Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 21:24:43 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Paul Robinson" <paul@akita.co.uk> Cc: "Chris Coleman" <chrisc@vmunix.com>, "Si" <si@chemicalterrorism.com>, <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Banner Exchanges Message-ID: <000001c14255$56838dc0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010920111348.C43679@jake.akitanet.co.uk>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: wiggy [mailto:wiggy@wopr.akitanet.co.uk]On Behalf Of Paul Robinson >Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 3:14 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Chris Coleman; Si; freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG; >freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: Banner Exchanges > > >On Sep 20, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> wrote: > >> Well - you can do what you want but I've read that the clickthroughs >> on banner advertising are miserable - in general not worth the time >> unless your running a porno site or something like that which is generating >> millions of hits a day. > >Translation: "I hate banner ads because although I get suckered into >clicking on banners on the porn sites I browse, when I spent 10k with >doubleclick last month I didn't get millions of hits on my website" > No, I get all my porn off Usenet, it's free. Seriously, though, I've never spent a dime on advertising on the Internet. >> I would be very interested in any stats you can generate as a result of >> something like this, should you decide to do it. > >Translation: "Please give me some market research for free... " > Of course. However, it's his choice to give it out and I have no intention of commencing spending on Internet advertising no matter what the results are. You see, I happen to work for an ISP - and I've seen the damage that was done to ISP's by the now-repudiated business plans to hand out Internet access for free in exchange for shoved-down-your-throat banner advertising. As long as I work for an ISP, spending money on banner ads is in effect supporting a paradigm that is in total opposition to what my livlihood is. I may be missing something, but in my life I've observed that advertising-funded businesses are inherently resting on a foundation that's now proven to be unsupportable. You take television. Over the years, TV ads have become more and more ineffectual as people have been trained to ignore them. As a result to get the same effect, "free" TV channels have had to devote more and more of the time of a show to advertising. This is a vicious circle because the more advertising that's displayed, the more desensitized to it the public becomes, the less effective it is, the more must be displayed to maintain the same effect, etc. All the time the funding from the ad revenue is getting less and less, and as the costs of producing TV shows go ever higher, a vise is created which is starving the TV shows of decent funding. As a result, there's more and more crap on TV that nobody wants to watch, which results in lower ratings, which is another vicious cycle. Ultimately TV is going to end up with the advertising being sold for a few cents, and it occupying 60% of the show time, and the shows being produced in sweatshops in the Third World that will be the most boring thing you can imagine. Now, I suppose if you want the Internet to go that way, why then banner ads are a Good Thing I guess. But I would never support them. >Perhaps I'm getting too cynical. :-) > Amateur. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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