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'"
Metrics (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore. Safari has PithHelmet, Firefox has AdBlock, and Konqueror has
Re:Metrics (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I just don't use any browsers without blockers anymore.
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
99% of the internet could disappear and it would much nicer.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:4, Insightful)
These back-and-forths don't make any sense, its a market. Advertising is NOT a right, its a business model!
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Therefore, while we do have a "tragedy of the commons" type situation, you cannot clai
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.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
If it flashes, wiggles, blinks, moves, stutters, makes sound, takes up too much space, or changes its content in any way , it gets blocked - forever. Static ads I leave.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
So do I, unless the server is too slow and I have to wait for them. Then they go bye-bye
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Even if the /. ads were more muted or more relevant than most, at least some of them were flashy-blinky things, so out they all went.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
Your ad is a static image?
You can stay.
Is your ad animated?
You can stay.
Huge ads or ones that distract too much to read content get added to Adblock.
I recognise your desire to advertise to make money, now please recognise that it is your content why i visit your page, not to subject myself to annoying 'Tagworld faux chat dialogues' etc.
Maybe they will rethink their business model once they realise of 1000 visits
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
-nB
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Informative)
What you need is Firefox with the NoScript [mozilla.org] extension. Its default is to disallow all javascript, and you can selectively whitelist sites allowed to execute Javascript, without allowing the advertisers on that site to run their scripts. All the annoying pop-ups and pop-under ads are now gone.
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Informative)
I have taken to AdBlocking virtually every site that delivers third party scripts. I started out blocking just the annoying ad scripts, but I'm now blocking falkag, google-analytic
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
If I use a site that depends on Javascript (flickr, etc.) all I have to do is whitelist it with two clicks o' yon
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 e
Cookies (Score:2)
I wish Firefox had a cookie function where I could right-click on a page and enable/disable/remove cookies for th
Re:Cookies (Score:4, Informative)
I run with "prompt always" too. I differ from you in that for the most part I reject all cookies by default, unless it's a forum or some place I'm interested in creating or maintaining a longer-term relationship. Occasionally I'll be too quick to say no, and Cookie Button makes it darned easy to go back and reenable them. Firefox's cookie manager is horrible to navigate -- it's virtually unusable after you've built up a list of a thousand different sites that you've rejected or accepted at some time in the past.
Re:Cookies (Score:2)
Firefox's cookie manager is close to useless once the list has more than a handful of cookies in it. It's sorted alphabetically by then name of the host that issued the cookie, which is often unrelated to the name of the site you're at. Let's say you wanted to whitelist your cookie from xfire. Would you look for that cookie under "x", for xfire.com? Or "w", for www.xfire.com? Would you believe "d" for dcs.xfire.com? Yeah, that's intuiti
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
-nB
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
I don't know about others but I was never really bothered by static banners and occasionally even purchased a relevant advertised product. As a matter of fact I never even considered blocking ads until "Spank the Monkey" appeared.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Not my problem. If companies want to make money, they will find a way. People are simply using ad-blockers and the like to tell companies that the current method is not acceptable.
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, no web site ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American public.
Even if every geek out there installed Firefox and AdBlock, that leaves 80+% of the machines belonging to the great unwashed masses who can punch all the monkeys they want. As long as Joe Sixpack is out there generating eyeballs for these sites, I'm going to free ride the whole trip.
Besides, I figure I'm just saving Doubleclick the bandwidth. It's not like I've ever purchased anything at all from an on-line ad, targeted or not. All my purchases have been driven by me, through Google/Froogle searches, pricewatch, Amazon, ebay, etc. I do not follow ad links.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
I'm afraid that's irrelevant - before I used an ad-blocker I never paid attention to the ads anyway. I've been freeloading on websites since 1994.
Incidentally, I suppose you'd also assert that I'm taking revenue away from TV companies when I press 'fast farward'? You sound like a marketing shrill.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Serious
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
I may be mist
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
If you select "Hide ads" then it's still downloaded, just not displayed. I beleive "remove ads" parses out the offending img tag before the page is rendered. ICBW.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
perhaps there are too many pages for the market to bare. of course when you tell advertising people that, they would just look for ways to
Re:Sunday Newspaper Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
You know that big lump of color advertising in the middle of the Sunday newspaper?
Well... I throw that out too without looking at it.
Do you know what I do when a crappy commercial comes on the tube?
Yeah... I change the channel.
Do you know I do when a commerical comes on the radio?
I... err... Well there doesn't seem to be any ads on my iPod. I guess I could put them there, but maybe that is why I stopped listening to the radio on the drive to work.
Truth of the matter is I am an advertisers worst nightmare and I don't really go that far in refusing to view ads.
Its not because I don't like the idea of advertisments, but if the advert interupts my stream of entertainment or causes annoyance... I tend to find a way to stop it or I find another mehtods of entertainment.
Billboards, related ads to entertainment, and entertaining ads will get my eyes and ears.
Obtrusive, non-related ads, and annoying ads will get my immediate disintrest.
Entertainment and information with the ads is just as important as the content... Otherwise if I can't shut out the ads, I'm going to shutout the content.
Re:Sunday Newspaper Ads (Score:2)
The billboards are starting to get flashier. There are those "triangle" rotating billboards with three ads that switch every 10 seconds or so; I've also seen some billboards with flashing lights, or even worse the kind in NYC that are animated.
It would be interesting to see government statistics of accidents correlated with the locations of these flashier billboards.
Re:Sunday Newspaper Ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Truth of the matter is I am an advertisers worst nightmare
And yet you bought an ipod.
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
Their problem (Score:2)
That's their problem, not ours. The consuming is not responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable.
-matthew
Re:Their problem (Score:2)
Humour the debate... what happens if/when a large enough majority of people are using ad-blockers? Will you be happy that no-one's viewing those nasty adverts anymore even though the new alternative is to pay $5 per month to each and every website whose content you'd like to view?
Re:Their problem (Score:2)
I don't see the problem with that, because that just means that there's content worth $5/mo to view.
Re:Their problem (Score:2)
It is exactly the point. It isn't my problem. I have the right to filter, manipulate, and censor any and all of the content that I legally download. And that is all there is to it.
Humour the debate... what happens if/when a large enough majority of people are using ad-blockers?
They'll find a new way to make money or they'll close down. The internet got along just fine before ads became the norm, albeit with less content.
Will you be h
I did *not* punch that monkey (Score:2)
Interrupting my page-read to put an adserver on my block list (I use Proxomitron) is in itself a distraction for me, so many adservers are not blocked. But if an ad is flickering loudly to get my attention, dancing around the page or floating over the content I'm trying to read, such that I find that step less of an interruption, that ad company loses its place on my screen permanently. If so many people block the ads that piss them off, I think web companies will s
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
I propose that, if they really want to deliver their content, they just suck it up and absorb the cost themselves.
If you really want to deliver something on the web, then do it. Notice "making somebody else pay for it" is not part of the equation.
Where in your constitution does it say "A free market, being necessary
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
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 hungry4r
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Ad-blocker-autorespondo-preventer-curcumvent-o-tro n(tm) !
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Ah.. computers...
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
That's a concern now?!
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Easy, turn your content into flat image files and host them http://doubleclick.net/ [doubleclick.net] so that *.doublick.net/* ad block wild cards will block out the desired content. Err... Well... As long as you don't think that having to read pages of jpegs to be a dragrading experience.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:5, Funny)
Um.... let me think... I think it's called Firefox, or Mozilla, or something like that.
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
Re:Metrics (Score:2)
OT: your sig (Score:2)
But if a naked woman were to pop up in front of me, I assure you my woman would be there to block her. :-/
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.
Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo (Score:2)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marschip/hosts [xs4all.nl]
Add those entries to a Windows system (c:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc), and you can watch your browsing experience slow to a painful crawl.
The approach may work or work better if the DNS client service is disabled (which, incidentally, can be typically turned off without issue), though I haven't bother to check. Maybe someone else can comment.
Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No doubleclick.net with DNS blackholing / Adblo (Score:3, Informative)
With the advent of these powerful and extensive adblockers (supports regular expressions!), and the ease of installation and usage, it makes me wonder how online advertisers could survive...
Re: I came here to post that (Score:2)
Re: I came here to post that (Score:2)
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...
Re:DoubleClick who? (Score:2)
None of my users ever get any of their stuff anymore.
Know what else? NOBODY NOTICED. Users don't care if there is a 404 in that box or an ad, all they know is the site runs a little faster.
My HOSTS file on my own machines is something like 16k of data (found the list somewhere).
If I weren't really lazy, I would add a whole bunch more by finding them myself... so far I have just used lists others generated.
Re:DoubleClick who? (Score:2, Funny)
I for one... (Score:2)
oh boy (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Online advertising? (Score:3, Informative)
Tracking mouse movements (Score:3, Funny)
1. How do they do this? (JavaScript?)
2. They're going to find my mouse movements utterly baffling. I like to wave my mouse around in circles, highlight random chunks of text & various other pointless, yet occupying hand motions.
I'm going to start practicing how to spell out "Suck It" in mouse movements, just for these guys.
Re:Tracking mouse movements (Score:2)
Re:Tracking mouse movements (Score:2)
Yep, that's the stuff. You know those annoyingly cute mouse-trailers that were all the rage a couple years ago? Same idea. Capturing the data is pretty easy. Making something meaningful out of all that data is something else.
Effective CPM is all you need (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
State of Internet Advertising = Unrest (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
It's okay, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
One could infer, then, that the people who are not using adblocking fall into one of two categories: those who enjoy the advertising, and those who do not, but are too novice to set up adblocking. Both of those classes of people are the kinds that online advertisers want to target, because each of those classes is more easily separated from their money than the class of people who do not like online advertising and are savvy enough to block it.
This is why you don't hear online advertisers really making much noise about adblocking. Those who are blocking ads are much less likely to buy were they to see the ads anyway, and the fact that they're blocking reduces load on the technology supplying the ads.
It's a win-win. Those who don't want to see ads -- don't. Those who want to target ads to the consumers who are most likely to respond and buy -- do.
Re:It's okay, really. (Score:2)
those who enjoy the advertising
I think you meant "tolerate". The only ads that are enjoyed are the funny ones.
What sites will need to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What sites will need to do (Score:2)
Re:What sites will need to do (Score:2)
That's why I don't think we're going to have to worry about that approach. As the online game world has shown us, you simply cannot trust the client. Since these are advertisers, who make a living screwing over as many people as they can, they're going to expect others to do the same.
Mike Skallas' HOSTS (Score:4, Informative)
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:One Interesting Point from TFA (Score:2)
That depends. Number of looks isn't nearly as important as number of conversions. As an advertiser, given a choice between an advertisement that'll bring 1000 people into your store but only 1 will likely buy or an advertisement that'll only bring in 100 people but 10 of them are likely to buy, which one is a better advertisement?
A high number of views may mean that you're getting your ad out in front of a lot of the kind of people who click through an ad solely to cost the advertiser money or to give the
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me be the first to say it. If you have 50 different ways to measure something, you do not have any measurements that matter.
When advertisers are looking at buying media, they want to use a standard metric so that they can do a rough apples to apples comparison. The question advertisers want to know is how much it costs and how many people that might buy their product will see it. In the world of three network TV channels, you could talk about cost per million and you basically have a homogenous mass, so it was pretty easy.
Nowadays, you have media fragmentation and advertisers do not know what to buy. Should you buy commercial time during the NCAA tournament? How about the Simpsons? How about on MTV? Since people are using DVR, maybe it is better to do a product placement and put that Coke can on American Idol. Maybe you should just buy search advertising on Google.
You get the point. While it may be interesting for advertisers to track purchase habits with loyalty cards at grocery stores, through capturing personal information via Google or targeted search results ads, the bottom line is that you can measure it 50 ways till Sunday and it doesn't much help with the central problem - what media do you buy and how much do you buy? Advertisers want an algoritm that breaks it all down and gives them the best bang for their buck.
There is an old saying in advertising, "I know I'm wasting half my money on advertising, I just don't know which half." The reality is that despite all the scary privacy issues that are starting to come into play - advertisers generally have no clue about what they are doing. And you know what? It's only going to get harder. People can talk about getting into the content tail, but it doesn't make the advertiser's job any easier.
Stop DoubleClick from identifying you (Score:2)
Of course, this assumes that you actually trust DoubleClick in the first place...
Re:google ads versus others (Score:2, Funny)
BTW, is 'ass heat' a measurable phenomena?
Re:google ads versus others (Score:2)
(Obviously, their website would be assassassin.com.)
Re:google ads versus others (Score:2)
Re:a part of my hosts file: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:a part of my hosts file: (Score:2)
works alot faster, also if you have a webserver on your local machine it doesnt throw up errors.
Re:pay me (Score:3, Insightful)
It might be worth that to some company, but not if you're anonymous.
Re:Ads for bras on /. ?? (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously it's for your girlfri....oh, wait, nevermind.
Re:Ads for bras on /. ?? (Score:2)
Re:Ads for bras on /. ?? (Score:2)
Hint:
Giving her sexy underthings for her birthday = BAD
Giving her sexy underthings for YOUR birthday = GOOD