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Re: Advertising Creepiness
On Sat, Nov 07, 1998 at 11:50:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> Myself, I try to mostly just snip out a few paragraphs of a story and
> comment on them, fair use and all.
I particularly dislike articles that are things forwarded from other
lists without comment (IP seems a particular offender here). These are
rarely interesting.
> This is the new "blind spot"...that foveal region about a third of the way
> down a Web page screen that has dancing icons, "click on me" junk, and
> corporate logos. My guess is that nearly all of us skip this junk
> completely, and I think marketing studies will someday confirm this. (There
> have been tantalizing reports in places like the "Wall Street Journal" that
> basically almost nobody sees these ads, but the full message hasn't sunk
> in.)
Click through rates are something like 2%, so most are screening them out.
I rarely noticed what the ads actually said.
> (Yes, I tried the utilities which purport to flush banner ads, but they
> didn't work well (long delays, cruftiness).)
I don't know which ones you have tried but junkbuster
http://www.junkbuster.org/ (a proxy on port 8000)
works _very_ well on my linux system, particularly with the "blank gif"
patch.
It blanks out 99% of banner gifs, which makes pages like metacrawler and
wired look more visually attractive and load faster.
Until I lost all the banner ads I hadn't realised how distracting all those
animated gifs at the top of the screen were and its now much faster and
easier to read the info you want, without them.
> Friends of mine routinely turn off all graphics, a point I'm about to reach.
I tried this but found it made the net too hard to use.
> So, Declan may think the banner ads at Wired.com pay the rent, and the bean
> counters may think this is so, but I doubt any of us are looking at the
> ads. Except the dummies.
It would give a brave browser manufactor (Opera?) quite an advantage if
they built the banner ad killer into the browser directly.
--
1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [email protected] http://www.pineal.com/
i'm a programmer: i don't buy software, i write it.
--tom christiansen