Technology today can be used to track users across domains. A study in 2009 saw Google on 92 of the top 100 sites followed by DoubleClick with 70 presences (which are now also Google owned) and Microsoft’s Atlas with 60 occurrences.

Cookies, regular or Flash, are usually used to track users. These cookies can be accessed on all domains a company script is loaded on, which in the case of Google would mean the ability to track user movement on 92 of the top 100 domains in the world. While this percentage is surely going down a bit if the sample size increases, it is still common to be tracked across many web properties.

There are options available to not be tracked online. This includes clearing all cookies after or even during a browsing session, using private browsing modes, or installing extensions like the excellent NoScript to block third party scripts from running on a site.

TrackerBlock, available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome offers another option. The program can make sure that you are not tracked across the web. It does so in a number of ways:

• Do Not Track Me Header – Whenever you make a request to a website, you submit a signal that tells the website that you do not want your activities tracked. Websites and companies are not obligated though. Option to delete Flash cookies.
• Opt-Out Cookies – So called opt-out cookies tell websites, services and agencies that the user does not want to be tracked. This turns off data collection and tracking off more than one hundred companies.
• Tracker Blocking – Blocks advertising agencies and companies from reading or writing cookies on your system. The extension does that for more than 550 different companies.
• HTML5 Storage – Visualizes which companies are using HTML5 to store data on your system, with options to delete the data manually.

Click on an image to see how the settings and preferences look like in the Firefox web browser.

The program combines several anti-tracking options in one interface. Especially useful is the ability to write the opt-out cookies on the system, to clear Flash and HTML5 data storage that are often used for tracking, and to block advertising companies from reading or writing cookies on the system.

TrackerBlock can best be installed at the Privacy Choice website, as it is available there for all supported browsers. It is not really clear if the extension is available for other browsers as well. It is definitely available for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

I recently stumbled upon a story over at Connection Agent. The story basically revealed that LinkedIn had automatically opted-in all their users to a setting that allowed them to use their user’s names and photos for third party advertising.

Now, the core problem with these kind of things is that they are usually diametrical to what users want. This would not be a problem if the service would be opt-in only, so that users could make the decision whether they wanted their names and photos to potentially appear in third party advertising. Then again, no one would probably do it if that was the case.

Steve describes on his blog how users can opt-out of the third party advertising. They need to click on their name on the LinkedIn homepage and select Settings from the drop down menu that appears automatically.

On the Settings page they need to select Account. They then need to locate Manage Social Advertising in the column next to Account and de-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”.

Once done you are opted-out of third party advertising.

Now, the real problem here is LinkedIn’s sneaky way of enabling this for all their user accounts. The move sounds great from their perspective and will surely please their stock holders. The majority of users may never realize that the option is there, and those that do are probably only opting-out and not closing their accounts because of this. They may be a bit disgruntled but this settles over time.

LinkedIn basically does what Facebook has done before them; Enable a feature for all users automatically that the majority of users, if they knew about it, would not opt-in for.

If you are on LinkedIn and do not want your name or face to appear in an ad that you have no control over whatsoever, I suggest you opt-out of it immediately.

Update: LinkedIn has posted a response called Privacy, Advertising, and Putting Members First on their blog. While the company does not seem intent to change social advertising from automatic opt-in to manual opt-in, they have announced that they will make changes to the ad units.

In the interview, Schmidt described Microsoft’s search engine as their main competitor, describing it as a “well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

He said that Microsoft need to be watched and implied that they had perhaps been written-off prematurely by the media, especially where Bing is concerned.

The Bing search engine now also powers Yahoo! search and Bing recently overtook Yahoo to take second place in the search engine rankings.  This isn’t bad for a search engine that comes from a family of search engines that had awful reputations, and that’s achieved this in less than 18 months.

It was also clear that Google’s smartphone and tablet operating system, Android, is a secondary concern and that Apple, as a result, isn’t the main competitive focus of the company.

This is not really a surprise as search and advertising provide Google with almost all of its revenue.  The free Android OS must be a drain on resources and is really only a way to help market the Google name and maintain consumer goodwill towards the company.

You can view the entire interview on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

Every advertising company runs an ad server and it is not usually necessary to run another ad server to manage the ads on websites. An ad server on the other hand has several advantages (and some disadvantages) over using no ad server.

If you look at most websites you will notice that ads are usually displayed without an ad server in the background. All the webmaster has to do is to copy and paste the ad tags that are supplied by the advertising company on the website or pages the ads should be displayed.

That’s usually it for cpc based advertising solutions like Google Adsense but cpm based banner ads on the other hand require additional configurations. This can be largely attributed to the fact that cpm advertising companies often only display ads for some of the inventory. They do require a backup ad (passback ad) that they transfer the ad request to if they cannot display one. That’s tiered advertising (or ad chaining).

It is up to the webmaster where the passback ads are send to. It is possible to display a local banner, a transparent gif or ads from another company.

It becomes more difficulty if geographic parameters are taking into consideration. Say one advertiser is only offering banner ads for US visitors, one for UK visitors and one offers to display ads for all visitors. Most webmasters chain the ads then to direct all visitors from the US advertiser to the UK and the to the one that is serving all.

This means that the page loading time for visitors that are not coming from the US or UK increases. If you assume that each advertiser has the same loading time it increases by a factor of 3 for worldwide users.

An ad server on the other hand can be configured to take the geolocation of a visitor into account. It can for instance be configured to display ad 1 to US visitors, ad 2 to UK visitors and ad 3 to everyone else. This means that the loading time is always the same no matter where the visitor of the website comes from.

This is one of the biggest strengths of an ad server. It has to be noted though that an ad server that is not hosted locally adds its loading time to all ad displays. Locally hosted ad servers on the other hand require lots of server resources if the website is popular and it is often the case that they need to be hosted on another server because of their performance requirements.

An alternative to using an ad server for distributing ads to geotargeted users is to use a scripting language to do that during page loading time. This again has severe consequences as it increases the server’s load and prevents caching of those scripts since they have to be run individually for every visitor.

Most ad servers provide additional filtering options and ad display options. Google’s Ad Manager for instance can also filter by web browser, operating system and date or time. This opens interesting new options like displaying specific ads to Linux users for instance or Google Chrome users.

The second big benefit of an ad server are its ad management capabilities. It is for instance nearly impossible to sell part of the inventory directly to advertisers as it would be very difficulty to control the ads on the website.

An ad server can be easily used for that. An advertiser might want to purchase 100k impressions targeting Windows users from the UK. That would not be a problem with a proper ad manager which could be configured to run the 100k impressions on the web server disabling the ad after the last impression has been served.

Ad Server Benefits

• More flexibility to serve and manage ads
• Better performance by reducing the effects of ad chaining
• Ability to run highly targeted campaigns and to sell direct advertisement

Ad Server Disadvantages

• Requires some time to configure the ads that are served properly
• Might increase loading time for some users depending whether the ad server is hosted locally or remotely
• Not suitable for smaller websites or sites that display only ads from one advertising company

What’s your experience regarding ad servers? Would you recommend one if you could?

1. Comment moderation and spam

Comment moderation and spam are two of the most time consuming aspects of a webmaster’s workday. A high profile blog can get thousands of spam comments a day which are then queued up in a spam folder somewhere. Even the best antispam tools do not offer a 100% protection against spam. Another trade-off is that false positives tend to increase with every new antispam plugin and script installed which can frustrate visitors so that they either stop posting comments or leave the site to never come back.

2. Email Support

Most websites have a contact form or other means of contacting the webmaster or a person responsible by email. These emails can contain tech support topics, requests (either for new articles, help, guest blogging or advertising), comments, spam or rude remarks. Tech support questions are usually the most time consuming to answer especially if it is not possible to test the problem locally. Webmasters obviously do not have to answer emails but it is good behavior if they do in a timely manner (except for spam and the rude remark emails). It is still a time consuming process especially on high traffic websites.

3. Updates and Security

It is of uttermost importance to run the latest version of scripts and software on a website. Old versions can contain security or memory holes, incompatibilities or missing features. Many hackers wait for security releases and start searching for websites that still run an older version on the day the new releases get announced. Updates on the other hand are only one part of the security concept. Scripts on the server side can improve security by preventing brute force attacks or notifying tech support. Webmasters do not necessarily have access to these features especially on shared hosting but some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. This includes setting the right access rights for directories, making sure to use non-standard usernames, directories and database prefixes or installing scripts and plugins that increase a website’s security.

4. Features and Plugins

Webmasters have to keep an eye on the development of new plugins and features. WordPress webmasters for example have thousands of plugins at their disposal that get constantly updated. Additions are posted in the dozens daily and it can be quite hard to keep up with them. There is however always the possibility to find a plugin or script that adds a new interesting feature to a website or is able to replace an existing script by providing an increase in performance or functionality. One of the main reasons why many webmasters stick with one content management system is that it is easier to keep an overview of the advancements (and other things including security) that are made.

5. Design

Not all webmasters have to be design-aces. It is perfectly possible to download templates and themes for many different types of content management systems or websites and use these with little modification. Another option is to order a custom theme from a designer. Small changes on the other hand are usually performed by the webmaster. This includes changing a logo, adding a graphic or other elements.

6. Performance

A slow loading website does not necessarily mean that the server the website is hosted is not capable of delivering the performance the website needs. Other things can play a role here including scripts and plugins installed. External scripts, like advertisement or third party widgets, can slow down a website tremendously. Even more so if the domain the data is loaded from is experiencing technical problems as well. A webmaster needs to make sure that the website can be loaded as fast as possible. While third party scripts are usually in the top list of elements that slow down a website the problems can also be caused by large multimedia contents like unoptimized images, broken scripts, not optimized loading sequences or not making use of compression techniques or image concatenation.

Many tools can help in the analysis including the XHTML Validator over at W3C, Firebug or YSLOW.

7. Testing and Compatibility

A website has to be tested with various web browsers to ensure that the user experience is similar in all cases and that it is possible to connect to the website with all popular web browsers. Webmasters also do a lot of testing that include testing advertisement, plugins, scripts or element positions on their website. A classical example is to test various advertisement positions on a website to find the one that is yielding the highest earnings for the webmaster. Other possibilities include testing various positions for content to increase pageviews or decrease the number of visitors who leave a website on the first page without visiting a second one.

8. Advertising

Not all websites and blogs run advertisements. Webmasters who do place ads on their websites open a new can of worms. Statistics have to be checked regularly to make sure that the ads perform well. Ads need to be tested (if possible) in various ways including different positions, color schemes and even different advertisers. Monitoring various webmaster forums and blogs for new advertising opportunities and tips is a must do.

9. Hosting, Domain and Billing

Webmasters using free webhosts do not have to worry about these. But webmasters with their own domain name and web hosting account need to keep an eye on a few things including expiration dates and paying subscriptions in time. This is usually not a big issue and not that time consuming unless hundreds or thousands of domains are hosted at dozens of different web hosters or web servers.

10. Networking

Networking is probably the most important aspect of being a webmaster. You tend to get the best tips from a network of webmasters who work in the same niche. I consider the day I met Everton from Connected Internet one of my luckiest days in my life. Not only have we exchanged information that helped us get rich (haha) and improve our websites; No, we also decided to run a joint project which turned out to be very profitable.

Not everything is about being profitable of course. Some tips are only passed around in close circles because many webmasters do not post their findings and experiences on forums or websites. This can be a better way of placing ads on a blog, a new plugin or script that a website benefits from or general tips.

Verdict:

I’m not sure if this article covered all the aspects. There are probably more including tax reports, law suites and the like. Please post a comment if you have something to add or would like to voice your opinion on the subject. Being a webmaster is more than meets the eye.

The move was not easy at the beginning as we strive to have long term relationships with Internet advertising providers even if it means to miss opportunities. We did ran into some invoicing issues with Vibrant Media which definitely fueled the decision to move. We were contacted by one of Kontera’s business development managers who convinced us that Kontera would be able to monetize the website better which essentially meant more revenue for us.

We did not run blindly into this though as we have been burned quite a few times in the past by Internet advertising agencies who claimed to up the revenue but failed to deliver. Kontera was easy to setup on the blog as they provided access to a WordPress plugin. Took a couple of minutes to install and configure the plugin and everything was set to go. One of the differences between Kontera and Intellitxt is that the former allows to change the color of the links while the latter does not. Kontera managed to reach the same level of revenue that Intellitxt provided but managed to surpass that after the first week. We are now at about 150% of the Intellitxt revenue.

Every website on the other hand is different and performance can therefor vary quite a bit depending on your site’s niche, language and other factors.

I am not taking credit for this, so if you did this before me feel free to let us know, but I did arrive at it on my own. The methods you could try is the “defer” attribute, which defers loading to the end of the page load, however, this had no effect at all. You can also try a “window.onload”, but this didn’t help either. With any other function combinations the ad either loaded as usual or did some weird stuff.

In the end, I decided to load the ad at the bottom of the page, right before the “” tag, and then use javascript to “transfer” the contents to where I need it do be, while keeping the source hidden. This is achieved using the “document.getElementById” method, read on to take a look at a specific example.

So what we need to do is create a div at the bottom of our page, load the advertisement there, and transfer it to the place we want it to be. I will be using inline CSS and inline javascript, which should not be done in real “life”, the best practice is to have all your CSS in external stylsheets and you javascript called from files in the header (where possible). The bottom of our page would look like this:

<div id=”top_ad_loader” style=”display:none;”>
Ad code in here
</div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.getElementById(“top_ad”).innerHTML = document.getElementById(“top_ad_loader”).innerHTML
</script>

</body>

So what is going on here? We have two divs, the first is “top_ad_loader”, which you can see right here. This div is hidden, but contains the ad code. When the code is being read, the javascript might take a while to load, but we’re right at the bottom, so all our content is displayed already. There is also another div, “top_ad”, which can not be seen here, it is somewhere way above this part of our code, somewhere near the “<body>” tag.

There is javascript code right beneath the ad loader, the purpose of which is to transfer the loaded contents of the ad loader to te place where we want it to be. We “grab” the contents inside the ad loader using “document.getElementById(“top_ad_loader”).innerHTML“, and we want the contents of the actual ad block to equal this.

Once the page load gets to the ad it will slowly load it, when finished, parsing will continue, and our javascript will transfer the contents to the top.

If you have a page that loads a bit slowly, perhaps this method would be worth a try? Contents usually load faster than javascript, so if you place the javascript load last your content will load in 1-2 seconds (maybe much less), making the javascript load 1-2 seconds later. However, if a javascript at the beginning loads in 5 seconds, you need to wait that out just to start loading the content.

If you’d like to read some similar articles, take a look at Scriptastique, a blog all about web development and coding, with great tips on CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL and Javascript and tutorials and screencasts coming soon! You can follow us on our RSS feed, or Twitter where we’re posting 3-4 short tips daily now!

One way to do that would be to block cookies of those Internet advertising networks. It also works to clear cookies after every session but there is a better way. Many Internet advertising networks are providing ways to opt-out of behavioral targeting by setting so called opt-out cookies on the user’s computer system.

If an opt-out cookie is present they will not track and analyze the user by placing additional cookies on his computer system. The major problem here is that there are hundreds of online advertising companies that use behavioral targeting in some of their advertising campaigns.

A user following that manual approach would have to locate the website of the Internet advertising network and there the page where the opt-out cookie could be set. This would take days and the chance would be high that a lot of networks would be missed.

Privacy Choice was mentioned in yesterday’s post about Google’s new behavioral ads. The website provides the means to opt-out of behavioral targeting of dozens of ad networks including major ones like Google AdSense, DoubleClick, Yahoo! and AOL.

A click on the opt-out button on the main page of Privacy Choice will set all opt-out cookies that are currently provided by the service. This may take up to a minute as several connections to the various internet advertising agencies are established to set the cookie.

The only thing that you need to be aware of is that the opt-out cookie is a normal web browser cookie that will get deleted if you clear all of your cookies. You would need to set the opt-out cookie again after clearing the cookies of the web browser.

Usually, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is very critical of big corporations who intrude on people’s privacy, but their criticism was not very harsh. Why? Because Google has developed a web browser plug-in that permits users to opt-out of this scheme.

The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and modifications to browser preferences in Chrome and Safari also allow people to opt-out. Google also maintains an ‘Ad Preferences Manager‘ which allows this tracking cookie to be disabled until the next time cookies are wiped.

There are several reasons to disable these cookies. Firstly, you may not entrust Google with your details. Secondly, adverts based on past browsing may be displayed to other users of the computer… not perfect if, for example, you were buying a present for a family member and they are suddenly swarmed with advertisements about it!

Most tracking cookies can be disabled if you modify browser settings. In Firefox, for example, in Preferences>Privacy, you can refuse to ‘accept third party cookies’.

Understandably of course, there where a lot of serious issues with Vista’s release, nothing we hadn’t seen before, but issues nonetheless. It’s safe to say that 2 years later these issues have been resolved and as Tim Anderson declared:

“Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.”

Thanks to the infamous, largely inaccurate yet brilliant “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” advertisements Apple managed to walk all over Microsoft and contribute to what may be a permanent tarring of the Vista image.

Several months ago however there was the announcement that Microsoft had sold its latest $300 million advertising campaign to a _____  company

This month however we have began to see the launch of what we can only presume to be the new Microsoft campaign aimed at removing that anti-Vista stigma. The Microsoft website has been completely redesigned, removing the Aero inspired elements and replacing it with a lighter look, attractive and well designed. The design manages to say ‘Microsoft Windows’ without saying ‘Vista’ which is what I imagine the intention to be.

The most interesting thing on the front page is the banner advertisement declaring

“at one point, everyone thought the earth was flat”

Which I think is very good start and gives me a little more confidence in the Windows campaign. It’s clever and unique and gets the message across without being corny or seeming to compete with the Apple ads in any way.

The website the banner leads to is also well designed and provides a whole lot of easy to read and understand information about Vista. The only thing I still don’t think is being sold well about Vista is some good solid reasons for upgrading. The list given is quite short and really a lot more could be said, but I guess I’m not running a multi-billion dollar company here so they probably know best.

Payments are made after the advertiser has made the payment and will be by PayPal. Other payment options can be discussed privately. I suggest you take a look at my advertising on Ghacks page to get the most important details. Here is a listing of all ad units and costs that are currently available:

Half of that money can be yours if you refer an advertiser who books the spot for at least one month. Use the contact form on my website if you want to let me know about an advertiser.

A 468×60 advertisement can be placed on the top of the page on the right side of the site logo. The ads of this spot are visible on all pages, it sells for a monthly fee of $500. Remember that’s more than a million pageviews.

> A 125×125 ad block can be placed in the sidebar above the fold. Only 4 of those precious spots will be sold at a time and they sell for $300 per month each.

> A larger ad block with a maximum width and height of 350 pixels can be placed in the sidebar as well, possible positions are at the top above site search, at the bottom below all other sidebar entries or somewhere in between. Since this block is larger than the 125×125 ads it costs a little bit more. There will only be one of these blocks available, the monthly costs are $700

> The sidebar can also hold a so called Skyscraper ad block which can have a width of either 120 or 160 pixels. Skyscrapers sell for $700 as well.

> A floating rectangle around the articles is available as well. This spot gets lots of clicks each day and a monthly placement costs $5000.

> Additional ad spots are available on the articles pages. Ad units can be placed below the articles who have a maximum width of 500 pixels. This spot is a premium spot, getting great clicks and views. It sells for $1000 per month.