Disqus - Latest Comments for dmarti

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Apple Treats The Disease. Google Treats The Symptoms.

dmarti — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 15:30:44 -0000

Crappy ads promote blocking, and web publishers know that. But they don't have the market power to reject annoying ads, because tracking enables crappy advertisers to reach the same audience on another site.

When users protect themselves from tracking, that translates into more market power for publishers, so more power to enforce standards on annoying ads.

http://blog.aloodo.org/post...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: GOOG, FB, P&G Create Coalition To Do Nothing

dmarti — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:39:55 -0000

Web ads did not end up being so annoying because
Data-Driven Marketing masters have failed to do
some magickal research that would quantify user
irritation. Any web editor who has ever moderated
a comment section knows what the problem ads are.
Web sites would start refusing those problem ads
tomorrow if they had the market power to do it.

http://blog.aloodo.org/post...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Facebook "Amazed" By Crap They've Been Selling

dmarti — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 08:53:41 -0000

Facebook stopped doing this particular project, but, as Dave Jakubowski said, "those ads were almost certainly dumped into another low-quality exchange where all of them were most likely purchased."

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Waste Not, Grow Not

dmarti — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:31:09 -0000

I don't think it's a coincidence that ad blocking went mainstream just as people started noticing ads "following them around the Internet." https://digitalcontentnext....

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Waste Not, Grow Not

dmarti — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:02:20 -0000

David Ogilvy once wrote, "The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife." The average shopper is just as good an applied behavioral economist as the average database marketer. People know when they're being targeted individually, so a digital cold call doesn't work the same way that a public, costly, hard-to-repudiate ad can.

https://digitalcontentnext....

Re: over the counter-culture

dmarti — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 08:57:22 -0000

d00d, the _left_ hasn't had a decent counter-cultural idea since 1993. The _right_ has invented precarity, surveillance marketing, and Bitcoin.

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Display Advertising Is Poison

dmarti — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 18:07:23 -0000

I seriously thought about signing up, but I ended up deciding against it.

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: 10 Dreadful Clichés The Ad Industry Should Euthanize

dmarti — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 12:39:32 -0000

"Relevant" -- that's adtech-speak for "creepy".

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Ad Industry Is The Web's Lapdog

dmarti — Mon, 19 May 2014 12:08:54 -0000

Or 0.03% of traffic was from bots written by people too lazy to try them on the same analytics tools you use. (Seriously though, it's a game, like spam vs. spam filters...some days more bogus stuff gets through, other days either the filters have it under control or the scammers are busy running DDoS or Bitcoin mining)

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Ad Industry Is The Web's Lapdog

dmarti — Mon, 19 May 2014 12:01:55 -0000

Great piece but the most important problem is in the big picture.

Surveillance marketing creeps people out (not just privacy freaks: 86% of users have taken privacy measures online. http://www.pewinternet.org/... )

Because "nobody knows where their online ads run", the people who are temporarily in charge of great brands are undermining them by associating them with bottom-feeder sites and creepy tracking practices.

Re: What does "It" look like? - The COMRADITY Journal

dmarti — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 10:34:10 -0000

It won't though. Marketing executives are fad-driven, and the flavor of the month is surveillance marketing, not "old-fashioned" budgets.

Re: What does "It" look like? - The COMRADITY Journal

dmarti — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 22:35:42 -0000

The industry has gotten into this mess because people are sold on the idea of chasing users from high-value content (which writers get paid to make) onto lower-value content, which is often infringing, scammy, or otherwise problematic. Michael Tiffany explained it best: "The fundamental value proposition of these
ad tech companies who are de-anonymizing the Internet
is, "Why spend big CPMs on branded sites when I can get
them on no-name sites?""

Fighting fraud is going to require advertisers to make some hard choices: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Facebook's Awesome Bait-And-Switch

dmarti — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 18:15:15 -0000

I'm getting "13 Celebrities with Awesome and REAL Bodies". The ad system must know something about you.

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Facebook's Awesome Bait-And-Switch

dmarti — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 18:13:14 -0000

Now that I have the Facebook profile of an 88-year-old woman, I'm getting terrible, cheesy, scammy advertising on that site. There's nothing social or sharing about it, just low-end web ads.

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

It looks like Bob is right about legit advertisers not wanting to reach older customers, anyway.

Re: Don’t eat that cookie

dmarti — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 02:45:35 -0000

The problem is that out of adtech, fraud control, and privacy, you can only pick two.

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: Why I Have A Blog, A Facebook Page, And A Twitter Account

dmarti — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:58:27 -0000

You can always run dlvr.it to gateway your blog posts, or any other RSS feed, to Facebook. (Not affiliated with either company, just a satisfied user of dlvr.it).

Re: The Ad Contrarian: A Very Intricate Nonsense

dmarti — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 09:21:40 -0000

Good points. Because large agencies and tech companies are finding it so easy to bullshit the clients with math, the industry is systematically throwing away what's valuable about advertising in the first place.

http://zgp.org/targeted-adv...

Re: The Ad Contrarian: The 5 Dumbest Ideas About Online Advertising

dmarti — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 07:32:45 -0000

If you ever expand this to a top 10, you might want to save a spot for targeting.

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

The industry still believes that you can make advertising more "efficient" by paying for creepy targeting instead of quality content to run the ads on -- but if that worked, email spam would have worked in the 1990s.

Re: Mozilla Comes under Attack - and of Age

dmarti — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 18:18:31 -0000

The IAB's position on creepy web ads today is strangely familiar. It's the same thing the spammers were saying about email spam in the late 1990s. Remember? It's just those elitist nerds who want to filter spam--regular users like it!

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/busi...

Re: Old School? It’s Time to Change Your Mind About Social CRM.

dmarti — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:09:33 -0000

Au contraire, Lou -- better to not have an official Facebook page at all than to have one that's either abandoned, or only a one-way channel.

Social sites aren't advertising made targeted -- they're customer service ticketing systems made public.

Re: TCP Sucks

dmarti — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:28:50 -0000

Instead of having the router drop all the packets in its queue, what about using the milk algorithm? (When you remove milk from your refrigerator, you check the date. If the date is within an acceptable range, you drink it, otherwise discard it.) When a router adds a packet to the queue, timestamp it. Check the timestamp on the way out. If it's stale, discard it and check the next one.

Re: Microsoft Gives Up on Competition, Tries to Buy IE Users Instead

dmarti — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:18:46 -0000

Dean Hachamovitch from the MSIE team did an interesting post on "tracking protection" (IOW, AdBlock out of the box).

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/...

How's that working out for them? Privacy could be a pretty good selling point for MSFT, since they aren't tied to ad revenue the way Firefox and Chrome are.

Re: Tech Shopping Rules of Thumb

dmarti — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:57:02 -0000

You can get double usage out of a quality laptop by upgrading RAM, replacing storage, and battery, and doing an OS reinstall after one "lifespan."

If it hooks up between the computer and your ears, try a music store for one that will last a lifetime before you get a crappy one from the computer store (headphones, amps, "monitor" speakers, USB audio boxes, mics)

Re: Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip

dmarti — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:08:42 -0000

Doesn't Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server still support it? They have a lot of HPC customers who are on IA64.

Re: That was quick: Four lines of code is all it takes for The New York Times’ paywall to come tumbling down

dmarti — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:18:40 -0000

This trick looks about as easy as ad blocking, which has been around for a long time, and is pretty easy, but very few users bother to do it: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/www/...

If the paywall is this leaky, then most Javascript nerds will just bypass it without making an infringing copy of the story. If the NYT made it tighter, more of the nerds would copy stories to sites outside the paywall, where more non-nerds would see them.