JOHN SUMSER,
S P O N S O R S Find out more
Hall Of Fame8 Corners of ECommerceTypes
of Links
Red Herring
The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
Advertising is
Reality
The System
It's better to
All material on this
|
... |
Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter
Canny Mac users will probably already have found a nifty little application which filters out banner ads.
Surfing with the app makes us somewhat nostalgic for the old days of the Web, before banner ads became ubiquitous. And, in many cases, poorly conceived, creatively-bereft and intrusive.
Now the rest of the world can join in the unfettered pleasure allowed only to one cohort, courtesy of the wonderful folks who brought us Cybersitter, the filtering software which filters out - well, tons of interesting and useful stuff as well as smut.
Solid Oak Software recently announced the release of an enhanced version of Cybersitter "in response to consumer demand", according to VP Marc Kante.
Apparently, Solid Oak developed the newest incarnation of CYBERsitter so that surfers can free up modems crippled by the heavy graphics (and subsequent L-O-N-G download times) of some banner ads.
Is this A Good Thing?
Well, it depends on your standpoint. We have no beef with banner ads per se. But we do feel that the apparent need for products such as Solid Oak's merely points up the paucity of creativity at the creative end of banners.
In another sense, the whole issue draws attention to the apparent haze of oblivion in which many site and banner designers seem to be enveloped. Whilst the creatives may have a super fast processor, a 21" monitor and a T1 connection, us lesser mortals have to make do with a 28.8, a slower processor and a 14" monitor.
Solid Oak's constituency lies amongst those of us who are tired of the World Wide Wait, and who yearn for a Kinder, Gentler Net...
The notion of an "Internet Mall" has always seemed a little perverse to us. The Web, after all, is not the "real world", so the idea that users will decide to purchase a CD (for example), whilst looking for information on vacations flies in the face of our belief that sophisticated users use the Web to obtain very specific information.
Our beliefs have been bolstered by a report by Paul Marshall.
Here are the salient points:
Businesses that have sites on malls were surveyed and asked to
rate their experiences. Five of the questions used a scale of 0
to 10. A rating from 0-3 means they are very dissatisfied, 4-7
is somewhat satisfied, and 8 and up are very satisfied.
84% of the respondents are very unsatisfied with the leads or
sales they have received from their site, and less than 2% are
very satisfied. The average rating was 1.4. More than half of
the respondents, 55%, have not received any business from their
site. Most of the 43% who have received business have received
only a few orders.
Further, 89% of the respondents said that they are not getting
the results that they expected. Again, less than 2% are
receiving the results that they expected. The average response
was 1.1 out of 10.
Another area of dissatisfaction includes mistakes made by the
mall owners that are never corrected. Here's a particularly
striking example:
One site was listed in the mall's directory as a "Clam
Substation Specialist." The business was a research company;
they were a "Claim Substantiation Specialist." This error was
never corrected and remained on the mall for at least 1 year.
Somehow, we're not surprised by these results.
"To Mall or Not to Mall"? A resounding NOT.
...screamed Jon Swartz, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer in the Business
Section of the Chronicle of Saturday, January 31, 1998.
Quelle surprise!!!!
The proposal, concocted by the wonderfully-named Ira Magaziner, envisions
the creation of a further five TLD's (Top Level Domains), namely:
This proposal has, of course, been kicking around for ages, and is
something upon which we have commented in previous editions of this column.
Now, however, it looks as if this absurd, wrong-headed proposal might
actually take flight.
The objective, according to Magaziner, is "that more domain names should be
added".
Fat chance.
Take, for example, "interbiznet.com" (puh-leeze!!!). We are a ".com" as we
are a commercial entity. Come September - when the new domains are planned
to arrive - we would be mighty silly if we didn't snap up "interbiznet.web"
(we are, after all, "web related"), "interbiznet.store" (we are a vendor of
services) and "interbiznet.firm" (as an online company).
And the mighty brains who inhabit this organization are certain to come up
with plausible reasons as to why we should also be entitled to ".arts" and
".nom"...
Of course, we aren't the only people who have this notion.
Which begs the question as to how this proposal will increase the number of
domains.
All it will do is create a marketing nightmare for existing online
organizations, and line the pockets of lawyers who specialize in trademark
disputes. And even those who don't.
URL's are a consumers' bad dream as it is - awkward, clumsy, difficult to
remember. Here was a golden opportunity to reform the whole system.
And Obersturmfuhrer Magaziner blew it.
Most people find Web sites through the top search engines. Or do they?
Georgia Tech's GVU surveys indicate otherwise. They show that links from other Web pages are the most popular way people find new sites. Which means that you need lots of "other web pages" to link to your site as well.
But how to get those links?
In the "old days", it was usually enough to write a flattering, imploring eMail to a site operator and organize some sort of reciprocal link arrangement. No problem, old chap - part of the Internet Culture.
No more. Sending such a mail to a well-trafficked site will probably be ignored.
Why? Well, a site with a relatively high level of traffic (like this one, for example), attracts around fifty link requests a week. We could employ our intern, Monika, to do nothing more than download pages, change 'em, check 'em and bung 'em back up.
No way. Not at around thirty minutes a link.
The first thing to do is to find out who links to you. Use the "link:www.yourcompany.com" command in AltaVista or HotBot. You may be pleasantly surprised. Or bitterly disappointed...
Now do the same with a competing and equally (or more) successful company. You'll probably notice quite a difference.
Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to persuade those sites that link to your competition to link to you instead.
Look at who they are. If a popular non-profit links to your competition, and you have your own server, they may be persuaded to swap links by the offer of free server space, for example.
Bear in mind that changing links takes time. If you offer a quid pro quo, your request is more likely to be taken seriously.
Alternatively, check out ClickTrade...
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
All material on this site is © 1995, 1996 by IBN (The Internet Business Network), Mill Valley, CA 94941 |