Showing 98 posts tagged advertising
“TV ratings have dropped by 50 percent over the last decade. Goldman Sachs recently called the decline “the sharpest pace on record.” The firm found that ratings in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic – the key group targeted by advertisers – fell by 17 percent last winter compared with the winter before.”
Advertisers Are Now Tracking Your Behavior Across Various Devices
Think that your mobile browsing habits exist in a different world than the content and ads you view on your PC? Until recently, you’d have been correct, but now advertisers are coming up with ways to identify consumers across platforms in order to provide them with ads they might actually click on.
“Every retailer is trying to figure out cross-platform activities,” Expedia’s VP of mobile and online partner marketing tells the Wall Street Journal.
» via Consumerist
Sen. Rockefeller rips 'repulsive' online tracking
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) accused the advertising industry on Wednesday of purposefully delaying negotiations to develop a feature that would allow consumers to block online tracking.
Rockefeller, the chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, accused the industry of “dragging its feet” on developing a Do Not Track option.
“And I believe it’s doing it on purpose,” he said during his committee’s hearing on the issue.
“People don’t read ads. People read what interests them – sometimes it’s an ad.”
(via courtenaybird)
“In shaping its targeted advertising strategy, it is no longer relying solely on what Facebook users reveal about themselves. Instead, it is tapping into outside sources of data to learn even more about them — and to sell ads that are more finely targeted to them. Facebook says that this way, marketers will be able to reach the right audience for the right products, and consumers will see advertisements that are, as the company calls it, “relevant” to them.”
Massive bot network is draining $6 million a month from online ad industry, says report
A London analytics firm says it has identified a bot network that is tricking marketers into showing billions of ads every month to phantom visitors. The botnet reportedly relies on more than 120,000 infected Windows computers located in the U.S., and appears to represent a sophisticated scheme to defraud the advertising industry.
The findings were announced on Tuesday by Spider.io, a firm that specializes in detecting abnormal internet traffic. Spider says it has identified at least 202 websites where the vast majority of visitors are bots rather than normal human visitors, and that that every major brand engaged in automated ad buying has been paying to shows ads to the bots; a visit to one of the affected sites Tuesday morning showed ads from brands like Crest and Bank of America.
» via paidContent
“Facebook cited a stat that only a single-digit percentage of its users (which amounts to tens of millions of people) had previously opted out of having their content appear in search results, so the change wouldn’t be noticed by most. Of course at the time, no one knew the future of Facebook’s advertising business might ride on their data appearing in search results.”
France Rejects Plan by Internet Provider to Block Online Ads
In a potential test case for Europe, the French government on Monday ordered a big Internet service provider to stop blocking online advertisements, saying the company had no right to edit the contents of the Web for users.
The dispute has turned into a gauge of how France, and perhaps the rest of Europe, will mediate a struggle between telecommunications providers against Internet companies like Google, which generate billions of dollars in revenue from traffic that travels freely on their networks.
European telecommunications companies want a share of that money, saying they need it to finance investments in faster broadband networks — and, as the latest incident shows, they are willing to flex their muscles to get it.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
Ad Blocking Raises Alarm Among Firms Like Google
Xavier Niel, the French technology entrepreneur, has made a career of disrupting the status quo.
Now, he has dared to take on Google and other online advertisers in a battle that puts the Web companies under pressure to use the wealth generated by the ads to help pay for the network pipelines that deliver the content.
Mr. Niel’s telecommunications company, Free, which has an estimated 5.2 million Internet-access users in France, began last week to enable its customers to block Web advertising. The company is updating users’ software with an ad-blocking feature as the default setting.
That move has raised alarm among companies that, like Google, have based their entire business models on providing free content to consumers by festooning Web pages with paid advertisements. Although Google so far has kept largely silent about Free’s challenge, the reaction from the small Web operators who live and die by online ads has been vociferous.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
French ISP Free Blocks All Web Advertising
A French Internet service provider (ISP) with more than 5 million subscribers has taken the unusual step of blocking most web advertising. ISP Free is now blocking most advertisements to subscribers (Français) through an opt-out system; if Free subscribers wish to see web advertising, they will be required to change their router’s settings. Free, one of the country’s most popular ISPs, gained popularity by offering customers an integrated DSL modem/router/digital video recorder in a single set-top box. French website Numerama reports there is no whitelist (Français) for advertisers to bypass the ad blocker.
» via Fast Company
