could not be reached for comment, since no e-mail addresses could be obtained from the crushed Web servers.

  • I disagree completely and wholeheartedly.

    I see banner ads as an assault on my psyche, trying to extract from me things ($$$) which I want to keep.

    IF banner ads work, then I am paying to look at free sites one way or another (TANSTAAFL [science.uva.nl], and all that). I would rather be subjected to an earnest plea to support the site than I would subject myself to the creations of people whose very job is to subtly manipulate my psyche in the favor of their company.

    A number of the online [penny-arcade.com] comics [goats.com] I frequently read have shifted in the direction of a PBS model - if you like it, send us a few bucks. If we get enough bucks we'll run some kind of special feature (not too unlike the Street Performer Protocol [counterpane.com]). It is not anywhere near as obtrusive as your example - one of the reasons at least Penny-Arcade shifted to this model is that ad banners were too obtrusive and disruped their site. (their network kept sneaking popups in, plus just vibrating windows and stuff)
  • If you use Konqueror, set the "disable window.open()" in the configuration. It's the only browser that currently does this. For those of you that think it's unstable, you haven't been using it lately. The final bugs that annoyed me during the beta2 are gone. I no longer need to open Netscape or Mozilla anymore for anything.

    Of course, you could always hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc (basically xkill) and click the app to make it disappear without having a popup.

  • How many of you remember them /now/? (Score:3)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @04:48PM (#388332)
    You can confirm most of the items on the above list pretty easily, can't you?

    The difference between conscious and unconscious memory is essential to the advertiser's trade.

    They don't want to you to think about the ad after you've left it, they want you to recognize the brand, and associate certain qualities with it.

    How many things do you associate with Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Ford trucks? You don't remember every ad, but they all affected your gut feeling toward these brands. Advertising is mind pollution. You are dumber for having seen it.
    ---
  • what, is it bash on banner ad day today?

    Banner Ads Now Themselves Have Banner Ads

    http://segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=3aa0088a -087aad20 [segfault.org]

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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