On Sat, Nov 07, 1998 at 11:50:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
Myself, I try to mostly just snip out a few paragraphs of a story and comment on them, fair use and all.
I particularly dislike articles that are things forwarded from other lists without comment (IP seems a particular offender here). These are rarely interesting.
This is the new "blind spot"...that foveal region about a third of the way down a Web page screen that has dancing icons, "click on me" junk, and corporate logos. My guess is that nearly all of us skip this junk completely, and I think marketing studies will someday confirm this. (There have been tantalizing reports in places like the "Wall Street Journal" that basically almost nobody sees these ads, but the full message hasn't sunk in.)
Click through rates are something like 2%, so most are screening them out. I rarely noticed what the ads actually said.
(Yes, I tried the utilities which purport to flush banner ads, but they didn't work well (long delays, cruftiness).)
I don't know which ones you have tried but junkbuster http://www.junkbuster.org/ (a proxy on port 8000) works _very_ well on my linux system, particularly with the "blank gif" patch. It blanks out 99% of banner gifs, which makes pages like metacrawler and wired look more visually attractive and load faster. Until I lost all the banner ads I hadn't realised how distracting all those animated gifs at the top of the screen were and its now much faster and easier to read the info you want, without them.
Friends of mine routinely turn off all graphics, a point I'm about to reach.
I tried this but found it made the net too hard to use.
So, Declan may think the banner ads at Wired.com pay the rent, and the bean counters may think this is so, but I doubt any of us are looking at the ads. Except the dummies.
It would give a brave browser manufactor (Opera?) quite an advantage if they built the banner ad killer into the browser directly. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott steve@tightrope.demon.co.uk http://www.pineal.com/ i'm a programmer: i don't buy software, i write it. --tom christiansen