The original article:
http://www.techi.com/2010/04/captcha-advertising-coming-soon...
Captcha Advertising
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Captcha Advertising
#32A German startup is doing this, too: http://www.captchaad.com/ IIRC Microsoft even tried to patent this. The article's claim that only one company is working "as the middleman between advertisers and webmasters in order to display CAPTCHA ads" seems slightly exaggerated ;)
An interesting point is the counter on CaptchaAd's homepage saying they have served over 23 million ads. They must have some data on how effective this is.
Re: Captcha Advertising
#33I agree that asking people to enter a phrase from the advertisement is not going to be a very secure CAPTCHA test because the advertiser is never going to be able to come up with enough different phrases to make a captcha that will be secure against brute force attacks. Also, if they want their dish network ad displayed often (to get more impressions) then again it's basically a static image that is not changing often enough to keep out bots.
An alternative could be this: http://www.confidenttechnologies.com/products/confident_CAPT...
The user is presented with a grid of images. The pictures themselves and their location on the grid change with each session. A website could insert just a few of their own images within the grid, as a way of reinforcing brand recognition without being blatant advertising that forces the user to enter a slogan. For example, if it's a sporting goods website, they could include some images of the items they sell among the stock photos. Because it's a grid of images that changes every time, there would be a huge amount of combinations possible, making it a stronger captcha against brute force attacks from bots.