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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

Tags: advertisement, blog monetization, blog revenue, monetize, revenue


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]]> 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 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.

Tags: Adsense, advertisement, clickzones, google adsense


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]]> 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 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 ?

Tags: advertisement, finetune, monetize, music, pandora, radio, service, stream


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]]> 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 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.

Tags: advertisement, battlefield, battlefield-2142, computer, ea, ea-games, game-advertisement, Games, iga, in-game-ads, pc, shooter


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