New Online Advertising Model Riles Journalists 181
Wynken de Word writes "A new online advertising model linking commercial messages to individual words of editorial content aims 'to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet -- the text of articles and message boards -- in what [company backers] bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play' according to this article at Ad Age, a leading advertising industry magazine. On the other hand, the article notes: 'If it looks like a pop-up, feels like a pop-up or interrupts like a pop-up, we might as well just assume consumers will outright hate and reject the format,' said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a Cincinnati research firm that tracks online consumer buzz."
Pfft. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pfft. (Score:2)
Re:Pfft. (Score:2)
Re:Pfft. (Score:2)
Re:Pfft. (Score:2, Informative)
It sucked badly as it slowed page loads down while it scaned through the page looking for the keywords to highlight.
Re:Pfft. (Score:2, Funny)
And popup.
Re:Pfft. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not your content.
Re:Pfft. (Score:2)
Re:Pfft. (Score:2)
The pessimist in me says news distributors(to seperate the content producer from the one that gets it to my eyeballs) already are a bit ad-happy. The optimist in me says as a publisher they'd refuse ad dollars if it would compromise journalistic integrity.
Idealistic of me isn't it?
As for consumers, consumers are ad-overloaded. No matter which argument is put out to get ads on this or that format, in this or that medium, they don'
Microsoft ads (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Microsoft ads (Score:5, Funny)
Speculation about where "M$" [wikipedia.org] points to?
Re:Microsoft ads (Score:2)
Hmmm, that's odd: I thought Beowulf was a Saxon poem [alliteration.net], not British at all.
Re:Microsoft ads (Score:4, Informative)
It's just funny to see
Hasn't this been done? (Score:1)
ads (Score:2, Funny)
I won't read it anyway.
Guess what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Guess what? (Score:2)
They have designed them ads for people like me. I knows it.
Re:Guess what? (Score:2)
Its stupid cause the popup has nothing to do with the article being read. How can one expect to shift his mental zones for some totally unrelated content.
Google Ads (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google Ads (Score:2)
After all we all remember what used to happen when someone typed into google "More Evil then the devil himself". In btw, it has changed lately... Apparently chads in Florida can do miracles...
Re:Google Ads (Score:2)
For instance eariler this week one site had an article on how in support of some sport player people wear afro wig. Some principal or someone like that wore one got photographed and then got into trouble for racal insensitivily. The google ads were filled with wig sellers.
Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
Re:Google. (Score:1, Insightful)
Incredibly dumb idea. Thanks, Ad geniuses for turning the internet into junk delivery vehicle.
Re:Google Link Limit (Score:2)
no mind to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Just what we need (Score:2, Funny)
They took the idea from wikis! (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems like they took the idea, but they sell the words! It will be annoying.
For example See the word Linux on a page. Joe user will think great, I'm going to learn about linux! But get in your face adverts for linux support services instead!
Wikis are good, Adwords are bad!
will add noise (Score:2)
Or if it is just garbage trying to sell me yet another penis enlargement kit.
Re:They took the idea from wikis! (Score:4, Informative)
not only that, but it smacks too much like what Microsoft wanted to do with their browser putting "Smart Tags" on top of ordinary webcontent [sdnpk.org]. That got shot down very fast as a breach of the writers copyright as they were messing with original works in an unauthorised manner...
Re:They took the idea from wikis! (Score:2)
This is hosted at the server end, and the effect is exactly what the publisher wants to happen. Of course, it seems like any old popup blocker will work here, no problem.
Speaking of popups, I've been using Mozilla for almost two years now, and of course I've never seen a popup in that time. X10 cameras are but a distant memory! Are popups
Wikis? What's so special about wikis? (Score:2)
Seems like they took the idea, but they sell the links! It will be annoying.
That last sentence I do agree with. I've no problem with AdWords, however, as long as they are unobstructive (no pop-ups) and properly distinguished from the content, which it doesn't look like these will be. What's the alternative? Subscription Google?
Re:Wikis? What's so special about wikis? (Score:2)
Maybe someone will find a way to enable content to be shared without the need for advertising or subscriptions.
OK, OK, perhaps it's a total pipe-dream. But I find even AdWords annoying. The simple reason is that I'm relatively clued in enough to already k
Re:They took the idea from wikis! (Score:2)
Not exactly... Wikis aren't a "rebranding", they are a return to the original concept of the Web that was never strongly supported in software before.
Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW idea was quite different from the browser model popular for the last decade. He had conceived that editing web pages would be accomplished seamlessly within the same software that views them (and within 2 orders of magnitude as frequently)
Actual topical links aren't bad (Score:4, Insightful)
But we all know that it's not going to be like that. Someone's going to use the word 'prevention' when discussing Enron finances, and the link will jump to the site of Trojan prophylactics.
The best we can hope for is a few really badly conceived links, or news stories which start to look like an Everything2 node with fifty links per paragraph, so that this form of ad will fade away, too.
Re:Actual topical links aren't bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way that I could ever see this justified AT ALL, and i still think its not cool, would be that Every ad linkd from the story is labelled "AD" somehow - either by bracketed text, or maybe the link being a different colour from normal links.
I find it very hard to see any way that this isn't a bad thing. I think it could turn in to a very bad think.
Remember - Adverts were first picked up by old paper media as a way to support the actual journalism - It would cover the costs to create and deliver the content. Now it seems we're getting closer and closer to the content being made to deliver the adverts. How long until articles are being changed to fit in certain key words from advertisers? Scary.
Re:Actual topical links aren't bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Who cares? (Score:2)
BTW, I think the ads down the side of that article show how a good ad's system works. Google has given 4 (nicely subtle) ads, all about stopping (not so subtle) ads. Great!
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
On a more selfish level, I keep a weblog about London [colingregorypalmer.net]. If some local pub gave me a wad of cash (please!) to work them into my weekly articles and link to them, how would to write a plugin that could distinguish between the paid content an the article? You couldn't.
-Colin
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
If some local pub gave me a wad of cash (please!) to work them into my weekly articles and link to them, how would to write a plugin that could distinguish between the paid content an the article? You couldn't.
I'll bet that it's this sort of back and forth that will finally lead to real AI.
Disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiding adverts inside of the content, appearing as part of the context, is disgusting. I'm sickened by the concept.
News 20 years from now: "This just in... McDonalds tastier than ever! More at 11." I only can hope something changes to destroy this trend by then.
Re:Disgusting (Score:2)
The only thing which would ever change this trend is to get the people who own the newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters to quit with the funny idea that news is there to be manipulated into profits for themselves as well as others.
Re:Disgusting (Score:3, Interesting)
Its very hard for the precious few people
Deja vu! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Deja vu! (Score:2)
Re:Deja vu! (Score:2)
microsoft smart text? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think widespread consumer criticism about hijacking webpages put the kibosh on that. But I use firefox, so I don't know what IE is doing these days
Re:microsoft smart text? (Score:1)
-bZj
Re:microsoft smart text? (Score:4, Informative)
it stealses our precious vision!
There's been a lot of whinging [wsj.com] about Micros~1's latest Innovation [microsoft.com], with talk of the horrible nerve they have to "re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave".
Aside from the usual Micros~1 practice of claiming others' technology as their own, and the icky ripoff of the Aqua GUI in their screenshot (What is with this fascination with white or almost-white backgrounds? GUIs, Web pages, everything. White backgrounds are too harsh and make reading difficult. One of the more significant advances between Win3.1 and Win9x was the death of the horrible white background everywhere, and now they're doing their best to revive it.), I see this as a good thing.
For once, they seem to be behaving somewhat responsibly in the integration of new functionality (although I wonder how true this would be were the specter of an antitrust breakup not looming over them). Smart Tags are quite visibly different, both in appearance and behavior. They aren't including any tag packages with IE (although I have no doubt they'll plug their ad-pimping package as much as they possibly can). All processing is done locally, which saves bandwidth and prevents a list of all the URLs you visit being sent to Redmond ("What's Related", anyone?).
Smart Tags scare Web "designers" to no end, because they exploit the most fundamental and useful feature of the World Wide Web: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks scare them for 2 simple reasons:
Obviously, these can't be used as arguments against the introduction of these tags, so instead they complain about how their sites are being edited behind their backs. But this is a lie and everyone knows it. Their pages are still stored on their server in exactly the same pattern of bytes as before. What frightens them is that the reader might be given the option to go read something else, and this is not right.
What they don't realize is that they never had the right nor the ability to control the presentation of their site. From the moment their pages are posted on a public server, I have the right to do anything I want with them. I can view the source. I can critique their site and their product. And I can disable their grotesque colors, their unreadable fonts, and their gratuitous JavaScript. I can see if their site contains any value to me, and if not, I can leave. A browser is not a television for them to flash pretty images on. It is a tool for me to explore publications, and as such I expect it to provide me with cross-referencing features.
There is public documentation on creating Smart Tag packages [microsoft.com]. Anyone can write their own annotations and distribute them to friends or the world at large. Of course, this ability is only useful to "the hate groups, the spammers and the junk marketers on the Web". I want to see Smart Tags in Mozilla. I want to see widespread grassroots dictionaries [tuxedo.org], references [ic.ac.uk], and
Quit whining. (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe is a new salesman and brings in his first order from a customer. The processing clerk tells Joe he has to take the order back because it's not filled out correctly. Joe's manager drops by to see how the new salesman is doing. Down in the mouth, Joe relates the story about how the processing clerk is sending him back out to the customer to get a corrected order.
The manager is livid. He marches to the processing clerk and tells him: "When my man comes in here with a sale, you get up and shake his hand because he's keeping you employed! If there's a problem with the order, you fix it!"
So where does this relate to this story? Easy: the bills have to get paid. There's bandwidth to pay for, computers, journalists salaries or freelancing fees...something has to pay for it. You can argue all you want about whether or not some of those things are paid at the level they should be (high executive salaries, high sales commissions)...but they still have to be paid. And after all that, mass media conglomerates have shareholders to think about, too.
Plus...there's a glut of freelance journalists out there. Freelancers especially should be glad they get their stuff published anywhere. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth to see links in your article or pop-ups because of keywords in your article, but it could be worse: your article could have not been published.
If this "trend" is all you've got to worry about, you've got too much time on your hands.
Re:Quit whining. (Score:2)
Re:Quit whining. (Score:5, Insightful)
Old News (Score:2)
Re:Old News (Score:2)
Easy! Get a good browser [mozilla.org] and dump that piece of junk Internet Exploder!
No chance... (Score:2)
If they try and weasel it into the browser-end, then HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Re:No chance... (Score:1)
-bZj
Re:No chance... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know about you guys... (Score:1)
It's like the old adage says - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Or, as my college room
Insanely Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
'If it looks like a pop-up, feels like a pop-up or interrupts like a pop-up, we might as well just assume consumers will outright hate and reject the format,'
Didn't Einstien say that insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again expecting different results?
They keep trying with the boorish, intrusive ads as if an irritating ad wasn't necessarily an irritating ad. All web marketers must be insane. Or stupid. Wait wait... let's not be narrow-minded about this.... they could easily be both.
On a more serious note: whatever. I don't care. Go ahead and put ads right in the context of something I'm trying to read. It's really irritating trying to read a forum post or an article and having the text keep changing color because there are ads weaved into it. Put that on your site, and you can rest assured that I'll leave in a heartbeat and never come back, just like I've already done with some sites. Hell, even I can remember from the one marketing class I had to take that ads were supposed to heighten interest in or raise awareness of a product in a positive manner. Yet, these bumbling morons keep turning the advertising into the content, or pushing the content out of the way in favor of the advertising so that people get pissed off by a popup or whatever, THEN see what's being advertised.
What good does it do me to have to struggle with ads to read content? Why should I come back? If the ads destroy the value of the site.... how is it even an idea worth trying? What good does it do the advertiser to raise product awareness with a medium that's making them MAD. What, you want people to be angry when they think of your car? Idiots...
Ad Agencies (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if everyone plays nice ads are modestly effective. If one person plays dirty, they win by a good margin. If everyone plays dirty, ads are less than modestly effective. Human nature being what it is, nobody wants to play nice if the guy playing dirty will beat them... so everyone plays dirty and everyone loses.
Also, ad agencies don't care if they ruin the quality of everything their campaigns touch, so long as the client sees enough effect from the effort to pay for the next campaign. They get their souls from the same place as most lawyers, and Darl.
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:4, Informative)
They even target sick people using 'tele-screens' [bbc.co.uk].
Seriously fucked-up psychology.
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:2)
I seriously thought your post was a joke until I followed the link. That's just sick.
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:2)
Dear... god.....
That is the single most disgusting thing I think I've ever seen in my life.... every employee involved in the process of selling, developing, or managing those sets for Patientline needs to be skinned alive and dipped in the Dead Sea....
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:3, Funny)
They get their souls from the same place as most lawyers, and Darl.
For those who thought the parent wasn't specific enough, that would be /dev/null...
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:3, Interesting)
There will always be the agencies who play dirty. They are just trying to make a buck the quickest way possible, and it usually doesn't get them as far as you might think. The best ad agencies are the ones who shoot for quality.
Re:Ad Agencies (Score:2)
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill your
Advertising Darwinism (Score:2)
I browse with popups disabled. Generally, I leave banner ads alone, but whenever I see one with ugly flashing colors or the ones that jump about like a Chihuahua on meth, I block all images from that server.
When advertisers started using flash to get around that sort of thing (and drag the poor little laptop I use for casual browsing to a crawl in the process), I added the flash blocker where you can click to actually load the flash.
Simple ads have supported newspapers and magazines for years, there's n
OSnews (Score:2)
There's buzz in Cincinnati? (Score:2)
Erudite scribes == software's cognitive dissonance (Score:2)
Time to go see if the Amazon ranking for Thesauri are up.
Great. Product placement in news. Sheesh. (Score:3, Insightful)
So when we get our next serial killer story, we will see an ad for a better, more powerful gun?
When we read about a tanker truck accident on I-94 outside of Battle Creek, MI will we start reading ads about Kellogg's Corn Flakes (based in Battle Creek)?
Will an Amtrak derailment story prompt Greyhound ads?
Where the hell does this stop?
They'll never learn... (Score:2)
I guess it's because, unlike print ads, we can measure how successful a web ad is by how many times the link is clicked and they now realize that people have been ignoring print ads for years.
I know we need advertisers so we can pay for the content and deliver
warez and porn (Score:2)
This is happening on forums I post to as well (Score:4, Informative)
So when i'm posting in the tech support forum or whatever and mention one of 9-16 keywords they have relating to different companies from IBM to Nvidia to ATI those words automatically get highlighted and linked to a site where you can buy those companies products..
I don't particullary care for this because while I'm not sure of the legality of it, I don't want MY post and MY thoughts to be the vehicle for targeted ads that I may or may not support. Its one thing with banner ads n such.. but on my posts? i find that to be a new low and now I make sure to use spaces to defeat it.
And to all of you who will say it pays for the site blah blah.. I donate to the site regulary to help keep it running.. I just don't like my forum posts being turned into ADS!!
Better way to get around it... (Score:2, Informative)
This is GOOD (Score:4, Interesting)
I for one don't see a problem with this model. Here are my reasons:
#1. The rightful people are receiving the rewards for their hard work. And why not? The more ad dollars you allow them, the better and more content we all get. Do you really want more subscription-based content sites, or is free more appealing to you?
#2. How annoying exactly is it? Ok I agree that the inline popups can be annoying, but then you're reading the article. Why in the world would you go mouse exploring all over the words if you're not interested in their ads? To me this type of advertising is NOT annoying at all. Much better than the popups or the skyscraper ads that pollute your screen.
#3. Whenever the issue of advertising arises, you see a boatload of people whining about how ads are not remotely interesting nor pertinent to their interests. Guys would be presented with tampon banners, etc. Well, here you have context-specific ads. If you happen to be reading an article about cars and you see a link for Mercedes (and you just so happen to be interested in that), you can now click on it and be happy!
How annoying? (Score:2, Insightful)
-If the linked words are marked by another colour or underlined. A well trained reader has a few fixations of the eye on each row of text. But these markings would not be seen as standard text, and will thus generate more fixations and a "stuttered" reading experience.
-Trying to read a wiki text with a lot of references illustrates this point: It is OK if the text is short, but a longer text is virtually unreadable.
Pop Ups? (Score:2)
Boom!
There's only so much consumer $ (Score:2, Interesting)
View the demo (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.vibrantmedia.com/content/intellitxt
Re:View the demo (Score:3, Insightful)
It means the reader has to distinguish between paid links and real ones. Link styles are different all over the place, so it's not trivial to distinguish the two. It means I have to keep the mouse cursor away from the text for fear of triggering a pop-up.
Most importantly, it blurs
Re:View the demo (Score:3, Informative)
That demo is a flash popup, not the same as a real page. According to that it has two effects on the page: selecting a normal ad to go on the page, and making double-underlined green links that give popups when selected. SO I suspect that you'll at least see the underlines, whihc would be a distraction, till a filter comes along a week later.
Re:View the demo (Score:2)
Yeah, ditto.
Have a look at the source:
What's wrong with just making frigging links ???
They do it because they can (Score:2)
One way to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Provide a visible link to the ad-page from your front page and in your navigational construct. (For example, Slashdot could put this link in the left-hand link list, under it's own heading or under, say, Services.)
Keep statistics for how much this pays off. Don't knock the idea until it's been thoroughly tried.
This will force advertisers to be truly interesting. Maybe sort the ads into categories, or prioritize ads that are related to recently visited pages.
The idea is to be maximally non-annoying.
As an aside, I find google-text-ad-style ads to be very intrusive since they are harder to block. There are periods in my life (for example when I'm flush for cash) that I am extremely disinterested in (commercial and other) solicitation, and exposing me to advertising then only causes me to feel hostility towards the advertiser.
Please, spread this idea.
We experimented with this in a paper magazine I worked for - putting all the commercials in a clearly designated spot in the back. Other magazines have tried the same approach. AFAIK, however, they haven't kept statistics and neither did we.
The effects on good-will this has will be interesting to observe.
(For television, this would be analogous to putting all of a networks commercial spots on a separate channel.)
Truth Hurts (Score:2)
What riles people is the notion that some link exists between news reporting, editorials and advertisers.
In theory, journalists like to think of themselves as crusaders, exposing the truth to the public. It's a noble goal and I'm happy they're carrying on the crusade.
But in practice, we're all conditioned by what we've been exposed to in the past, and much of what we read, see and hear only serves to reinforce points of view that were formed earlier.
The tie between money, media and politics is not new.
Did not originate in spam (Score:3, Informative)
Rather than explain on every single page what a "TFT" is, highlight the first (or first three, or every, whatever) occurance of the word on the page and have it create a small pop-up with brief description. Optionally, a link to another document could be offered.
This could be done manually, but instead including an external javascript (src="") is much easier to control and maintain.
In a way, it behaves like CSS - applying itself to word-elements, rather than mark-up elements.
Of course, ad-people quickly saw the opportunity to use it for advertising. That doesn't make the technology bad, though. Much like P2P services and those using it for illicit acts.
copyright moral rights (Score:4, Interesting)
Popups clearly do not affect the work per se, they just add junk around the edges. Same goes for all other sorts of advertising. Also, some reasonable allowance is made for commercial purposes (e.g. splitting a work up into separate parts to make it easier for people to read it, or whatever). However, this new type of advertising is really quite insidious: it manipulates the text, and possibly it can be considered derogatory because the authors of the text may mean one thing, but the "subtext" of the advertising message may suggest something else: I mean, authors often leave words and phrases to the interpretation of the reader, but when you overload those words with advertising, the advertising may "suggest" something that the author did not intend. I think there's a lot of scope of problems here.
training the self (Score:2)
Hey Mozilla team! (Score:2)
Ads caused me to spend $8 in two years. (Score:3, Interesting)
For a period of maybe two years, I often watched the old Arsenio Hall show on TV. During that time, I noticed I spent less than $8 on things that I saw advertised.
I think the pool of poorly educated people who would buy something because they saw an ad is diminishing.
Froogle [google.com] is great for people like me who buy things after doing research.
money wasted (Score:2)
Where are all the relevant, context sensitive ads we were promised?
For additional credit, did the X10 company go bust or did they learn a valuable lesson?
Response rate (Score:3, Insightful)
I though everyone already knew that new advertisement technologies always have dramatically higher response rates not because they are more effective, but simply because they are new. Personally I know that after I see it for the first ten times, I will spend a minute and add a filter to Proxomitron to never see it again.
Where does it stop? (Score:2)
of a box of computer printer paper ) for every
man, woman, and child are thrown away each year
- movie theaters are now showing television
commercials
- google is going to read email to target
advertising
- all sorts of businesses AND US governments
redistributing personal information without
permission.
Now this, where does it stop?
When does the right of a business to make the maximum possible profit ( not stated in the constitution ) __sto
re: If it looks like a pop-up, feels like a pop-up (Score:2)
tagword has had this for quite a while (Score:2)
They do little dhtml popups over certain words. It works on the base HTML without having to mess with the page.
Same thing..
wrong (Score:2)
It is so much more than this. If it looks like an ad that is interrupting me, or insults me or my intelligence by attempting to sneak its way into the text I am reading when I have clearly rejected looking at the ad in a more traditional location (banner ad, popup, popunder, etc), it won't work.
In fact, if that
Re:osnews (Score:2)
Oh wait, you aren't using firefox are you.
Opens page in ie
Oh, that is annoying. How do you stand it???
vows never to use ie again even to run a quick test(for the umpteenth time)
The bigger issue (Score:2)
127.0.0.1 itxt.vibrantmedia.com
That will disable the in-line advertising. The larger issue, of course, is that other people read the things you create. You have no way of controlling the browser THEY use, and whether THEY disable it. So a clueless user who happens to use IE, and reads your post on some site that uses IntelliTXT, it will have ads embedded in it. And they might as we