The company basically stated that an algorithmic change was launched that analyzes the ad to content ratio above the fold. Sites that do not have much content above the fold can be affected by this change, according to Google. What does affected mean exactly? They are pushed down in the search results in favor of sites that have a better user experience.

Sites that display ads to a normal degree are not affected by the change.

I personally have two issues with the announcement.

Parameters

Google did not provide information about the parameters that they look at. What’s missing?

• The definition of what the company considers to be an ad
• What Google considers to be a normal ad ratio above the fold
• The screen resolutions they use to calculate that ad to content ratio
• If popup ads or interstitial ads are also considered by the change

This leaves webmasters again with the nagging feeling that they may be affected by the change, even though they are likely not.

Not everyone is equal

The second aspect weights more heavily in my eyes. Take a look at the following screenshot and let me know if you would consider this a bad ad to content ratio on the page.

Please note that this screenshot shows a 1000 to 800 resolution, and that your experience may differ depending on a number of factors.

And now read Matt Cutts’ announcement again:

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience

Is Matt saying that Google Search is not offering a good user experience? I think he does. Lets discuss in the comments.

Back in October we ran a story about the founding of Eyos GMBH, the new parent company for Adblock Plus that was founded by Wladimir Palant and Till Faida. And with the company came the idea to change the behavior of Adblock Plus. The managing directors back then mentioned that they had plans to fix the web for both web publishers and users.

Their decision to allow unobtrusive ads to pass through the filter was backed by a user study were 75% of all users stated that they were using an adblocker primarily to block annoying ads on the web, and that they would not mind if unobtrusive ads were displayed to them on websites.

Adblock Plus 2.0 for Firefox will introduce the concept of acceptable ads to all Firefox users who upgrade to or install the new version of the add-on. Users will see a notification once they install or update to the new version.

The notification states that Adblock Plus has been configured to allow non-intrusive advertising. Links lead to a help page with additional information about the new feature and the configuration were the feature can be turned off. The page explains the reason for the move (supporting websites that rely on advertising, forcing websites who use annoying ads to think about it), that users can disable the acceptable ads feature if they so desire, and what the developers consider acceptable ads.

According to their information, acceptable ads are static advertisements (no animations or sounds), preferably text only and use at most one script to avoid delays in page loading times.

A list of acceptable ad providers and websites is available here. The only big name in the list is Google, the remaining filters refer to ads on specific sites (mostly German based). The page states that Adblock Plus has agreements with “some websites and advertisers”. It is not clear how those agreements look like.

Adblock Plus users can disable the feature in the add-on’s Filter options.

I have to admit that I like the move as a webmaster. Why? Because I earn my living from this website with ads on the site. If everyone would block the ads on this site, I would be working in a 9 to 5 job with little or maybe no time to update and maintain this website.

Users still have the option to turn off the the exception list if the want to continue blocking all ads on the Internet.
The new version for Firefox is said to be released tomorrow. The Chrome version will receive an update in the coming months.

What’s your take on the move? Let me know in the comments.

The new Twitter web design has seen big changes. The homepage displays a left sidebar now with information about the Twitter user, follow suggestions and trends, and the main area that displays with the most recent tweets.

A new tab menu with four new tabs has been introduced that looks and behaves the same on all platforms that Twitter is available on.

The four new tabs Home, Connect, Discover and Me are explained on the Fly page, only this much:

• Home: Tweets from the people a user follows
• Connect: Displays conversation details, e.g. who followed you or retweeted a message.
• Discover: Personalized information based on the user’s location, followed users and world news.
• Me: The new profile section on Twitter.

A video has been created that demonstrates the capabilities of the new Twitter.

Not every Twitter users seems to be happy with the redesign. Especially the placement of direct messages under the Me tab makes it highly uncomfortable to reach. Even more concerning than this design decision are ads that have been spotted by users such as Abraham Vegh.

This particular ad appeared as an intermediary page on one of the mobile clients. I cannot really say if this is something that all users will see or if it is restricted to particular users, countries, platforms or other parameters.

If you are using the new Twitter mobile clients, have ads been displayed to you? Let us know more about if if they did. (via)

Update: Abraham who posted the original tweet has now posted a correction stating that it “*may* have not been a Twitter-imposed ad”.

Have you seen ads on the new mobile Twitter clients?

Salimane Adjao Moustapha recently posted a photo of another place where Google (seemingly) has started to display ads: The Chrome browser. The screenshot shows a new tab page of the Chrome browser. The Apps section is open and at the top of it is an ad for Google’s own Chromebook. It states: Get a Chromebook for the holidays: the computer powered by Chrome.

The first part of the ad is underlined. It is not clear where it leads to as it is not revealed by Salimane, and I was not able to reproduce it.

The post on Google Plus sums up all the different opinions about the ad in Chrome. Some say it is Google’s right to display ads because the browser is free. Others that they should not do so without giving the user control over the ads. A third group is suggesting to switch to Firefox or Chromium. And a last group is angry but not angry enough to switch just yet. It would not make much sense either at the time considering that the majority may not have seen ads in Chrome yet.

I’d like to know your opinion about ads in web browsers. Do you think it is ok for Google to display ads in the browser, especially if it is for other company products? Or would you say that ads in a browser are a no-go, regardless of what they promote?

My personal opinion on the matter is that Chrome has turned adware if Google makes the decision to display these kind of ads to all Chrome users. It does not really matter if the ads promote Google products or third party products, it is still an ad.

Linking “real-world” purchases to online users is one of the holy grails of Internet marketing. Current advertising companies are already able to link online activity to advertisements. Linking offline purchases on the other hand would push behavioral targeting to another level.

Both credit card companies interestingly enough confirmed that they are exploring ways of using transactional data for targeted online advertisements. A Visa patent application in April for instance revealed plans to use personal details to create online profiles for ad targeting, with personal details taken from a variety of sources including “information from social network websites, information from credit bureaus, information from search engines, information about insurance claims, information from DNA databanks”.

A Master Card spokesman stated that the company “doesn’t collect card-holders’ names or contact information in transactions it processes”, and that it therefor “doesn’t connect an individual’s Web-surfing activity to their specific cardholder transaction data or provide outside companies with individuals’ transaction data”.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, both companies said that the plans are preliminary. Master Card and Visa are not the only two credit card processing companies that use the billions of credit card transactions for marketing. Most companies disclose in their privacy policies that they may share personal information with third party companies.

Master Card credit card holders can opt-opt of a variety of marketing and tracking related programs. This includes opting-out from the anonymization of personal information to perform data analyzes and from a unique web analytics cookie to avoid the aggregation and analysis of data collected.

The best way to protect yourself? Pay with cash whenever possible. What’s your take on this?

The official announcement dates back to the last day of September 2011. It is a three paragraph announcement that the Eyeo GmbH has been founded, and that Wladimir Palant and Till Faida have become the managing directories of said company. Wladimir’s role as the lead Adblock Plus developer will remain while Till looks more at the financial well being and funding of the company.

A blog post back in August 2011 offers additional information about Wladimir’s decision to back the project by founding a company. Probably the most interesting aspect from a user perspective is that Adblock Plus has not sold out in any form. It also means that Wladimir can now work full-time on the development of Adblock Plus, which will mean faster updates than before.

It is also reassuring that the company will not put money in front of morals or ethics.

If you read the announcements carefully you will find references to “fixing” or “influencing” the web. I recently asked Till what they meant by that and he told me that the main intention of the ad blocker was to eliminate “bad” advertisement on the Internet. They do realize that the application’s current state hurts web publishers and companies who rely on advertising revenue to provide their services for free on the Internet.

A decision was made to give users an option to support their favorite websites by only blocking annoying and obtrusive ads instead of all advertisements. According to one of their studies 75% of all Adblock Plus users would like “to only block annoying ads and let unobtrusive ads go through to facilitate revenues for their favourite websites”.

Till did not fail to mention that it was the company’s “top priority to let the users decide” whether they want to continue blocking all forms of advertisements or only annoying forms.

That’s an interesting prospect from a webmaster’s point of view, considering that many rely on advertising revenue to offer their services on the Internet.

The discussion as to what is considered acceptable and what is not is publicly discussed on the Adblock Plus forum.

Adblock Plus is an extension for the Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and K-Meleon web browser.

Yahoo’s Ad Internet Manager reveals the information that Yahoo has accumulated based on activity on Yahoo sites like Flickr, Delicious or Yahoo Search.

The data consists of factual data, e.g. a user’s IP address, and “educated guesses” based on the usage of Yahoo services.

The information on the Ad Interest Manager page are divided into three groups: Interest Categories, Activities, and Computer and Cookies.

ad interest manager

Interest Categories are set based on the pages that have been visited in the past, ads that have been clicked on and viewed, and searches that have been conducted.

Activities highlight the use of Yahoo network sites by the user. It displays an activity level for each service used.

Computer and Cookies finally displays the user’s IP address and location, operating system, browser, screen resolution, color depth, age range and gender.

The information may differ depending on the web browser used to access the Ad Internet Manager website.

The page offers an opt out option to block interest based ads from being displayed. It the choice is made a cookie is saved to the computer that blocks interest based ads. This still means that ads are shown, but that those ads are not “fine tuned” by other information.

It is interesting to note that some information are guesswork, the age and gender of a user for instance. In our tests, Yahoo thought we were a 26-35 female from Mont-de-Marsan, Aquitaine, or a 56-65 female from New York, depending on the browser used to access the page. It is puzzling that the IP lookup returned locations in two different countries, with both of them being incorrect.

The Ad Interest Manager does not support Google Chrome yet, both the OS and browser information where set to unknown or blank.

Yahoo is not the only company that makes use of interest based ads. Google for instance offers a similar service that they call Ads Preferences, which can, when coupled with the information of the Google Dashboard, reveal lots of information about a particular user.

Opt Out Pages:

Yahoo Opt-Out
Google Opt-Out
Microsoft Advertising Opt-Out
Amazon Opt-Out
Privacy Choice Opt-Out (multiple ad networks)

You may also be interested in the guide “What is a tracking cookie” that not only explains what a tracking cookie is, but also how to disable them in popular web browsers.

How do you handle interest based ads and tracking cookies? Let us know in the comments.

Some Amazon users might prefer that Amazon is not keeping a record of visits to third party sites while some might not want to see personalized ads on Amazon sites and third party sites.

Personalized ads can be problematic when multiple users use a single computer system as the recommendations are then all mixed together (unless each customer has an individual account that is used whenever Amazon is opened).

Amazon offers an opt-out procedure. This opt-out has the following two effects:

• No personalized ads are displayed to the Amazon customer on Amazon first party sites and third party sites that display Amazon ads.
• Amazon will not record the user’s visits to third party sites that display Amazon advertisements.

It is fairly easy to opt-out of Amazon personalized ads and third party information collection.

Open the Amazon website and locate the Your Account link in the top right corner of the screen.

Scroll down on the next page until you see the link “Your Advertising Preferences” in the Personalization section. Clicking that link opens the following screen.

The opt out button on the left can be used to disable personalized ads and information collection on third party websites.

Personalized Ads. We want the ads you see on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, as well as the ads you see from Amazon or its affiliates on other third-party websites, to be as relevant to you as possible. Often, our advertising is based on personal information about you, such as your purchases on Amazon.com, visits to Amazon Associate web sites, or use of payment services like Checkout by Amazon on other web sites.

If you do not want us to use this information to allow third parties to personalize ads we display to you on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, or to allow us to personalize Amazon or its affiliates’ ads displayed to you on third-party sites, click the button on the left of this page to turn off this feature.

Please keep in mind that you will still see ads on Amazon.com and its affiliated sites, they just won’t be personalized by third parties. Similarly, you may still see Amazon and its affiliates’ ads on third-party sites; they just won’t be personalized by us.

Information Collection. Like other internet advertisers, Amazon and its affiliates are able to keep a record of third-party web sites you visit that display our advertisements and content links.

If you do not want us to keep a record of your visits to third-party web sites, click the button on the left of the page to turn off this feature, and we will no longer record, store or use this information. However, all previously collected information will be retained by our systems to better personalize your web experience and improve our services.

The opt out button will turn into an opt in button if it is pressed to give the customer an option to activate the feature again.

That’s where Tracker Watcher comes into play. The Firefox add-on will analyze the active website for trackers and display all that have been found on an external page. It provides information about anonymity, sharing of information, Sensitivity and deletion in an easy to understand manner.

• Anonymity: Is the data anonymized or tracked across websites?
• Sharing: Do they share the information with third parties?
• Sensitivity: Do they use the information in sensitive personal areas like health conditions or financial matters?
• Deletion: Do they promise to delete the information?

Links to privacy statements of trackers are provided if available. Some trackers are not included in the list but are listed below the table. This could mean that the service does not have enough information yet about those trackers so that they could not be added to the table.

The very same page links to opt-out pages for advertisers that support that option. Those links lead to the website of the developer of the tracker where the opt-out can be announced. The Tracker Watcher website contains another link to a global opt-out page to opt out of all 91 companies that have been analyzed by the service or only 71 of those companies that have raised concerns.

Tracker Watcher can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox website.

Whilst it is possible to ‘collapse’ the advertisement to a much smaller one, having to do so is about as big an annoyance as the original advertisement.

A popular Wikimedia-themed newsletter, Wikizine, pointed out that by modifying the theme, it is possible to remove it.

All registered users can edit two files which modify CSS and JavaScript on Wikipedia for them. By default, the monobook theme is used and to my knowledge, this will only under that theme.

To remove the advert, ensure you are logged in, then go to Special:mypage/monobook.css. Go to ‘edit this page’ and paste the following:

/* Remove fundraiser banner and sitenotice */
#siteNotice, #fundraiser, .fundraiser-box { display:none; !important; }

Save the page and then do a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5). The advert should be gone!

Wikimedia obviously requires money in order to operate and they massively value donations, but I find begging for money in such an obtrustive fashion very annoying and it really makes Wikipedia less easy to use.

Update: Wikipedia is currently again asking for donations. This is handled in very much the same way as it was handled in 2008. You see a large donation banner on every Wikipedia page. It is possible to close the banner but it will eventually reappear.

One of the options here is to use userscripts, small JavaScript based files, to remove the banners from Wikipedia. Remove Wikipedia notices is one of the scripts that you can install in your browser to remove the donation banner on Wikipedia. Chrome users can install the script right away, Firefox users need to download and install either the Greasemonkey or the Scriptish extension before they can do so.

I have spotted a Pepsi advertisement on Youtube that is airing in South-America only which has all the traits of an interesting fun to watch ad. Honestly, what can go wrong if you combine Kung Fu Fighting, Mini Me and Godzilla in an ad?

Interestingly enough that’s not all there is to be seen and done for the viewer. They did release a free browser widget for Nokia Mobile phones built by interactive design & marketing group AgencyNet that can be downloaded free of charge from a newly created website. Supported languages are Spanish, Portuguese and English. The Pepsimundo website itself is only in Spanish but easy enough to navigate.

How does this ad compare to the ads you usually see when turning on the television?

Update: The video has been deleted on YouTube, it is no longer available on the popular video hosting website. The account that has uploaded the video has been deleted as well. The video itself does not seem to be available as a copy on the site, which is often the case when a video goes down.

Here are related videos that you may enjoy. The first is a French Pepsi commercial.

A Dr. Pepper commercial featuring Godzilla.

Nike’s famous Ronaldinho commercial.

Please let me know if you find the original Pepsi Kung Fu commercial on the Internet, I’d like to embed the video again on the site.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

Two new right-click entries appear after installing the add-on for Firefox, which currently does not support Firefox 3.01 but can be forced to be compatible. The first entry, Remove This Permanently, removes the selected element from the current page. If you remove the Google logo from a search it will still appear on a different search. This method is pretty good for quickly removing elements on a website that you visit regularly and that does not have changing addresses.

The second entry Rip Advanced offers advanced features that make it possible to remove elements from a single page, all similar pages, the website and the full domain. That’s not all however. You can also remove all similar items in one go, remove the parent element, all parent elements, all frames and Google Adsense.

A few remarks about the process: It’s pretty difficulty to remove flash elements from a website because you cannot right-click in the elements. They display a different menu. This means you have to click close to them and hope that Rip picks them as the default element that should be removed. A red border appears around the element that would get removed which is a good visual aid.

Elements that are removed do still get downloaded and appear in the cache. This is therefor no method to save bandwidth.

The primary use for Rip would be to remove nerve wrecking elements from websites that you visit regularly. Before you start now and remove advertisements from my website I ask you to consider this before you do it. They pay my bills. If everyone would remove them I would not be able to maintain that blog. And they pay for every pageview. This is also a tip for every Adblock user who is visiting my site. If you want to support me disable Adblock on my website. I do not have popups, layer ads or any other disturbing ads of that kind on my pages. It would help me tremendously on the other hand.

The article is divided into ten parts and you have to click on the numbers below each part to navigate to the rest. A far better way would be to scan the page for a PRINT button, because this usually opens a new window with the full article without advertisement and navigation.

I do use this trick for several years and it is working perfectly on those websites. The print function at Information Week opens the complete article at once.

A few words about why they do this, why websites divided articles into smaller parts. They are not thinking about the reader here, that they don’t want him to scroll the article for instance. They don’t want him to scroll the article for another reason, advertisement. It is all about ads on the page.

The longer an article gets the lesser ads you will most likely see. Ads tend to concentrate on the top, and maybe at the very bottom. Another reason for dividing up articles is the increase in Pageviews. Advertisers love Pageviews. If you tell them that your readers view 10.0 pages per visit instead of 1.0 page per visit they are impressed.

More pages also increases the time visitors stay on a website which is another important figure for advertisers. Oh, and you do earn more if you sell direct advertisement. If you get 1000 visitors per day and publish one article per day you would get 1000 pageviews if each visitor would read one article. If you divided that article by ten pages you would get a figure much higher, close to 10000 depending on how many visitors decided to quit reading because of the navigation.

The filter list grows over time, I know mine does and becomes ineffective this way due to duplicate entries and ineffective usage of space in the filter list. Thankfully though the Adblock website offers a way to optimize this filter list to make it more effective. Before you can start with the optimization you need to export your current filter list.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open Adblock Plus. Click on Filters > Export Filters to save the filter list as a text document. Now load the Adblock Plus optimization website and paste the contents of the saved filtered list into the form.

The default options that are available at the bottom should be sufficient for most users. Just make sure you check Optimize including preexisting RegExes if you already have an optimized version but added new filters to that one. Click on the optimize button which should display some stats and of course the new optimized filter list.

Now copy and paste the new filter list into a text document and import it again into Adblock Plus. Press CTRL + SHIFT + A again and click on Filters > Import Filters. Select the text document that contains the updated filter list and click ok. Make sure you select Overwrite when asked if you want to overwrite or append the filter list.

My filter list, which only contained 12 lines and 364 chars was reduced to 1 line and 251 chars which means a reduction of 91.7 % and 31 %.

Update:

Wladimir Palant from Adblock Plus contacted me and told me that Adblock Plus users should use the following two scripts if they want to optimize their filter list:

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier
http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check

This could work and is not the biggest reason why I think it will fail though. Users can get used to it much like they are used to see ads when reading newspapers. I think it depends on the content and how the ads are displayed in the document. The main reason why this is going to fail is the following.

Users have to accept that the Adobe Reader is connecting to a Adobe server if the document contains sponsored content. They have to do so every time they open the document and this is why PDF ads will fail. Most users can simply click on No in that dialog and still view the contents of the document. There is no need to accept the connection.

Other PDF viewers like Foxit or Sumatra do not display the ads at all and do not ask the user therefor if he wants to display them. This means that the target audience is only a fraction of the viewers of the content. It remains to be seen how many users will accept the connection so that ads can be displayed on their system.

It is also possible that Adobe will fix this in a future version of Adobe Reader so that ads are displayed without asking the user. But that is just an assumption on my side and must not be the case. A quick manipulation of the host file should be enough to counter this though. Unless the pdf won’t be displayed at all if the ads are not displayed.

There are however several differences between the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic which are worth noting. When I first joined Pubmatic I was turned off by the fact that I had to add my username and password for all the advertising companies that I did work with and that I had to sign up for all that I was not a member of yet.

This required a huge portion of trust on my side which I was not able to give at that time. I did not want to give away my login details which basically could be used to change account details like payment address. I therefor never tried out Pubmatic.

The Rubicon Project does not have this requirement. They use existing accounts for sites that generate less than 300000 impressions per day. This has several advantages. First, I do not have to give them my existing login information which is great. Second I do get paid by Paypal or Check from one company and not from several. I also see all the stats and performance in one place instead of having to log into several websites to check the performance of my ads.

Third, I do not have to join networks that I’m no member of yet and finally I can use advertisers that are not available yet in my country. This means that it is for instance possible to have YPN (Yahoo Ads) displayed on your website even if you do not have a US-American SSID. That’s the theory at least because I can currently select only a handful of networks from the list of advertising networks listed on their website.

A quick chat with the excellent support revealed that the Network Directory contained most known advertising networks and that users could comment and rate them even if they have not been added yet to the Rubicon Project. Plans are to add as many advertisers from that list before the commercial release in 2008.

I’m currently using ads from their website to fill as second tier for certain ad spots on my website and will report back when I have some data that I can share. Here is a short list of changes that I would like to see:

• Create Ad Zones and disable certain networks on those zones. Currently a network can only be disabled for all ad spots.
• Faster reporting times. They are updated once a day only but they will most likely fix this before they leave Beta
• More Advertisers. Some heavyweight advertisers are missing currently. Those are YPN, Tribalfusion, Burst Media and others that I use on my website currently
• Make it clearer that users have to select ad colors themselves and make it possible to use different colors for different ad zones.

I heard about the Rubicon Project at Connected Internet. Make sure you check this awesome blog out and add it to your RSS Reader.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/feed/ 0 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/#comments Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:09:42 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/ Google changed the clickzones of their Adsense ad units and most webmasters are reporting decreases in their ad unit click through rate and revenue. Many have seen a decrease between 1-2% in click through rate which reduced the earnings by a figure between 30-70%.

It is to early to really say if this will turn out to be a lasting effect of if advertisers in turn will spend more money which results in higher earnings per click. I’m a bit skeptic that advertisers will really increase their bids on keywords and have the feeling that this drop will remain as it is for a very long time.

Several webmasters already decided to move away from Adsense and use other ways of monetizing their website. This is unfortunately not an option for many.

I compiled a list of tips that might help in this situation:

• Don’t panic ! This is probably the most important tip. We need more time to analyze the impact on the webmaster community and discover strategies on how to cope with this situation.
• Blending might not be the best option anymore. Most webmasters did blend their ads to fit into the site design. They were able to do this because it did not really matter where the user clicked on the ad. Even the whitespace was clickable. This is different now with only the title and url clickable
• Be patient when you try different ad units and color schemes. Try those for at least 1-2 days before you draw a conclusion. We all know that Adsense earnings rise and fall on a daily basis and it is essential to test ad units for a certain time. My suggestion would be to test them on at least two weekdays.
• Take the time and look for Adsense alternatives. It is always a good idea to look around and have alternatives if Adsense earnings remain on these low levels. A good starting point is Darrens Problogger blog and webmaster forums like Webmaster World and Digitalpoint
• Making Ads stick out. I’m currently testing different color schemes and a early conclusion that I can draw is that the color red seems to be excellent for a higher click through rate. I would suggest to change colors and ad units and test those as well. Title and URL have different sizes in many ad units which means that the clickable area is different as well. Some ad units do not display the URL at all which means that the only clickable area is the title.

Feel free to add additional tips and alternatives to Adsense. I would also be interested in your observations.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/feed/ 1 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/#comments Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:07:14 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/ Pandora streams music over the internet which is related to a artist or song that you have entered at the beginning. The service is great to find new artists that make a similar kind of music than artists that you like to listen to. The service was completely free until now.

They have decided to add advertisement to their service. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about 10% of the users are receiving a nine second advertisement once a day. This looks like testing the waters for me. If few users complain about the ads they might introduce this to all listeners and probably even increase the amount of ads that are displayed each day.

I personally think that it is not such a big problem if you compare it to terrestrial radio stations for instance. It could become one if they would decided to increase the advertisements. One should also consider that websites that offer such services have to generate money somehow to be able to pay the bills for servers, bandwidth and service.

A alternative would be finetune.com which can also be used to get new suggestions.

What is your opinion on the matter ?

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/feed/ 3 http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/remove-the-advertising-in-games-like-battlefield-2142/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/remove-the-advertising-in-games-like-battlefield-2142/#comments Sat, 25 Nov 2006 08:02:31 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/remove-the-advertising-in-games-like-battlefield-2142/ Ingame advertising will become more common in the next years. One of the first games that makes extensive use of ingame advertisement is EA Games Battlefield 2142. Once connected to the server it displays ads in the game that are displayed by a calculation of variables like your geolocation or time you did spend looking at an ad.

Gamers do not receive anything from this. All the money earned goes right into the pockets of EA. This kinda sucks and I thought it would be nice to share a way to get rid of those ads. The easiest solution would be to block the network that streams the ads from being able to connect to your computer. All you need to do is block (reject traffic from) the subnets 72.3.184.144/28 and 72.32.5.0/28.

Another method that looks more complicated would be to change the ad files in the cache by using a tool called IGA Ad Cache Editor. The readme explains the functionality: “This application imports and exports DDS image files from the ad cache of Battlefield 2142.  You can also import and export groups/sets of images (adpacks).”

Once exported you can modify the images using tools like GIMP and import them after you have changed the contents.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/remove-the-advertising-in-games-like-battlefield-2142/feed/ 0