Don Marti

Sun 26 Aug 2012 08:29:06 AM PDT

Advertising links

Online ad story from Robert X. Cringely: Click fraud the old fashion way. There is apparently no standardized ad auditing capability on the Internet so scams of this sort are actually easy to do. And advertisers often lean into it by often preferring not to know precisely how effective are their ads. Links back to a previous article: Apple and the Future of Publishing – Part One: Ad agencies 15 years ago didn’t want to know whether or not their ads had actually been read, they told us. This was simply because if an advertiser discovered that few, if any, people were actually reading their ad on page 113, the company might just pull that ad and save their money, taking revenue away from the ad agency in the process.

Larry Downes: Customer Intelligence, Privacy, and the "Creepy Factor" Interesting point that people get de-sensitized to creepy ad practices. But the remaining question is how the creepiness level as seen by the user affects the effectiveness of the ad, or likelihood that the user will run an ad blocker. Any answers?

Jacques Mattheij explains the You are not the customer, you are the product meme. Instead of the simplistic ‘you are the product’ view it is much more complicated. (Just because you see an ad for example.com doesn't mean example.com necessarily knows anything about your web activity. Tracking feeds into a whole hairball of Big Data that's different from site to site.)

Finally, some good points on the great app.net experiment:

Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

Dalton Caldwell: Fred Wilson is wrong about “Free”

How App.net Can Change Everything – Orian Marx (via ReadWriteWeb)

J.D. Bentley: The Network Underneath

Matthew Gertner: The Case Against Advertising

(By the way: you can follow me as dmarti on alpha.app.net.)