Mad As Hell
Moe Freedman, remembering my Websurfer’s Credo, forwarded this interview with internet advertising guru Jason McCabe Calacanis. Read it and weep:
Advertising must be disruptive to be truly valuable to advertisers. The key word in that sentence is “truly”. Sure, the banner has some value, but it has nowhere near the value or power of an interstitial, a popup, a Television ad, a Radio ad, or a Magazine ad. [Emphasis added]
Think that’s bad? It gets worse.
The truth is we should have gone with full-screen, Flash-based interstitials three years ago. Flash is light, fast, and entertaining. It has all the power of TV, combined with the power of online targeting and tracking. If the New York Times made you watch a 20 second Flash commercial every time you visited the site they would have a line of advertisers at their door. I think Martin [Niesenholtz, CEO, New York Times Digital] will do this in the next six months, I mean, they have already been doing pop-unders for X10 – that is sad!
I use Norton to block cookies, kill pop-ups and pop-unders, and hide referrals. Once a day — a day! — I run LavaSoft’s AdAware to remove snooper programs that slip past Norton. And now they want to take over my entire goddamn work screen, just so I have the privilege of seeing that stupid sock pocket in high resolution?
I gladly pay for worthwhile content, when asked to do so. But I will not pay ransom, just to keep ads off the computer I’ve already paid for. I’m not entertained enough by silly kitty vikings to keep Flash installed on this computer, if that’s what I have to do to retain control of my own desktop.
I’m uninstalling Flash — I suggest you do the same.
I think that if this happens, we can say goodbye to Flash as a viable medium for online content.
Does the concrete form of these ads depend on your bandwidth? I’ve got a connection over TV-cable (1100 kbit/s) and get full-screen singing and talking ads, herds of animals chasing each other over the screen etc
Steve,
I wrote about blocking Interet ads early in my site’s existence. I started with Pop-Up Stopper Pro, and then eventually added FlashSwitch, to toggle Flash on and off. I’ve gotten sick of Alka-Seltzers fizzing across a Web page, ET flying across my monitor and other random bits of strangeness interrupting a page I was trying to read.
By the way–great Thin Man review on Blogcritics!
Ed
Hey all,
I have had pretty good luck with Pop-up Stopper which is available free at http://www.panicware.com The only drawback is that you need to remember to toggle it off to view comments boxes like this one because it sees it as a pop-up ad. It’s easy enough to do though as it sits in the systray.
Get Opera. Hit the F12 key and you can turn Flash (and any plugins) on and off (along with pop-up windows, javascript, java and other stuff).
Or for the more technically oriented, proxomitron works. virtual proxy. in essence you divert all http traffic from apps using browser proxy settings through localhost:someport , and it runs pattern matching on the traffic. Basicly can get rid of most annoyances, but to add more customized settings you need to be pretty comfortable with regexps and know the nuts and bolts side of things.
Mozilla also has some great features for blocking ads and other annoyances. In the basic settings, you can stop scripts from opening unrequested windows, which stops pop-ups while still allowing comment windows to come up normally. The is also a plugin called BannerBlind that blocks most banner ads. Also, you can block annoying animated .gif ads by right-clicking on the image and selecting “Block Images From This Server” and then reloading the page. This works well as ads almost always come from a different server than the rest of the content on a page. There’s not a currently a convenient way to deal with Flash ads that I know of, but I would bet that somebody is working on it.
In a previous life, I was responsible for many of these monstrosities.
The reason why full-screen Flash never took hold was bandwidth. Nobody, not even those on a company-sponsored T1 line wants to sit through an intersitial, pop-up, pop-under, or Pop-O-Matic(tm) before opening http://www.squirrelsex.com
When I surf, I don’t want to screw with ad shit.
If it’s any consolation, I left that field and am now in the business of selling Evil Black Baby Killing Assault Guns.
My conscience is far less troubled.
Popups do not work. You close them before they get their message across. Banners work, if they’re interesting. The best examples of on-line advertising I’ve seen are the Absolut ads seen on The Onion – small, pretty, unobtrusive, but you can’t help seeing what you can do with it. And once you’re done you aren’t sent to abslout.com, you can keep on reading the page you’re on. Just like print ads, but more fun. The moment the ad starts hindering your use of the page you’re on, it stops working. What works on TV (annoy them enough to make them remember your product or brand name) doesn’t work on the web – we just close the popups cause we can do that.
Wow. Five minutes after reading this, I went to http://www.washingtonpost.com and had to endure a 5 second flash commercial before I could see their site.
I now have the following batch file on my desktop, called “flashoff.bat”:
@echo off
cd C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MACROMED\FLASH\
ren flash.ocx flash.ocx.old
ren swflash.ocx swflash.ocx.old
A similar file called “flashon.bat” switches it back whenever I like.