[thelist] OT advertising impotence rant (was: open source development network)

[dave gray]

> us whoring ourselves to get traffic to evolt.org. What would be the
> point after all? To turn non-existant banner ads? 

the company I work for recently started testing a banner ad rotator on one
of the sites we have up, and I didn't realize quite how absurd it was to
have banner ads on a site if you have any kind of business plan at all
until just now.

at the very most, banner ad impressions bring in a couple thousand dollars
a month. if you get a lot of hits. that's not really significant all if
you take into account what banner ads do - annoy users, making them
automatically ignore certain sections of your page.

i don't like being advertised at. i won't buy something because i saw it
on tv or because i saw it on a banner ad. like tv advertisements that
actually contain some value to me besides lifeless promotion, however, i
will watch a banner ad if it entertains me or is skillfully done. like
that sun breakout applet :)

which brings me to deception in advertising. you know what i'm talking
about. banner ads that look like dialog boxes. they are aimed at a
specific target audience: people who don't know all that much about
computers, people who don't understand what a banner ad is and what it
does. these deceptive banner ads take advantage of people's ignorance
because clicks mean money to online advertisers. not only do they take
advantage of the user, they piss off the uninformed user who didn't know
they were being advertised at. i put companies who use those sort of
banner ads on the same level of hell as spammers. it's not clever, it's
not cute, it's deceptive and it needs to stop.

going back and reading this rant over, i'm not quite sure what the point
of it was, but i feel better now.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that pure advertising is annoying, but
skillfully done advertising is tolerable.

my name is dave, and i'm a web developer...

 -dave

<tip type="site maps" author="dave">
having trouble fitting your entire site on a piece of paper? do it
digital: draw it out in flash or photoshop so you can mess with it more
easily.
</tip>