[KLUG Advocacy] Re: And the Spam Wars continue...

[Robert G. Brown]

>> It is the same here. Advertisers ought to take the hinti...
>> ...won't sell to these people, they'll simply make 'em mad.
>If they get mad, then they should go to one of the hundreds of other web
>sites offering similar products or services.
I think you're working fairly carefully to miss the point. :)

I'm attempting to show the folly of "forcing" ads on people, from the point
of view of the advertiser. You're busy trying to solve the problem (or play
the role of) the end user, and solving a problem that I'm not so interested
in discussing.

OF COURSE the end users will go elsewhere if they get mad, that's EXACTLY 
NOT what the advertisers want them to do. The advertisers want them to see
the ads (banner or popup), absorb the message, and go out and buy, buy, BUY!

Apparently, any behavior that contravenes that model is anethema to them. 
My point was that the "war of escalation" that you (rightly) discuss is
something of a fools errand for the companies that pay for advertising,
since any escalation merely further alienates the people who really have
a say, the paying customers out there.

>But there is a difference.  I've already PAID my hard earned MONEY to
>rent or purchase the DVD.  That fee should exempt me from having to
>watch the advertising too.
Quite an assumption you're making here!
Specifically, I'm referring to the notion that you pay once, and are
then exempted from paying again, or perhaps that you pay money to exempt
you from watching advertising. Nothing of the sort happens most of the time.

You bought your televison, and then you "have to" watch advertising on
that, all the time... even ads for other televisions! Do you want to be
exempted from this? How? The broadcast medium is non-selective, newer
media are not.

The Britsh do this, and have since the 1920's. They collect a license fee
for operating a RECEIVER (something hardly mentioned in US law); it's about
$170/year per household or business. In exchange for they get the BBC (which
is funded from license fees, even if the viewers aren't watching the BBC)
a commercial-free government service.

I'm sure you don't prefer that. I don't. I prefer the NPR/PBS model (actually
originated by Lewis Hill, with Pacifica, in the late 1940's) where the viewers
pay for the station operation, and have some voice in what is broadcast.

>When I go to a free web site to search for useful information, or be
>entertained, or be informed, or ... those sites need a form of income.
>I may not like it, but I like ads better than giving them my credit
>card, or having them go out of business.
That's fine, Bruce. I don't think we have a lot of sifference here. I don't
object to these ads per se. My point is that if I block them, the site
operators and advertisers have rather little recourse..."forcing" me to 
have the ads displayed on my screen does not lead not effective customer re0
lationships or beneficial marketing results. The only thing it might be is 
some cold comfort to an advertising executive, who can go to his client and
say something like "our banner ad appeared on 4 million screens last month", 
which is kinda lame if 10 percent of those people were "forced" to display it 
and closed it without reading the content (which is what I do when I get a 
popup or popunder).

>>>I've always figured this is better than the alternative.  I don't want
>>>to pay a subscription fee to every web site I visit for information. 
>>I'd MUCH rather see a banner ad on their web pages.
>>I agree, but hold out that while banner ads are not great, they are better
>>than paying for every site. Still, we can look for better models for 
>>this.
>Then start looking!  That'd be great!
Um, this thread, or my postings have been doing that, sans any need for 
cheerleading or gainsaying.

>>>Popup ads are much more annoying, but I can still live with them, given
>>>the alternative.
>>An irritant, but you're not taking steps to block them. Imagine if you 
>>felt strongly enough to do and were "forced" to see them anyway.
>That's fine if I really go to the trouble of blocking it, and I have run
>some blocking software in the past.
>But what happens when the next release of Mozilla/Netscape/IE/Opera/...
>comes out and all people have to do is click a preference to block ads?
>Or what if that option is set ON by default?

We have two conflicting commercial interests here; perhaps they need to get
together and discuss things. On one hand we have the folks who want to use
the Internet as an advertising medium, and the other we have software devel-
opers who want to serve the needs and interests of their users, and are mo-
tivated by competitive pressure to do so.

I would think they would do quite well to sit down and confer. If I were 
one of the players, I would try to organize that.

In some sense, we're seeing the maturity of the medium; just as mute 
buttons and so on represented a level of maturity in television

>The people who write the software to block the ads are trying to change
>the look of the web site from the way the owners and webmasters designed
>the site.  And that's FINE!  And it's also fine for the webmasters to
>try to prevent people from modifying the look of their web site if they
>feel that strongly about it.
Oh, come now! This is not really what the issue is at all. 

We all know that how a page is rendered really ain't under the control 
of the site operators (absent technologies like flash and Acrobat), and 
browsers have provided content control since the very beginning, being 
able to inhibit graphics (lynx being an extreme case of this :) and so 
on.  So if we're going to squawk about users changing the appearence of 
things, why no the same uproar about all that, since the beginning?  

Because we're talking about a business model, not about content. Let's be
honest about this. Banner ads and popups are making a lot of money for people
somewhere, and they feel threatened by it, creating a demand for a product
such as the one Andrew posted. I would claim that people who use this
product have not thought things through very well; they've lost sight of
something.

>It's going to be a constant battle between the ads, and the ad blockers,
>and the ad blocker blockers, and the ad blocker blocker blockers, and 
>that's fine too.  Gives them something to do and employs more people. :)
This is what will happen if the above-proposed conference does not happen.
The other outcome may well be the phasing out of this kind of advertising
on the Internet. That's fine with me, I feel that the Interent has been 
greatly oversold as an advertising medium in any case.

And yes, the sort of "arms race" you posit may in fact happen, but it will
collapse like a house o'cards when all the players realize that they've lost 
the audience that matters. Functions with that little economic benfit are
among the least stable anyway.

>>>And for people who don't like ads on sites, DON'T GO TO THOSE SITES!!!...
>>What /. is doing is in essence providing an alternative, while preserving
>>their economic interest. The devil's in the details here, and poses some-
>>thing of a policy dilemma as well.

>>Many broadcast media stations (Pacifica Foundation, some local univerity and
>>NPR stations) have opted for a "listener sponsored" approach to financing;
>>it is usually done for non-profit groups. How this works for a profit making
>>organizations is a but more nebulous. However, it is on the whole more 
>>sensible and less annoying.
>That may work for some sites, but I doubt it'd work universally.
IMO there's no one "magic bullet". Users may be receptive to advertising on
some sites, not on others. The notion of conducting more business directly
over the Internet may subsume lot of advertising, and the number of Internet
sites may be economically excessive, in any case.

							Regards,
                                                        ---> RGB <---