DISQUS

Running a website that is funded on advertising revenue as well as an avid web surfer, I end up with a different opinion.

I don't mind ads on sites, in fact several sites do it so tastefully it really ads to the sites. But other sites have ads that are filled with spyware, popups, popunders, etc. The other ones that annoy are ads that play audio automatically -- like the annoying smilely download banners that infected myspace.

Facebook's attempt to show relevant ads on the right hand side of whatever your doing works to some degree -- but again they do a terrible job of filtering out irrelevant ads as well as the down right scams -- click here to get your obama stimulus check!

I do a lot of surfing in chrome as well --- so no ad block even available here.

Overall my take on the situation is -- someone who goes about to specifically block ads, is not too likely to have clicked on them (just like users from digg and stumbleupon are not likely either). But they still would have been there for the display ads paid on a CPM basis.

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I'm remembering a time when Quiznos offered a coupon for buy one get one free subs... then after redeeming it a few times... seeing a cut out of the coupon on a board that said "not accepted". Same with Mobile gas stations ran a promo about 10 years ago for some deal involving a very cheap soft drink. Of course they too stopped accepting it as well.

Why on earth these companies think that they can make an announcement to give something away for free -- and then not plan on following through -- is beyond me. There are websites dedicated to watching for deals like this so that everyone who follows those sites can participate -- even if you didn't watch the original show. The oprah.com page on this has over 6000 comments as of now..

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while I don't think this cap is fair, or close - it should be noted that the existing time warner road runner service agreement allows them to cap internet usage based on amount transferred or speed. So they technically can already do this.

Setting a cap as absurdly low as 40 GB/month is just bad business. In fact its terrible business. Sure this is getting a lot of media and perhaps its just a publicity stunt, but it is a terrible idea. you can easily track some of your bandwidth usage just by setting windows task manager to monitor bytes sent/rec'd and then turn it on with your computer. not ideal, but gives you some idea...


in a data center you can usually get connections for $20 to $30 per mbit (which is about 300 Gb/month if run wide open). So TWC's costs are nowhere near this. Understanding that though - you couldn't get a connection anywhere near as fast as home cable modem if you were a business for $40/month... you would be charged much more.

3mbit/768 up DSL would allow you to transfer about 1.2TB/month for just $30 from Verzion... if you used the whole thing the whole time...

TWC does offer a home worker package from the business class service... for $80/month. With no plans to limit the business end of things. Perhaps this is just a ploy to get even more each month from customers.. instead of $30, $40, $50/month for cable modem service... now they could just push "heavy" users to a higher plan and up their revenue.

I think that if ISPs start charging users for bandwidth overages -- which several are currently testing in the US, including Time Warner... then many users may reduce the amount of youtube videos they watch. This in turn reduces revenue as well as costs, but might make the revenue amount in line with costs.

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Last year - abc.com showed about 4 commercials during a 1 hour long program (actually they become like 42minutes because of the lack of tv commercials.) If you ran adblock plus - you watched it commercial free.

This year we noticed that the number of breaks increased , but it is still one 30 second commercial each time. The more annoying thing about it - is not that they are there, but that if you are watching full screen, then it will take it out of full screen, play the commercial (which are often longer than 30 seconds, you just have to wait 30 seconds to play the show again), then click play again to resume the show full screen.

These 30 second breaks would be far less intrusive if they just played 30 seconds of commercials without taking it out of full screen.

In the end - its still faster and less commercials than there are on tv.

We try to record stuff and watch it with the DVR, but sometimes you forget to record something...

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pretty cool setup - I think we will see this get expanded to other products like custom search etc.

I think its a step in the right direction. machine translation certainly has come a long way from where it started - but there is room for more improvements down the road.

No way would I ever leave a great current position to go work for a political office. You are then at the whim and will of the office whom you serve.

very well said. some key points here that I wish more people would understand.

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awesome collection - i can't believe that so many things like this happen.

there are lots of sites covering tech stuff.. there are lots more covering politics.. heck the DNC said that they allowed over 10,000 bloggers in to cover the event... 10,000! thats not to mention the rest of the media coverage that was there.

So to lump a few sites together to call them copycats is just lame.

great list of sites - thanks!

Oh wow - thats pretty crazy. Its pretty cleaned up on my end though.

great tips Chris. I've definitely got to put some of these into effect.

we have hosted with mosso for the last 16 months. But if the current plan to switch to compute cycles isn't corrected soon - we will be leaving. The way they are calculating them is either not accurate or something. It is different by a factor of about 10 from what they claim in their FAQ. I think they have a few more weeks or a lot of people are leaving.

All of this of course before rackspace's planned IPO.

I saw the amazon payment stuff the other month. It looks like a good idea from what I could tell. Our programmer said implementing it along side paypal would not be much of a problem - just another api.

great post - i'll have to check into this books. stumbled.

interesting... I had no idea that they were blocking so many countries.

great list and i think that your spot on with the first 15. the 10 myths are funny as well.

great site - and nice podcast for this video series.

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Being the owner of 2 article directories I can say that it still does work. There are several reasons and theories about this - but the least of which is that while the links may not all count in the big 3 serps - there are still users who visit each of the article directories every day and look for new content to syndicate or content to read or stories to use in newspapers.

Having a wider distribution base - aka article marketer - benefits you in 2 ways - 1) bigger net to catch interested parties 2) potentially more links.

great list. I've heard of some of these - but I hadn't heard of others. I'll have to take a look at them.

thats cool. sometimes it can be a bit tricky driving if the bikes are in the middle of the road. hopefully this will help.

great story - I can believe it helped him, but its very cool to hear that someone who runs a fishing lure business has benefited from social media.

Great article. I run 2 article directories so of course I'm a big fan of article marketing. It works on large scale and long term projects is my experience.