Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting 177
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Ad Age:
"[Rachel Law's] creation, called 'Vortex,' is a browser extension that's part game, part ad-targeting disrupter that helps people turn their user profiles and the browsing information into alternate fake identities that have nothing to do with reality. People who use the browser tool, which works with Firefox and Chrome, effectively confuse the technologies that categorize web audiences into likely running shoe buyers, in-market auto buyers, or moms interested in cooking and football. ... It's a bit like the ad blocker extensions of yore, except it scrambles information to trick ad targeters, all in service of an addictive game deemed 'Site Miner,' which allows players to fish for cookies visualized as sea creatures. Players can gobble up cookies Pac-Man style, creating a pool of profile information that has nothing to do with their actual web behavior. ... Vortex features a profile switcher that people can use and share to take on a new identity while browsing the web. 'It's a way of masking your identity across networks,' she said."
Re:Targeted ads are better than untargeted ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly my feelings. It is one thing to block the ads completely — they waste my bandwidth and RAM, slow down page-loading, and degrade my privacy. But if any ad makes it through anyway, I'd rather it be related to something I may be remotely interested in.
Re:I fully support this! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, we might lose some mediocrity, but high quality will remain.
Re:I fully support this! (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at xkcd, not an ad on the site...
See this link?
You can get the Subways comic as a poster!
That's an ad. Them posters ain't free.
Not a bad ad, not an obnoxious ad, but still an ad.
Re:I fully support this! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's different, IMO, since it's part of the site. It's the difference between going to a concert and the band selling CD's, and going to a concert and the band painting a Wal-Mart logo on the stage.
Re:Targeted ads are better than untargeted ads (Score:5, Insightful)
When sites start to lose significant amounts of money, they're going to move to more and more annoying and integrated ads, until the ads become indistinguishable from the content itself..
I still won't see them, and if they hate their users that much then I probably won't care if they collapse.
Re:I fully support this! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why destroy all ads and marketing? We still need a mechanism that allows us to know what is available, and at what price.
What I want to destroy is the means for marketers to set prices of goods and services based on "targeted" information that seemingly have no relation to the product or service being purchased. I hate when people in Florida have are offered a product via a WWW site that costs more than the same exact product offered to someone in Massachusetts. It is even worse when you take a look at the picture on a global basis. I hate it when I pay $100 more for an airline seat than the guy sitting next to me. We both got the same exact service, but at wildly divergent prices.
Make a good product...sell it at a price point determined by supply and demand (which I am guessing won't fluctuate each minute) where a reasonable profit can be had, and be happy with it. Probably a little naive...
what it OUGHT to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
is toss one site back to another, so they are tossing ads back and forth, making it look like all the hits are coming from other advertisers. I would suspect eventually the hosting sites will end up blocking themselves, and all will be well in the Twitterverse.
Re:I fully support this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you will not have as many websites.
Only true insofar as quantity. Quality OTOH will likely improve, if you want the truth. Any site that relies (even in large part) on ad impressions for its survival is likely one that has starved itself to death a long time ago, is is barely straggling along.
there are far too many other ways of making income from a website (an internal store, premium content, even donations stand out as examples.)
Making and supporting a web site takes time and money.
So does any other worthwhile endeavor. Doesn't mean it has to have adverts, though.
I am not sure if you remembered how horrable adds were in the late 1990's early 2000.
I beg to differ - it's uglier today.
Turn off all your blockers/add-ins/extensions sometime, and go visit ZDNet or parts of CNET. They stand out as only a couple examples of how a company can jack in a shit-ton of intrusive dancing adverts (where even clicking on what looks like blank space will toss an advert at you). Also note that back in the late '90s you only had popups and cookies at worst (okay, they had Bonzi Buddy or whatever-the-hell-that-was, but that bullshit required your explicit collusion to install).
Today you have to contend with LSOs, stealth "toolbars" that slide in just because you updated Java and weren't paying attention, and other intrusive-as-fuck tracking techniques that slip right by most non-techies. Oh, and I won't even have to mention that now we get to put up with ISP collusion as a matter-of-course (ad-packed redirects for failed DNS lookups, anyone?)
Re:I fully support this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Targeted ads are better than untargeted ads (Score:4, Insightful)
>quote>But if any ad makes it through anyway, I'd rather it be related to something I may be remotely interested in.
I'd rather spend time making sure it won't get through the next time.
I just wish (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I fully support this! (Score:4, Insightful)