One of the hot tickets currently on-line are in-text relevance advertising. All the big publishers are testing this idea using various implementations. I’m using Kontera. I’ll be testing the overall effectiveness, annoyance factor, click through and other elements. Most of all I wonder if these links are doing well for many site just because they are a curiosity. It’s hard to resist clicking opn them when you first see them. Ziff is using someone’s system on my online column, for example. The ad links in the case of this blog are double underlined and in green. I welcome any other suggestions. I also apologize in advance for any possible annoyance.
Allow me to get in an early vote on just how awful and annoying these things are. They don’t seem to be at all effective at pulling out phrases relevant to the post at hand and visually they sap at the readability of the content.
Why am I getting adverts targetting US Army personnel in Iraq, when I’m an New Zealander in Auckland? Should I be worried?
#1 — Well this post itself added a link right to the topic. Seems pretty effective to me. And, yes some of the other links are dubious. And you should note the algorithms are still new regarding page analysis.
#2 — YES! be worried.
All I have to say is “Thank God for the No Script Firefox extension.” I hate these stupid text link ads. If I hadn’t bothered to temporarily allow javascript from Kontera, then I wouldn’t have seen them. I won’t turn on javascript from them again.
With the possible exception of pop-ups and pop-unders, these are the single most annoying type of ad I have ever seen. I’ve hated them since I first saw them. The fact that they add links to the comments even is horrendous – that’s the space for the commenters to add their own links. JCD, please get rid of these ads ASAP. They just degrade from the visual look of the site and make mousing around a pain.
I forgot to mention – the ads are also quite usually completely irrelevant even to the word they’re linking from. Bloody useless. Please remove.
Ack !!!!!
This technology is one of the most annoying things on the net
Not worth it at all. These things get in the way of everything! I have not once clicked on one. They block the content!
Please John, no, don’t do it.
Annoying. Intrusive. Useless. Adblocked.
I love the way that using adblock with firefox and keeping it updated sometimes confuses me. I cant see any ads, and at first i didnt realise why and figured that they must not show because of my New Zealand IP address… But I came back with IE and now i see ’em. Same thing happened on digg when they added ads, I made some embarassing comment about how everyone was going crazy over nothing, but I just wasnt seeing it. Google search ‘adblock extension’.
6,7,8,9,10.11,12
I Agree. Shit can them. The revenue gained will be offset by the number of views lost. After a few times the average reader will say fug it and move to another site and maybe not come back. I know these are obvious conclusions but someone had to be trite.
Insidious. This is worse than censorship. It is blatant overtaking of your content, John. It puts what Kontera deems important, not YOU. It undermines your blog. It puts you SECOND behind Kontera.
Maybe this earmarks the end of John C. Dvorak as we knew him. Get them undermining underlining of this FREEDOM blog.
wow… that’s just fucking horrible.
Combine this with the utterly useless comment spam annoyances… well I can only assume you are trying to drive people away.
What is it I am supposed to do or what are they are supposed to do?
What are their purpose again? I guess for me they are a great success, easily ignored.
More advertisement! Bring it on!!!
I had to check in another browser as Firefox/Adblock Plus prevented the appearance of the green links. Another reason to recommend this combo…
Both of us think they suck! But, it did finally motivate me to get Adblock Plus for Firefox.
If it was on a 3sec delay with a context menu…
it would still suck
it would be better if… just no
Thanks for the heads up about the Adblock Plus for Firefox. Still new to Firefox, loving it, and now I love it even more. Now I don’t care ’cause I don’t see the underline popup crap now.
I have js disabled in Opera so I don’t even see those words with underlined links, just regular words.
Uhm – I have posted only once and got the “whoa cowboy message.” lol
OK. Let’s get a couple of things straight. One of the purposes of this blog is to test stuff going around in a REAL WORLD rather than a lab setting. This is so I can know — not theorize — about the effectiveness of Google Adsense or various screwy affiliate programs. I have the kinds of numbers on this blog that make this sort of thing realistic and which allows me to speak from experience. Most of the readers here do actually use Firefox and can turn these off as noted above. To me that’s good too since the final numbers become even more interesting. So this is here for the next month whatever happens. And I have trouble believing that an double underlined link that is SO OBVIOUS as an ad link somehow upsets the constitution of a reader. OH NO!! WHAT WILL I DO!?!? Cripes and sheesh!
Shoot, I’m going against the flow on this one. I don’t really mind them nearly as much as everyone else did. Excepting # 18, jag.
The reality is it costs money to run a web site. While we would love it all to be free, someone has to pay. If this helps to defray the expenses and maybe have enough left to reward the Contributing Editors with a frosty cold one periodically then some good has come of this.
Maybe people will now use the scroll bar on the right hand side of the page or keep their cursor off to the side as they scroll.
As for the Whoa cowboy thing..it’s another topic that will be discussed shortly.
“One of the purposes of this blog is to test stuff going around in a REAL WORLD rather than a lab setting.”
Huh. I thought the blog was so you could express your opinions about current events and tech issues. I had no idea the writing was in place simply to lure test subject to the page…
The little underlines don’t bother me much but you sure won’t catch me clicking on any of them.
Is it april 1st already.
Perhaps some constructive criticism is in order. I think the links are annoying, but mostly because of the rollover popup. It would be less of an issue, for me anyway, if they were regular links where you needed to click on them before they did anything. Also, I did notice the page seemed to load slower than normal, whether this is a temporary latency issue or due to the additional data from Kontera remains to be determined. From an aesthetic standpoint I think these type of in-text ad links simply make a page look too cluttered and amateurish myself. In general I tend to avoid reading sites that use these because they’re rather annoying and distracting to me while reading.
I really, really, really hate these things. Really, really hate. At least they can be easily adblocked.