Re: Interesting Twist to BANNER ADVERTISING

From: Matt Magri <matt_at_netmeg.net>
Date: Thu 13 Jan 2000 15:05:50 -0500

FRED WROTE
> In the banner exchange schemes, ad banners are 99.9%
> of the time NOT part of the content. In fact, the
> site owners seldom knows what banner will display for
> any given surfer at any given moment.

TO WHICH DAVID MCKNIGHT REPLIED:
> How one can say that a banner is not part of the
> content, when it clearly appears on the page, is
> beyond me.

I assume he was saying that there was still a banner
there and, if it was replacing a rotational ad
dynamically supplied by an ad network, that the
original ad was not chosen by the web designer anyway,
so what's the difference? It's a rationalization, of
course.

FRED WROTE:
> What about schools, government ISPs, and others who
> automatically filter out ads, spam and porno? Will the
> schools go to jail?

TO WHICH DAVID MCKNIGHT REPLIED:
> This is a *confused* argument, comparing e-mail SENT to
> one's server without request, to a web page served to
> you on request. Two (actually three when you toss in
> site blocking) completely different things are
> happening here.

He was talking about places that actually filter
content of webpages based on whatever rules of
acceptability the site has, so it's apples to apples in
that regard. There -are- differences, of course, which
make it a poor example, but I've commented on that in
another post.

DAVID MCKNIGHT CONTINUED:
> In the case of a web page, you go and grab it and all
> that it contains. If it happens to contain advertising,
> by you taking the page you are accepting the
> advertising, again whether or not you consider it
> annoying.

This ignores the way that the HTTP protocol works. The
major web browsers pull down the code, and then go
through it to identify any other actions that should be
taken, whether that is running a javascript routine,
downloading images, running a plugin, whatever. If
there are other things to download, it can send off
requests for those items.

The thing is, people can turn off all of that stuff
right in their web browser's config. It is -not- a
given that a request for a webpage will grab it and all
it contains. In fact, there are text-only web browsers,
like Lynx, that don't do a lot of that stuff -by
design-. On top of that, there are now a bunch of
freely-available proxies that folks can set up to block
certain types of downloads (for example, any urls that
have the string "/ad_images/" in them, or that are from
linkexchange.com). What's different in Fred's thought
experiment is that the ISP would be doing it on an
ISP-wise basis automagically (IOW, without the custoemr
having to point their web brower at the ad replacing
proxy, etc.).

That's the reality of the situation. Convincing Fred
not to do it at his ISP is nice, but doesn't change the
fact that there are -already- other places doing it.
And there will be more, since, unlike the simple
removal of ads, there's a monetary incentive to replace
ads with your paid ads.

It also doesn't change the fact that advertisers would
like to have real, geo-targeted ads. I hope that
legitimate schemes for addressing that will be adopted
by ad networks and ISPs.

Matt
--
Matt Magri
Netmeg Internet




Received on Thu Jan 13 2000 - 14:05:50 CST