They're After You

There has been some noise lately about Facebook's potential new ad service that could display ads targeted to you based on your Facebook information while you're on sites outside of Facebook.  The way it would work is that Facebook would stick a cookie on your machine and when an ad they sold sees you on another site, it knows that you're a fan of goth-punk gospel music.  This is, of course, causing all sorts of concern over privacy issues.  People seem to find it scary enough that Google shows you ads based on your search results, to think that they might see ads based on their Facebook profile is of great concern to them.  To me, this isn't a big deal.  There isn't some person somewhere sitting at a computer, pouring over Facebook profiles, and matching those people up to ads.  There is just some algorithm that sees I'm a fan of Sprite, and shows me an ad for Sprite instead of Coke.  Well, they would attempt to show me an ad, but I wouldn't see it.  That's not the point, though.  The point is that is there really a big difference between seeing an ad on Facebook that is targeted to you because of something you have in your profile, and seeing and ad on MSN targeted to you because of something you have in your profile?  The site you're visiting doesn't see this information.  They don't know what you have in your profile.  All of that information stays within the confines of Facebook's network.  When Facebook introduced the ability to target flyers using specifics in profiles, people said it was great, and wondered why it took so long to get here.  This is really the same concept, just showing it to you somewhere else.  Also, all of this is contingent on you having that cookie on your machine.  Lastly, there is the fact that if I see an ad telling me about something for 50-Cent, I really don't care, but if I saw an ad for something Sarah Brightman related, I'd be interested.  As a consumer, this would actually work in my favor. If I find the ads of interest, they no long are such an annoyance.  Instead of being considered ads, they move into that long sought by advertisers position of being "value-adds."

Perhaps I am too lenient about all of this.  What are your thoughts?

Experiment Part 1

I was talking to a friend of mine about Facebook’s new flyer advertising options when an idea for an experiment came up.  To give a quick overview, you can now get very granular with in your selection of who sees your flyer. In the past, it was based solely on which network would see it.  Now you can target based on any number of criteria.  What is interesting is that it gives you a real time number of how many people your ad will be hitting.  This can provide for some fun time killing (just how many men between the age of 18 and 29 like The Notebook), or for some legit marketing information. For fun, I can choose to target only single females in my city that like Family Guy.  Pulling that info up is when the idea came.  What if I tried making a flyer for an ad to get a date?  Facebook’s flyers are known to have abysmal click-through rates, so odds would be against me before even beginning.  Second, lets be honest, how likely is someone to actually click on and respond to an ad for a date on there?  To be honest, my hypothesis is that I won’t get any responses from this, but I figure this gives me something to write about for the next couple days. 

I’ll be running the ad for a week using competitive rates for maximum visibility.  It will give a quick blurb saying that I’m looking for someone to take to dinner, and have a link to a page with who I am and contact info.  I’ll post an update to how it’s going later in the week, and will have final results at the end.  Like I said, I’ll be surprised if anyone responds, but who knows I might meet some new people.

Hate Ads? Don't Just Get Over It

I think we're all well aware of how I feel about advertising. What is interesting, though, is that while I completely despise it, I'll admit that it is the bad apples that are spoiling it for everyone else. If it weren't for the annoying car commercials, I wouldn't mind TV ads all that much. If it weren't for flashing banner ads, I wouldn't be so opposed to online ads. It is because these forms of advertising exist that I hate it. Jeremiah Owyang writes about how people that hate advertising need to get over it. I don't really agree. His first point is that it isn't going to be going away. I'm fine with that, and I'm not so stupid as to think it would. What I want to go away are the ones that fall into his other point about the shotgun approach. Ads are like shotguns, in that it just gets thrown out there, and even if you weren't the ad's target, you still might get hit. These are the ones I want to go away. Obviously, these won't just disappear altogether, but I'm all for it moving more towards what he calls the laser approach. When an ad has a precise target, and that target is all that is hit. When this is precisely tailored, you get a situation where everyone wins. The consumer, me, only sees items that are of interest. The advertiser doesn't waste money shooting their ad to everyone, even though not everyone is interested. This means that a much higher percentage of those that see the ad are likely to buy their product. If I see ads for refinancing, I'm just going to tune them out. This means that someone just wasted money for me to see their ad, and have absolutely zero chance of getting a customer. This is why I have no problem using all of Google's personalized services. If they are going to show me ads, I want them to at least be something that interests me. And really, those little text ads they do, they don't bother me at all. I rarely even notice them, and have actually even clicked on a few because they are relevant to me.
Now I did say that I don't wholly agree with him, and here's where I don't. He says to just "get over it" to those of us that despise ads. I don't think that we should, though. If people simply accepted that ads are there, and didn't complain about them, then there isn't as much incentive for advertisers to change things. Sure they still have the driving force of attempting to make more profitable advertising, but without consumers giving feedback, they won't have all the data to go on. Of course, this battle would be won a lot easier if there weren't idiots in the world that actually did try to hit the bouncing monkey. I stand by my opinion, though, that if we don't like what they're throwing at us, we shouldn't just sit patiently and hope that they change it, we should help to try to facilitate the change.

Easily Distracted

As is often the case, when I find something, get myself sidetracked off of it for whatever reason. This is exactly what happened when I was going to post about an article that was sent to me. The article was on MSN Money Central, but I noticed that it said it was originally from the Christian Science Monitor. I didn't want to post to something that was just an exact reprint of something else (I don't mind posting to a blog or something because it at least adds some commentary), so I decide to get the link for the original. Once I got there, I found that they split the article onto two pages. This is not a long piece, by any means. There is no reason to break it up. This practice pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. I seem to be finding it more and more often while reading online. It seems like places are splitting things across multiple pages with no real justification (for the user, that is, I'll explain in a sec). I have seen lists of things posted where they stick each item on its own page. It isn't even done in a slide slow fashion, like Forbes will do, but rather just their full page is used. So I'll see something that has 5 pages, each one full of crap. Ah, and there is reasoning I said I'd explain. You see, when they break it apart across multiple pages, that means that their site is generating more hits. Every time you click the next page, it is another pageview. Not only does this inflate the numbers they'll show for their site, it inflates the numbers for ad views. When you make someone go through five pages, that is five times more views on the ads than would have otherwise been received. Personally, I think it is a horrible, despicable practice. All it does is aggravate the reader. Honestly, would anyone say that they'd prefer to have the content on multiple pages instead of one? I'm to the point now that if I see they've spread the piece out across multiple pages, I just stop reading it. The only exception is when it is actually a longer piece that is broken up to not be so daunting, or when the content is just really superb. What about you guys? Anyone else pissed off about this practice?



Oh, and for those of you curious, here is the article. I'm linking the MSN one for obvious reasons. I've lost all interest in wanting to talk about it, though.

Ads Will Be Shot on Sight

After reading a post about putting ads on your site, I got to thinking about ads on mine. For the longest time, I didn't put any up for a few reasons. First and foremost is that I had ads. Second, and not by far, is that my readerships is so small that I really didn't think I'd gain any benefit from having ads. Well, I finally decided that I'd stick some on here, and the second part of my reasoning has held true. My readership really is so small that I don't really see anything from them. As for my hatred of ads, I think I've done an alright job there. Also, the same day that I put the ads on I linked to browser plugins to disable ads. Adblock for Firefox, and IE7Pro for IE. The ads themselves are fairly small and out of the way, I think. Honestly, though, I don't even see them. I have them on more as an experiment than anything else.
Really, though, I am always amazed at ads on websites when I surf somewhere with my ad filters turned off. I don't understand how anyone can posisbly stand to visit those places and see the ads. The other thing that I think is funny is that I often don't even know that a site uses many annoying ads until I turn off the filter. I went for the longest time thinking that Facebook didn't have banner ads. I'm hopeful for the day when everywhere will just limit themselves to text only ads. I really don't think I'd mind if that is all that was used.