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Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

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Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#181

Post by extension »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #132
extension wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're getting 100% conversion then I guess you can do no wrong. But anyone who saw your ad and didn't buy was looking for something else. No matter what you put in your ad, it's not going to be more valuable than the content it displaces, save for strange and rare accidents.

anyone who saw your ad and didn't buy was looking for something else What an astonishing statement. Let's disregard the fact that some of the most popular entertainment in history first appeared as advertisements (everything from the annual, ephemeral crop of Super Bowl ads, to the 72-years-old-and-counting "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", to arguably every music video ever). Let's disregard the clear evidence that…

The problem with all of these common justifications for advertising is that they are all despite itself. Yes, the occasional ad is more entertaining than the content, and occasionally an ad will give you exactly the information that you need.

But fundamentally, ads do not exist in order to entertain or inform you. They exist to distract you from what you want to see, towards something someone else wants you to see. In general, content is always more valuable than advertising.

If looking at ads is the cost of looking at content, so be it. The point is that it is a cost, not a gift.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#182

Post by chrisduesing »

I think a fairly important point is that BuySellAds requires the site owner to approve the advertiser. So in effect, the person providing content on the site has agreed that Bingo Card Creator is not so reprehensible that they cannot accept money for what is then essentially a paid/guest listing on their site.

OTOH were this Google adwords instead, and there was no human approval, I have to say it would be pretty sketchy.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#183

Post by statictype »

tptacek wrote: post #94
teej wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Those of you who rail about the evils of advertising in general, or this technique in particular, are entitled to your opinions, but do please aim your rage at the appropriate target: Google." Let's be clear - I'm not at all railing on the evils of advertising. I'm as much of a marketer as I am a product designer and programmer. Google does not put faked user-generated content (review stars) next to their ads. This…

This is at least a productive comment. It's the review stars that bother you? If he took the review stars off, replaced them with some other element, you'd be fine with the ad?

If he took the review stars off, replaced them with some other element, you'd be fine with the ad?

Actually, yes.

I was looking at the ad and trying to figure out what bothered me about it. I know on an intellectual level that this isn't very different from what Google does yet the ad here slightly offended me in a way that Google SERPs do not.

I think removing the phony star ratings would have made it more palatable (to me, at least).

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#184

Post by dwwoelfel »

sssparkkk wrote: post #164
ig1 wrote: post #41

Warning: This type of behaviour may be illegal. For the US see the FTC guidance: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the... (the FTC has bought prosecutions on this topic recently) It's also illegal in the UK and presumably a lot of Europe. You can't make an ad look like an legitimate endorsement, it's as simple as that. In this case the small "sponsored placement" text could easily be taken to b…

What about when some site is raving about a product, and pointing users to the product's website using an affiliate link. No disclosure at all. Is that also illegal? Because I think it would be great if it was.

Why should that be illegal? We already have laws in place for fraud. The situation you've described could be perfectly innocent.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#186

Post by msellout »

nirvana wrote: post #129
chaosmachine wrote: post #98

I watched that Mixergy video too, and was inspired to try something similar :) BSA is great, but if you need more inventory, you can get this strategy working on Google AdWords, too. You just need to create a new ad group, and use "managed placements" to specify the sites you want to target. Since you probably don't want 100 ad groups, you have to get a bit more generic with your ads, but there are plenty of ways to…

Wow, that's a very valuable insight! Do you need a %0.2 CTR in order to switch to CPM (e.g.: is it disabled before that?) or is it that your bids will not be as good if you don't have at least that high a CTR? Every time I experiment with adwords, something in their policies seems to drive me off (last time it was that I couldn't use the terms "iPhone" or "iPad" in the ad, even though we have a legal license from App…

If your ads aren't showing up for certain word choices, you might want to rethink the type of words you're using to ensure that Google knows your content is appropriate.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#187

Post by msellout »

prawn wrote: post #126
badclient wrote: post #99

Another trick that works: break your website. When I ran a somewhat large music site(100K uniques/day), we'd make significantly more money from adsense when our streaming server went down. Why? Because when hitting the play button on the player didn't work, people start clicking on the ads.

Sadly, also effective are having an ugly site and not fully solving the problems of your audience.

Reminds me of a company I worked for back in the dot-com boom days. MostChoice.com planned on being some sort of meta insurance company, but that failed and the hundreds of pages of content they'd generated about insurance and financial planning, etc. stayed on the web. I would check on them over the years (to laugh at the fact my code still existed) and it seems they made more money as a static site just on AdSense clicks than they did with the original business idea. Insurance clicks are very nice.

It looks like they've redesigned the site now and taken down much of what I wrote. Too bad. I was a sophomore in high school and it was exciting to me to have my financial planning calculators out there on the internet.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#188

Post by epaga »

Definitely a darker shade of grey IMHO. Reminds me of the SourceForge ads shown on the download pages that have a big green "download" button. The ads usually display before the actual download button appears, and more than once I have accidentally clicked on it.

I end up angry and remembering NOT to deal with whoever was responsible for the ad.

However the difference I see to patio11's tactic is that in his case, people are searching for something educationally related and he gives them something related. That's different than me expecting to download a Java library and getting an anti-virus software page. So, still deception and therefore dark-grey, but not as blatant of deception as the ads on SourceForge.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#189

Post by bdonlan »

ig1 wrote: post #41

Warning: This type of behaviour may be illegal. For the US see the FTC guidance: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the... (the FTC has bought prosecutions on this topic recently) It's also illegal in the UK and presumably a lot of Europe. You can't make an ad look like an legitimate endorsement, it's as simple as that. In this case the small "sponsored placement" text could easily be taken to b…

It should be noted that the author of the article has moved to Japan; this may complicate any enforcement action, unless his company is incorporated in the US.

Re: Image Ad Blending Works Really, Really Well

#190

Post by bdonlan »

po wrote: post #180
bh42222 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a broad rule and I gave on the article because I could not see any of the image. I was about to white list the site when I realized that using Ad Block Plus and NoScript for years has resulted in me experiencing a significantly different Internet. So much of SEO simply does not apply to people like me. But in fact I do spend a lot of money on-line, but the I spend on content. Even if it's a funny shirt from a w…

I actually don't use adblock and the like (although I do actively block flash) for that reason: as someone developing for the web, I don't want to experience a different internet. I want to see it as my users do. Also, if a site is covered in ads, I click away. If I kept reading the site the person reading the analytics of the site would think I approve of what they're doing. I'm not going to get into an arms race wi…

I use adblock for one reason: Youtube started playing audio ads without user interaction, on tabs that had been open fo quite some time. Every other site is collateral damage, I'm afraid; it's not worth my effort to figure out how to switch chrome adblock from a whitelist to a blacklist model.
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