Audio ads? Not such a good idea

Posted by multippt

Thanks to web 2.0, we have much more innovative ideas than what we have a few years ago. Now comes a new ad which sounds promising (literally), which utilises a lesser used medium, known as the ear. Instead of having banner ads that are already annoying already, why not pop in an audio ad instead? Certain to capture the daily surfer who hasn’t got their speakers muted off, these ads hope to enhance the way advertisements get delivered to you.

Unwanted “noise”

To be frank, how many seconds could you last on a page blasting music at you from god-knows-where? Now with those ads, you do not just have to tolerate sites who have some sort of personalized music, you have to deal with those ads blabbering about how good a product is. 5 seconds while pretty short, turns up the annoyance level by a whole lot. While this sort of advertisement is normally targetted at radios, which is perfectly fine, it’s a pretty bad idea for sites non-audio related. Fancy visiting Engadget and having commercialism blasted at you? Fret not, there’s that mute button to silence the advertisement.

While it’s not too unfamiliar to find personal blogs having a “sweet” background music playing, audio ads is simply an unwanted presence. Thanks, but no thanks.

And there was video ads

When it comes between pictures and videos, videos win. We have tons and tons of videos online, and it’s no wonder why some ad company decided to make video ads as well. While this sort of ad is pretty okay if it is not as distracting as your everyday TV commercial, they are pretty much like mimes  - no sound. Why isn’t there audio? That’s because Google and DoubleClick know very well that it’s in their best interests to not annoy the hell out of their “clickers”.

Muted surfers

What’s the best thing to keep a computer silent? It’s to mute it off course! About 1 in every 15 person has their computer muted (particularly the ones in offices), or at least its volume tuned to inaudible levels. So, those ads will be practically invisible to those fortunate Internet surfers. Who knew muting a computer was such a nice thing? 

Payout, and final thoughts

As compensation for annoying your visitors, NetAudioAds does give a high payout, paid by visitor count (well, it’s paid per play, but it’s pretty similar to a well known system known as CPM). Though, no matter how high a payout is, it’s probably not worth it putting those ads on your site. Even so, the payout system is probably susceptable to cheating (yeah, like they know who is actually listening to the ad), and they have every right to suspend a publisher, even if the publisher did nothing wrong.

Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.