Category Archives: ads

abuse, ads

Abuse?

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Every so often something new and annoying happens in the business of the internet. The most recent trend to annoy me is the appearance of streaming video ad-lets that have no escape, mute, or user control embedded in various pages. Many of them have no way to prevent the contents from being streamed at the person viewing the page they are on. One clicks on to a page and there, off to the side, is a streaming video with no accessible controls and sound blaring, making it nearly impossible to read the article you originally intended to read.

Why are these ad-lets annoying and a dirty trick? There are several reasons:

  • No volume control to mute the obnoxious ad audio.
  • No pause control to stop wasting bandwidth for the video.
  • Capricious consumption of my bandwidth without asking permission.

Given that more and more ISPs are installing bandwidth consumption caps on consumer accounts, do you really want to see your bandwidth used without your permission to display an obnoxious streaming ad? I sure don’t, and I don’t even have a bandwidth cap on my service.

What can be done about the problem? Short of some technical slight of hand to prevent the domains serving the bogus video from connecting, there is very little the average user can do. But one thing we can all do as consumers is to refuse to do business with any company that uses such ads. Maybe they will get the hint that abusing their potential customers is not a way to increase sales.

What do you think?

ads, odd

Feel the …

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I happened to see an ad on TV tonight for a product that shall remain nameless (but you can find it here). The ad featured the catch-phrase “Feel the Heal”, trademarked by the nameless company, proving you can trademark anything. You can imagine what happened from there with my strange bent of thought. Heal came across as Heel, since that is what it sounded like. And from there I meandered down a hundred possible interpretations of the phrase, none of them good. Some examples:

Feel the Heel #1 – A picture of a rather elderly gentleman with a foot fetish sprang to mind. This poor fellow was kneeling at the feet of a beautiful model and trembling with awe and desire as she lifted her high heel clad foot to him with the words “Feel the heel”.

Feel the Heel #2 – A group of people are partying, dancing and drinking, having a great time. A group of young women are sitting around a table discussing the bad behavior of the cad at the club. One woman pipes in with “Feel the heel”. The others look aghast at her. She explains that he will undoubtedly be intimidated and go for safer prey.

Feel the Heel #3 – The star quarterback is lying on the field,writhing in pain. The head trainer turns to the team doctor and says “Feel the heel, feel the heel”.

So what comes to your mind now as I shout “FEEL THE HEEL’????

Does it change after seeing this picture?

ads, AdSense, keywords, oddity

AdSense Oddities (part II)

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(This is the follow on to this post .)

I don’t know about you, but suddenly tonight the ads started switching from the dental mania to reflect some of the other posts. So for example right now I see the following four ads:

  • Volunteer at Food Banks
  • Vonnage Small Business
  • Fake Your Phone Caller ID
  • Frisco Lodge B&B
What a change from the dental mania. But still no car ads!
It is fascinating to watch the workings of Google’s crawler and it’s ties to AdSense and how it determines what to display with what page content. Right now I can see how it might connect this post with the Volunteer ad, and I can stretch to see how the Vonnage and Fake Caller ID ads tie to this post , but it is a stretch to see how the Frisco Lodge B&B connects to this post . One day I’ll have to try showing only the current day’s post on the page to see the workings in finer grain. 
Oops, just refreshed the page again and the dental ads are back in force. Those dentists must really have a hard time finding keyword tie-ins because one of them is in Las Vegas which is one heck of a journey from here to see the dentist.
ads, AdSense, keywords, oddity

AdSense Oddities

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Do you ever look at the ads Google’s AdSense puts up on your page? Looking at the ads placed on your page gives some real insight into how hard it must be to find suitable places for some ads and how some of the AdSense ad space auctions must go.

You might remember that I wrote about breaking my tooth a few days ago and then making my subsequent dental appointment. Since that time I have seen nothing but dental ads on this page. Given the relative paucity of dental terms amidst all the other possible terms in this blog, I’m left to conclude that dental ads must have some interesting attributes. After all, before I wrote about my dental issues, I got ads for things like automobiles and how-to setups. Even one about the joys of scabies treatment (and boy oh boy must that be a hard one to sell via keywords). And after all the occurrences of the words dental and tooth in this post, I’ll probably be doomed to see nothing but dental ads for the next several weeks. Hopefully all my readers have bad dental health and will diligently visit the fine sponsors of the rampaging dental ads.

What do *I* deduce from the ads I see? Several things that may or may not be interesting to anyone but me in my peculiarly demented way of thinking. And for that matter the deductions may or may not be true. Caveat Emptor.

The first deduction is that the auction for dental terms must be fairly expensive relative to other ad types that might apply to this page. Otherwise the other terms should show up in preference to the current dental mania. Two other possibilities come to mind. It could it be that Colorado dentists are more ad happy than others and/or it could be hard to find occurrences of the dental/tooth keywords for ad placement. After all, I have only viewed the page from an ISP that can be attributed to Colorado. And I did use the words dentist, dental, and tooth.

The second deduction is that the regional division of the auction must be a bit coarse. I get dental practice ads for places like Summit county, Fort Collins, Greeley, etc. Given that those locations range from 250 miles to 100 miles from here, it hints to me that the auction may have included the word /region Colorado as a qualifier. At least one reader from the Summit county area emailed me that the ads must be prescient since they knew to target her with Summit county dental practices. I felt bad when I had to disabuse her of the idea of prescience by pointing out that *I* also saw the same ads out here on the plains. (For those who aren’t familiar with Colorado geography/locations, I am located on the eastern plains of Colorado in the area sometimes referred to as the armpit of Nebraska. {Look at a map! } On the other hand, Summit county is in the mountains in the area of the Key Stone, Arapaho Basin, and Breckenridge ski areas. About 250 miles apart as the automobile drives.)

So let me pose the question to those of you who use AdSense on your pages or who read blogs with ads by Google – do you see such odd spates of keyword/region mania? I intentionally used the word automobile four times (including the two in the paragraph)  in this post. It will be real interesting to see if automobile ads start appearing once in a while. Likewise will “ski area” trigger some hot dogging ads with snowboards?