NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Peter Bull's fanciful "ad piracy" hypothetical
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Peter Bull's fanciful "ad piracy" hypothetical
Peter Bull (peterb_at_dvp.com.au)
Thu, 4 Dec 1997 15:52:07 +1100
Michael Curl <curl_at_btinternet.com> wrote:
>Peter Bull has expounded some interesting ideas - but fortunately for
>the future of the World Wide Web they are quite erroneous.
>I will leave it to Mark Welch to address the legal issues involved, and
>reply as a simple web "publisher" - one of the breed seemingly so
>despised by Mr Bull - pointing out the most egregious of Mr Bull's
>errors. This is not intended as a "flame" - merely an attempt to set
>the record straight.
I don't despise web "publishers" - I am one! I share the same
vulnerabilities that I think you have. I am arguing as a devil's advocate
to try to find a better model for making advertising work in a more
meaningful way for both advertisers and end users, because right now, I
think it works very poorly, and delivers appalling value to advertisers who
are not getting their money's worth from many of the websites they buy
space in, and most web advertising messages are an irrelevant nuisance for
most consumers. And that is not a good start for a fledgling industry.
>Error 1.
>Mr Bull raises the question: who "owns the customer's eyeballs"? - and
>says "I own the customer's eyeballs".
>Really? I have news for Mr Bull - the customer owns the customer's
>eyeballs! And I predict his customers will soon learn that he has as much
>contempt for them as as he does for web publishers.
That is not meant to sound contemptuous of customers at all, it simply
means that if I have a direct relationship, contractual or financial, with
an end user who is well known to me, then I am in a much better position to
provide services of real value to that individual than you are. I have
always had the interests of my customers very firmly in mind when thinking
through these issues. I have noticed over many years that whoever is
closest to the customers and can give them what they want, wins most of
their business. That's not the law, but it is a fact in most parts of the
world.
Error 2
>Mr Bull describes his ads, as opposed to those carried by the web
>publisher, as "more relevant". Why are they more relevant? Because they
>are local, says Mr Bull. Great news for the local bookstores in
>Rockhampton, but bad news for the people in Rockhampton who might just be
>interested in Amazon.com or the Internet Bookshop.
Not ALL web ads are irrelevant, I don't think I ever said they were, but in
Australia, the overwhelming majority of ads we get from US sites are
irrelevant to us. When an advertising message is of direct personal value
to the receiver of the message, then it is perceived as useful content, not
as intrusive advertising. If I was a fisherman, I might visit the Angling
Times website JUST for the fishing tackle ads. But I get pissed off when I
just want my search results from HotBot and I have to wait until the damned
site has downloaded a banner telling me that I can get better ISDN rates
from Sprint than I can from PacBell! I mean who are Sprint and PacBell,
anyway - that means nothing to me. And Sprint got ripped off if they were
charged for showing me the ad!
Error 3
>Mr Bull accuses web publishers of "taking money under false pretences"
>because they can not guarantee delivery of their advertising messages.
>He is obviously unaware that almost all banner ads are tracked and the
>advertiser only pays when the banner image itself is displayed.
Can you tell whether I have scrolled the top banner off the screen and I am
reading further down the page by the time the graphic has loaded? I think
not. Can you tell if I click away from that page after your site has
delivered the ad, but before my browser showed it to me? I doubt it. Can
you tell whether I was actively using that screen within, say, one minute
of the ad being delivered, which might indicate that I was probably looking
at it? I don't believe you can, because you are too far away from the
customer. If I was the ISP who delivered the ad into a protected area of
my subscriber's screen, I can guarantee an advertiser all of those things,
without, incidentally, messing with your precious content at all.
Error 4
>Mr Bull's entire scenario is posited on advertising being in the form of
>banner ads or buttons that he can strip out of a web page. While it is
>certainly true that the banner ad is the predominant form of web
>advertising currently, that will not necessarily be the case in twelve
>months time. Or does he also propose to strip out text ads, Java ads,
>audio ads, sponsored contests, etc.?
No, my entire scenario is not based on stripping out your ads, that's
almost trivial. I should do it as a customer service to get rid of
irrelevant visual noise, but I don't need to do it at all. What I do want
to do is package the content that my customer chooses to look at (which
might be content that you kindly provide at no charge) with advertisements
that are directly relevant to the consumer, who is precisely targetted to
the advertiser and can be guaranteed (to a reasonably high degree) to have
seen the ad that I put in front of his or her eyes (not necessarily inside
your sacred site, but into an area of the screen that I own). My
advertising service can then provide good value and a worthwhile audience
even to the smallest, most local business imaginable.
>And can he be so certain that he can distinguish banner ads from other
>graphics? That may be the case now, but would almost certainly not be the
>case if his scheme were ever to gain ground. I can confidently predict
>that web publishers will take steps to protect their content. Mr Bull's
>unfortunate customers will see either the web page as the publisher
>indended it to be seen, or will see some some completely mangled version.
A very high number of your site visitors see a mangled version of your
content now, entirely without my help - have you seen the way some people
configure their browsers?. And you can technically and legally protect
your content all you like, but if somebody closer to the end user can
provide better value to the advertisers and end users than you can, then
your business model is flawed and you will lose that revenue anyway.
Error 5
>Mr Bull says:
>"But here comes the scary bit for websites that carry ads. When my
>customer asks for a particular web page, I'll go fetch it for them, and
>when the HTML comes down, it more than likely contains the URLs for the
>banner or button ads that have been sold on that page, and then I will
>get a request from the customer's browser to go fetch them too. But my
>customer has given me the right to decide whether to display any graphics
>or not, so I might just not bother to go get any of them."
>Mr Bull should not be so sure that the HTML will come down when
>requested
>I can put in my webpages a few lines of Javascript that will recognize
>the fact that the request has come from Mr Bull's ISP. Perhaps his
>customers won't have a chance to see my original page at all. Perhaps
>they will see another page listing alternative ISP's that give them
>unrestricted access to the Web. Perhaps my Javascript will be made
>freely available to anyone who wants to use it.
Well, if I'm right and this model works, then I will be far from the only
one doing it, so you go right ahead and block access from a big chunk of
the all ISPs in the world - that'll fix them. And you'd better include
Bill Gates' WebTV too, because what do you think that's all about? That
threat sounds to me a bit like "Don't anybody move, or the website gets it"
(for those of you who can remember the hostage scene in Blazing Saddles).
If I'm wrong you won't have to bother.
>In conclusion, Mr Bull's attempt to "send a shiver down the back" of
>website publishers needn't frighten anyone. I, for one, am confident in
>my future as a web publisher dependent on advertising revenue.
Well, good for you. Let's hope all the advertisers I speak to for whom the
web so far offers very poor value as an advertising medium, and the several
billion people outside of the US in the rest of the world who aren't yet
connected but soon will be, and who (surprise, surprise) aren't
particularly interested in Sprint's ISDN rates either, eventually come
round to seeing the world through your US-centric rose-colored glasses. In
the meantime, I will be trying to offer both advertisers and end users a
better service that is more relevant to their needs.
Peter Bull
Director, DVP Media Pty Ltd, Brisbane, Australia
peterb_at_dvp.com.au
For samples of DVP's most recent work, see:
The world's best online wine store - www.thegrape.com.au
Australian Provincial Newspapers Classifieds - www.checkoutclassifieds.com.au
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