Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Jason Kottke links to a post in Ars Technica with an argument that people shouldn’t use ad blocking browser plugins when visiting their favorite sites.  The argument is as old as ad blocking browser plugins.  And I most often here exactly that side of the story – the site that you love depends on the advertising and by blocking it, you’re effectively closing its oxygen supply.

I don’t disagree, but I find this point of view too narrow.  I think advertising should work for both the site and the visitor.  If we are asking a visitor to take a responsibility, we should also ask the the site owner to do the same.  Because the truth of the matter is that most sites out there are overloaded with advertising.  Most advertising out there is irrelevant. And on top of that, most advertising out there is annoying.  I think if site owners were spending more time selecting an appropriate and relevant advertising, their visitors wouldn’t spend as much time blocking it.

Consider the practical side of this.  From all the people I know who browse the web, everyone (and I do mean everyone) is browsing through a whole lot of web sites.  It’s not one web site, not two, not ten.  It’s hundreds and thousands.  If you look at all those web sites collectively (no matter who the person is), you’ll agree that the majority of those web sites have too much of advertising, which is too annoying, and too irrelevant.  And from the point of view of the site owner, it’s often much harder to fix than it looks.

First of all, most site owners don’t have advertisers standing in queue. So the choice is quite limited.  You get what you get most of the times.  Secondly, there are tools like Google AdSense which help site owners show ads which more relevant.  But with that being completely automated there is just so much control over the results. Most of the times you don’t get to pick the company or ad content.  Thirdly, the fact that not everyone not everywhere is on the web has something to do with ads relevancy.  For example, I live in a small country of Cyprus in the middle of nowhere.  There are probably a total of 40-50 companies here which advertise on Google.  None of those companies have anything that I am interested in.  But because there isn’t much choice, I’ll be shown these ads anywhere I go (every site that uses Google AdSense).

Even being a site owner myself, running Google AdSense block, I am still a supporter of ad blocking browser plugins.  I think the end-user should have a choice. And not only have it, but exercise that choice too.  If someone is getting annoyed by a huge ad block in the top right corner of this site, please, by all means, feel free to block it.  You don’t see it, you don’t click it, you don’t care about it – you just improve my click-through rate.  That’s the parameter I worry about.  I’d rather have 10 people see the ad and 10 people click on it, than have 10,000 people see the ad and nobody click on it.

Interestingly, out of Gmail, Yahoo Mail! and Hotmail, only the first one does not append advertising messages to actual emails.  I am rather surprised by this, given we just started with the year 2008.

I remember back when Hotmail and other webmail services were just starting, it was a common practice to monetize on advertising banners shown to webmail users, while also embedding advertising messages into outgoing emails.  That was a really ugly situation, but a lot of people suddenly got free access to email, which was great, so we lived with it.

While free webmail has always been useful, most web people prefer to have a mailbox under their own domain.  Or at least they preferred before Gmail came into play.   Nobody ever took you very serious if you were communicating using a well known free webmail service.

When the coolness of your own domain started to grow, many webmail services tried to meet the needs of their users and attempted to hide the obvious facts of them being free webmail services.  This was the time when webmail services registered tonnes and tonnes of domain names and offered their users a choice of any for their mailbox.  It was also the time when some stopped embedding advertising into outgoing emails.

For a few years, I stopped caring much about this issue, since I got a proper mailbox, as did many other people with who I communicated.  I knew of webmail existence, but it was mostly outside of my scope of interests.   Until Gmail came out.

With Gmail, Google changed the perception of webmail once again.  Two things that they did differently were AJAX interfaces, which provided for a much faster and more responsive user experience, than traditional web sites; and plenty of space.  If I remember correctly, Gmail offered something like 1 GB mailboxes.  That was in time when most other webmail services were giving out 10 or 15 MB.  “You will never have to delete an email message ever again“.

Google managed to make webmail popular again.   They implemented most of the good stuff, ignored mistakes, and came up with a few smart things of their own (conversation grouping, labels instead of folders, etc).  And, of course, one of the things that they did right was the advertising.  While reading mail, users see ads for related stuff – in clean, text, no blinking manner.  And no outgoing message is ever modified by Gmail to include advertising or to suggest that recipient should  give Gmail a try, or any of such nonsense.

I move all my mailboxes to Gmail.  This my only email interface these days.  And I’m pretty used to it now. And a lot of other people are back to webmail. And so it amazes me to no avail that some web services still don’t get it.  After all this time and all these lessons.  They still including their ads in outgoing messages.  This is really weird…

To all of you using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, et al, – you should really give Gmail a try.  At least you’ll know for sure that your recipients will get messages exactly as you send them.  No more, no less.

It was almost half a year ago that I wrote these words:

Google AdSense is gone.  I’ve been planning to do this for a long time but never got down to it.  I don’t want to have any ads on my personal blog anymore.  And, it wasn’t making me that much anyway.

As a tribute to my inconsistency and greed, I wanted to let you know that Google AdSense blocks are back.  Currently you can see one in full post view, between the post content and the comments.  Another two are in the sidebar.  I’m still playing around with the ad types, sizes, colors, and locations, so don’t be too disappointment if they annoy you right now.

Why are the ads back?  What happened?  Well, first of all, I accidentally wrote a couple of very popular posts.   I wanted to see how well these posts can do financially.   Secondly, with the latest theme changes and a round of plugin shakes, there seems to be more activity on the blog (more people are coming in, they are standing for longer, and they do more – read, comment, bookmark, etc).  I started wondering if it’s possible to get a penny out of all you people.  So, you can say that this AdSense comeback is an experiment on my side, with some hopes of earing an extra cent.

Of course, I can be totally wrong and off the track (which happens pretty often, if you need to know), and all the positive activity that I’m seeing around here is fueled by the lack of ads.  If it is indeed so, not only will I earn any money with the ads, but I’ll also lose some of the audience (something I’d much rather not happen).

Anyway, call me what you want, but the ads are back. At least for now.  If they are too annoying for you, all I can suggest is start using Firefox browser with AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Filterset.G Updater add-ons.  You won’t see another web ad in your life…

There are a couple of interesting posts (part one, part two) at gaping void on how the Internet (particularly, its social side) is changing marketing. As often with such analysis, the matters could be a little exaggerated and examples somewhat simplistic.  However, if you can handle those, you’ll sure find a few interesting points raised.

Let me get you started with a quote:

Now, when you buy something, you don’t phone up the company and order a brochure. You go onto Google and check out what other people- people like yourself- are saying about the product. In terms of communication, the company no longer has first-mover advantage. They don’t ask your company for the brochure until your product has already jumped through a series of hoops that SIMPLY WERE NOT there twenty years ago.
YOU NO LONGER CONTROL THE CONVERSATION. THEN AGAIN, MAYBE YOU NEVER DID.

Quoting Stan Schroeder of Mashable:

The thing is, AdSense is just too easy to abuse. Click an ad, and there goes a couple of dollars. Turn it into a meme or a viral joke and thousands go down the drain, together with the entire idea of click-based ads.

I agree,  the system is easy to abuse and it is getting abused a lot.  But it still works.  It helps a lot of people make a lot of money. And until it is so, it won’t go or even change much.

Now the question is – what are the alternatives?

I don’t care that much for television. Even less I care for advertisements. And even les than that I care about advertisement on television. You can easily say that I don’t care about them at all.

But that didn’t stop me from seeing one of the funniest things that I’ve seen on TV ever – The Big Ad for Carlton Draught (It doesn’t look that as good in the tiny window as it does on a large TV screen, but at least you’ll have an idea of what I am talking about here.). That was something!

It turns out I am by far not alone. A lot of people enjoyed it. There is even a Wikipedia page for it.

(singing)It’s a big add. Expensive ad! …