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A post today on Slash­dot got me think­ing about adver­tis­ing. Specif­i­cally adver­tis­ing on the inter­net, but also adver­tis­ing in general.

The arti­cle linked off the Slash­dot post was writ­ten by a man named Jim Lynch, a long time writer in tech­nol­ogy media both dig­i­tal and print. Mr. Lynch is appar­ently annoyed by a new fea­ture in Apple’s just-released Safari 5 web browser called Reader. Reader is a fea­ture that, when selected by the user, attempts to detect “arti­cle” con­tent on a web page and dis­play it in a sim­ple for­mat which is larger and often eas­ier to read than the nor­mal web site lay­out. It also attempts to detect multi-page arti­cles and auto­mat­i­cally dis­play fur­ther pages as you scroll down, effec­tively cre­at­ing a “print” view for sites which may lack such things.

What both­ers Mr. Lynch basi­cally comes down to adver­tis­ing. When using Reader, if it works prop­erly all ads are stripped out of the con­tent. More impor­tantly for some, the auto­matic load­ing of the next page means cost-per-impression ads get many less views as they would only show on the first page before the user clicked the Reader button.

I under­stand the key point behind his com­plaint, web sites cost money to run and that has to come from some­where. This site costs me about $275 a year between domain reg­is­tra­tion and server space, and it’s fairly low vol­ume (under­state­ment of the cen­tury, I aver­age less than 40 pageviews a day not count­ing spi­ders). I pay this out of pocket, since for my use the domain is for my email and the VPS is just a place for me to exper­i­ment. As far as I’m con­cerned I’d be pay­ing for them both any­ways, so why not put some­thing there? Obvi­ously that rea­son­ing doesn’t tend to apply out­side the range of per­sonal blogs and the costs are much higher when you start talk­ing real traf­fic lev­els requir­ing real servers rather than a vir­tual slice of one.

Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t help but not feel the slight­est bit of sor­row for adver­tis­ers and those run­ning adver­tis­ing when they com­plain about their ads being blocked. They’ve for the most part brought this on them­selves, by design­ing their ads to be as intru­sive and annoy­ing as pos­si­ble. Web pub­lish­ers have been just as badly a part of the prob­lem, inject­ing ads as if they were con­tent, allow­ing nui­sance ads with auto­play audio/video or var­i­ous popup/under/over win­dows, and in some par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing cases using the con­tent as the ad with Intel­liTXT and the like.

We’ve already seen what the abil­ity to skip ads has done to the tele­vi­sion indus­try. For years they thrived on annoy­ingly loud and repet­i­tive ads which seemed to rely on the “any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity” the­ory. As soon as the DVR became com­mon the ad mar­ket pretty much fell apart on any­thing peo­ple weren’t watch­ing live. Now that exten­sions like Adblock for Fire­fox and Apple’s new Reader are mak­ing it easy for the aver­age user to dodge ads (rather than us geeks who have been doing it for years) the inter­net ad com­mu­nity fears the same thing happening.

All I have to say is that the inter­net ad indus­try needs to learn from the suc­cess­ful tele­vi­sion ad campaigns.

First and fore­most, DO NOT PISS OFF YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMER!!!!!!!!!
If an overly loud and annoy­ing ad comes on the radio or TV, I’ll turn the vol­ume down or change the chan­nel if I don’t really care for what’s on while mak­ing a men­tal note to avoid the adver­tiser if pos­si­ble. The same applies to inter­net ads. If your ad stretches over the con­tent I’m try­ing to read, starts play­ing audio out of nowhere, makes half the words on the page pop up prod­uct links, or oth­er­wise inter­feres with my read­ing of the con­tent I will go out of my way to avoid your prod­uct where pos­si­ble. If ad block­ing is avail­able, I’ll turn it on imme­di­ately when any of those hap­pen and may make a note to avoid the site where it was seen as well.

Sec­ond, draw my eye the right way. You do not have to be loud, either lit­er­ally with audio or fig­u­ra­tively with bright/flashing col­ors. Use your space to make me inter­ested in what you have, then if I actively click on it you can load your con­tent of choice. This is more for adver­tiser rather than pub­lish­ers, but due to point one pub­lish­ers would do well to enforce point two.

Third, be rel­e­vant. If I’m read­ing a site about cars, an ad for purse built to carry small dogs is most likely irrel­e­vant. Again this is for both pub­lish­ers and adver­tis­ers. Ad net­works which do not tar­get based on con­tent are out­dated and should be dropped imme­di­ately from both sides.

Fourth, don’t try to shove too many ads in my face. I myself start get­ting annoyed when there’s more than 3 – 5 ads on the screen at one time, depend­ing on the amount of con­tent and such. Sites that split arti­cles in to a huge num­ber of short pages in order to increase impres­sions for ad pur­poses fall in to the same cat­e­gory (and I believe these sites are the great­est rea­son for the Reader fea­ture). Divid­ing arti­cles in to mul­ti­ple pages is fine, but don’t do it unless you have at least as much infor­ma­tion on a page as an aver­age mag­a­zine. Two para­graphs and a few pic­tures are not a page.

The short ver­sion is pro­vide ads that don’t annoy the reader and prefer­ably are some­thing they might actu­ally want and you won’t have as many block­ing them. If the rel­e­vance goes up, more peo­ple will click on them too. As for the rest, those who have already decided to install full ad block­ers, those are gone already. You won’t get them back, it’s just too nice. Down­load Fire­fox, install Adblock Plus, and sub­scribe to one of the pop­u­lar fil­ter lists like Easylist. Now turn it off and browse to a few pop­u­lar news sites. Turn it back on and reload those pages. If you don’t agree that this is a much cleaner and more enjoy­able way to browse the inter­net you’re blind.

To whom it may concern:

Over the past two days there has been a lot of talk about your new data plans, par­tic­u­larly the removal of the “unlim­ited” option. While I believe there should be a third tier for the heav­ier users, I can under­stand the rea­sons for mov­ing to an entirely metered struc­ture and do not have any prob­lems with that part. Where I do have a prob­lem is the addi­tional $20 per month charge for users of inter­net tethering.

Before I make my points, let me quote one of your Senior Vice Pres­i­dents, Mark Collins, from his inter­view with GigaOm on the day the new plans were announced.

That capa­bil­ity is enabling some­thing you can’t do today. You can use one device and get mul­ti­ple con­nec­tions so it’s more use­ful to you. You’re going to use more data so the price is based on the value that will be delivered.

This is in response to the ques­tion “What about the $20 teth­er­ing fee? It looks like a con­ve­nience charge.”

That capa­bil­ity is only enabling some­thing you can’t do today because you locked it out in the first place. My AT&T-branded LG CU500 could not tether until I had a teth­er­ing plan, but my unlocked and unbranded Sony K850i could just fine with­out any spe­cial teth­er­ing plans. The Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS both have sup­ported teth­er­ing offi­cially since the release of the 3.0 firmware released nearly a year ago, but this was dis­abled on mod­els sold in the US because you did not want to allow it. Teth­er­ing is not some spe­cial fea­ture you are doing work to enable and deserve to be paid extra for, it’s a fea­ture all of our data-capable phones have built in which you have actively engaged in defeating.

I won’t argue the state­ment that it makes my phone and data plan more use­ful, but again this is a fea­ture that both have inher­ently had from the begin­ning and you have actively sought to remove. If I went to rent a four door sedan and found that the pas­sen­ger side and rear seats had been removed unless I paid an extra fee to have them rein­stalled, I and any other rea­son­able per­son would think that is out­ra­geous. Unfor­tu­nately you are able to take advan­tage of the fact that 99% of your users are not technology-savvy and thus do not know how much they’re being screwed.

The last part of that response is the most illog­i­cal of them all. “You’re going to use more data,” so the price increases with­out the amount of data I’m allowed to use chang­ing in the slight­est? How is me using 2GB in one month on a smart­phone dif­fer­ent from using 2GB in one month teth­er­ing to even a dozen lap­tops? Data is data, one type doesn’t put any extra load on your net­work ver­sus another.

Extra charges for teth­er­ing were accept­able when the alter­na­tive options were smartphone/dumbphone-only unlim­ited pack­ages, since yes, a teth­er­ing user is likely to use more data over­all. How­ever, if I’m already buy­ing a bucket of bits how does it mat­ter at all if I choose to use those to feed my smart­phone directly or down­load some­thing to my laptop?

To close, I have been a cus­tomer of AT&T since port­ing in from T-Mobile’s then ter­ri­ble cov­er­age in 2005. In that time I have at peak car­ried two voice lines, one iPhone data, and one Lap­top­Con­nect at the same time. I know that does not make me any­thing spe­cial, but I’m sure it’s more than most of your sin­gle non-business or fam­ily cus­tomers. I have also defended AT&T as hav­ing the best net­work for geeks due to your use of open GSM tech­nol­ogy and until recently high­est mobile data speeds. As you might guess, I will not be doing this any longer and I will be empha­siz­ing the prob­lems I have with your change to any­one who may ask about your ser­vice. I had been eye­ing the Sprint/HTC Evo 4G for a time while debat­ing mak­ing the switch, I thank you for help­ing me make my deci­sion. You can expect to see my num­ber port out in the near future.

Sin­cerely,
Sean Harlow

Sent via e-mail to Ran­dall Stephen­son, CEO and Mark Collins, VP of Voice and Data