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Banner Ads Used as Hacker Tools

Dan Morrill — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:30:59 +0000

Legitimate sites and their users have been dealing with a rash of malware being spread by banner ads, from Monster to MLB (Major League Baseball) NHL (National Hockey League) and other sites that are delivering malware.

While the Monster dot com exploit is well known news, the MLB and NHL sites are not well known, but used a similar way of purchasing advertising on a web site, and then using that advertising to deliver malware to customers as shown in the video below.

What makes this interesting is that users are going to be easily confused by the whole hacking process, and may not even realize that they have been hacked. Rather they are going to believe the good name of MBL, NHL, Canada.com, Monster.com and others, and do what the web site suggests they do. Wired also points out that:

Publishers may be somewhat culpable, too. The distributor of the malware-infected ads is believed to be AdTraff, an online-marketing company with reported ties to the Russian Business Network, a secretive internet service provider that, security firms say, hosts some of the internet’s most egregious scams. AdTraff is believed to have posed as a legitimate advertiser, using its partners as references. The ads were almost always paid for with credit cards or wire transfers, according to Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, a provider of security software. Source: Wired

In all if you have a good AV at the gateway this might be spotted, the only real option really is to use some form of ad blocking software at the browser level, which is also going to cause problems, because then you end up with the whole "theft of content" issue if your users use ad blocking software. Unfortunately this is one of the more effective ways of protecting the corporate network, or the home network. This has some serious economic implications to it, and with advertisers not paying attention to quality, and then we end up in another hacker, hacking, user, consumer, company stalemate.

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Blogs Trusted More Than Search, Banner, and Text

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:27:37 +0000

Consumer-generated content is by far a more trusted form of advertising worldwide than search engine ads, banner ads, or text ads, according to Nielsen, and is trusted almost as much as physical word-of-mouth.

Also interesting from the biannual survey of nearly 25,000 Internet users, is that Asian markets tend to be the most trusting of advertising in general, while Eastern Europe and Scandinavians tend to be less trusting.

Overall, consumer recommendations are the most trusted, earning 78 percent of respondents’ trust, followed by newspapers at 63 percent, consumer opinions posted online at 61 percent, and brand websites at 60 percent.

Television, radio, and magazines are virtually tied, with radio being slightly less trusted than the other two. Nearly all of the advertising respondents found the least trustworthy (below 50 percent) were digital forms:

Brand sponsorships – 49%
Email I signed up for – 49%
Ads before movies – 38%
Search ads – 34%
Online banners – 26%
Mobile text ads – 18%

People from the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Taiwan were the most trusting of all forms advertising, while people from Latvia, Germany, Lithuania, Italy, and Denmark were the least trusting.

North America scored highest in trust of consumer-generated media, such as blogs, with 66 percent trusting them. But in individual markets, South Korea and Taiwan trusted blogs the most with 81 percent and 76 percent respectively. Finland trusts blogs the least. Only 35 percent said they did so.

YouTube Ads (The Aftermath)

Nathan Weinberg — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:55:16 +0000

YouTube finally unveiled the first real version of its a platform last week, and we’re still processing the results. Some stories:

Everyone’s claiming they invented YouTube’s ad style, the overlay ad. VideoEgg ran a banner on their site, saying, “We invented the video overlay ad about a year ago”. Of course, YouTube invented the embedded Flash player VideoEgg puts its videos inside of, Brightcove has been doing it for two years, and everybody takes good ideas from everybody else. After all, if it’s sucha good idea, why wouldn’t everybody use it?

Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley got herself in an embarrassing situation, as she tried to predict YouTube’s future revenue growth and misunderstood the meaning of CPM. By mistaking CPM as “cost per impression” instead of “cost per thousand”, she overstated her analysis by a factor of a thousand, predicting $4.8 billion in revenue for YouTube next year (which, if it happens, I’d eat my hat).

Of course, since the new estimates were a mere $4.5 million, and analysts don’t make their money with tiny numbers, Mary tweaked the estimates so that even though they dropped a factor of a thousand, they were more optimistic than before in terms of percentages. As Henry Blodget explains, that’s called “backing into the numbers”, making them fit your expectations, and it’s why I don’t like analysts.

Anyone can predict anything based on making up numbers. Sure, you can do a lot of math to calculate what your guesses mean in the long term, but if you are still guessing, you aren’t bringing anything of value to the table. Unless analysts hold themselves to a higher level of proof than this, they should just sit back down and stop wasting our time.

A significantly large bunch of stupid YouTubers completely misunderstood the new system, proving once again the immaturity of the YouTube community, and their complete inabillity to RTFA. These users started threatening to boycott or just plain leave YouTube if Google started putting ads on their videos. Problem is, Google is only putting ads on videos it has a partnership with, and the complaining idiots are (a) too stupid to understand that and (b) too unimportant to have been offered partnerships.

If you really hate the ads, TubeStop supposedly never shows the ads, and it has the added bonus of turning off auto-play on YouTube videos. Vunderbar.

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Banner Blindness Beyond the Banner

Aaron Wall — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:47:59 +0000

When looking at the difference between a profitable business model and an unprofitable one you really need to look at the math. I recently ran many graphic ads that I bought through Google on a CPM site targeting basis. Here is a look at one campaign:

Notice that the 468 by 60 got a much lower click-through rate than the text ad or other image ad. Why? Some of it may have been up to ad positioning, but part of it is also due to 468 by 60 being the default banner ad size. If it looks like an ad people ignore it.

Low value sites that feature targeted ads as the content (with in content text links) will earn more than high value content which has obvious ad units located in obvious ad spots.

And just how people grow sick of advertising they also grow sick and tired of abused methods and formats, such as:

pop ups and other intrusive ads

red headlines

squeeze pages

sensational headlines

If you want to make your marketing successful, leverage techniques that are not perceived as being overused and abused to members of your target market. Rather than formatting your ads like ads turn them into content that is formatted like other content people trust and get people talking about it.

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YouTube Goes Retro With Banner Ads And Pop-Ups

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:01:50 +0000

When Google bought YouTube, the second question people asked (after "what about the copyright nightmare?) was about how Google planned to introduce advertising into a pure video vacuum. YouTubers have never been keen on being sold anything, not even Paris Hilton.

In case you forgot, back when Paris Hilton launched her own special YouTube channel to promote her silly little song, purist YouTubers chimed in with their fears that the site would become too commercial.

Well, it’s too late for that now. It’s a marketer’s world these days, whether you’re selling hotel rooms or politics. But the burning debate surrounding video ads has been over whether pre-roll, mid-roll, or post roll ads were best.

Advertisers like pre-roll ads the best, but they can push the viewer to push the "Stop" button. People rightly assume viewers won’t stick around for post-roll. Mid-roll ads operate on the same premise as TV and radio ads – hook the viewer, make them wait a few seconds, and then get back to the content.

Google and YouTube know their touchy demographic, though. They won’t tolerate any in-video ads for long, if at all. This must be why they’re falling back on old standards: banners and pop-ups.

Yes, pop-ups.

If you have you’re Firefox browser tuned right, you won’t be able to see what Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser is pointing to. So use Internet Explorer or check out Plesser’s Dennis Kucinich video screen shot of the Best Western pop-up ad.

The banner ads seem more contextual. Click to view a Kucinich video and you may see a banner ad for YouTube’s latest baby, CitizenTube.

Though it seems backwards at first for such a Web 2.0 marketplace, it makes a lot of sense to do it this way. YouTubers just won’t tolerate their pure user-generated haven being interrupted constantly by in-vid advertisements.

The pop-ups may get annoying though. It will be interesting to see how the YouTube crowd responds.

Google Top Ads – Was Banner Blindness Setting In?

Andrew Goodman — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 17:05:11 +0000

Google refers vaguely to the "need for a new look" in shifting their top sponsored ad background color from blue to yellow today.

Were CTR’s declining? We know that rotating ad design in banner campaigns sometimes props up CTR’s. Personally, I haven’t seen much evidence of declining CTR up there at the top, but you never know.

Another significant shift is not triggering a clickthrough unless the user actually clicks the link. It’s been a bit cheesy that clicking anywhere in the box caused a click. So the result of this shift should be a noticeable improvement in ROI out of the top ad spots.

Fewer clicks, but more clicks that meant to click.

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AdSense Lets You Play Your Own Video Ads

Nathan Weinberg — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:10:50 +0000

A bit of a good thing for AdSense publishers: If you see a video AdSense ad appearing on your website, you can feel free to play it.

Since the ad only pays out if you click the ad, not play it, then there’s no harm, no foul, so long as you avoid the advertiser link. This means that you can watch the video and see if your visitors would actually find it useful. If you have an ad unit that is heavy on video ads (by design or luck of the contextual draw) this is the way to see what useless advertisers are targeting your visitors, so you can ban them away.

Also, Google is running these banner ads for Gmail:

They’re cute, but Philipp doesn’t seem to like Google using animated banner ads, which Google has said in the past they were against. I don’t see the problem; Google already abandoned plenty of their previous high-minded ideals as the company got bigger.

Plus, there’s a bit of panic that MyBlogLog will get AdSense publishers in trouble, since it does track which ads your visitors click on, and Google doesn’t like certain information about its ad system getting out (especially since MyBlogLog is owned by competitor Yahoo). Luckily, the MyBlogLog folks checked with Google, and all is A-O-K. There are plenty of ways to see where your visitors clicked ads, and MyBlogLog is just the one with lots of other great features. Though, on the ad-tracking side, I feel they don’t go far enough.

Also, Google’s been running these Google Gadget ads, a 300×250 ad that features the YouTube Gmail skits inside a Google Gadget with some other links and options. They’re even running on the Wall Street Journal’s home page. If you don’t like that, check out the blank test ad.

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Banner Ad Success and Contextual Improvement

Pat McCarthy — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:03:20 +0000

Seth Godin gives us an anecdote from Usama Fayyad of Yahoo about a study that showed that contextual text ads saw a 249% increase click-through rate increase after a corresponding banner campaign was run.

Without knowing the details of this study it’s hard to really know if that’s something advertisers could expect on an ongoing basis. Where were these ads run? Across multiple sites? Through ad networks?

Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that conventional banner advertising can increase brand awareness, and lead to all kinds of positive results.

I wanted to speak to another point, and I’m not sure whether Seth was saying this or Usama Fayyad, but the quote is:

If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money.

Banner campaigns could be a waste of money if executed poorly and without having metrics and goals attached to it, just as a CPC text campaign can have the same fate. However, the last few years display advertising has become more efficient as companies and media buyers have become more sophisticated at optimizing, driving conversions, and using yield management to make sure they are profitable. It’s the exact opposite from being a waste of money, and the quote strikes me as a statement made out of dislike of banner advertising instead of having any facts behind it.

Some other bloggers have chimed on on this:

Yukonbiz – Do banner ads still work?
WebMetricsGuru – Does Banner Advertising increase Contextual Ad CTR?

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

YouTube Confessions

StraightUpSearch — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:23:58 +0000

Is it wrong that at night, when I’m alone in my apartment, I’m scouring Popurls.com for the top YouTube posts and searching uncontrollably for Maury Povich’s show on Pickle Phobia?

Maybe not wrong, but definitely weird and probably concerning to my friends and family.

But I’m not the only one who’s into this user-generated video site; a recent USA Today article says YouTube reported 2.5 billion videos were watched in June of this year alone and more than 65,000 videos were uploaded to YouTube, accounting for more than 60 percent of all videos watched online.

YouTube, developed in February 2005, originally specialized in shorter, homemade, comic-like videos created and uploaded by users. But with its recent NBC partnership and banner ads for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, YouTube has now entered the marketing mainstream.

Not to mention the search engines, who are paying a little more attention to their own online video platforms. Just last week Yahoo announced it will now store homemade videos on its own site with many features similar to YouTube.

I think the best part of YouTube is its viral marketing abilities. For example, NBC captured an old WB pilot episode all because it demonstrated incredible popularity after it was leaked on YouTube. The pilot, Nobody’s Watching, was cancelled by WB one year ago, but appeared on YouTube with high download numbers. So now NBC is airing six episodes. And let’s not forget NBC’s recent deal to post promo clips from Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

But there is still the issue of profit for this online, user-generated video world. I highly doubt it will ever be a user-subscription-based model, after it has been free for so long.

But questions remain.

Disney only advertised 24 hours. Who will advertise next?

Is the partnership with TV networks a step in the right direction? Or, a sign that YouTube is going too mainstream?

And what happens when it ceases to be cool? Will the loss of the cool factor indicate a loss of profit opportunities, too?

The future of YouTube may be undetermined, but we must remember a pickle phobia is real, it does exist and it’s serious.

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Oneupweb is the only two-time winner of the ClickZ award for “Best Search Engine Engine Marketing Firm”. StraightUpSearchs blog authors include experts from Oneupwebs natural SEO, pay-per-click campaign management, research, marketing, design, and sales departments.

Study: Web Users Blind to Banner Ads

Andy Beal — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:13:44 +0000

ClickZ looks at a new study from the Nielsen/Norman Group which finds internet users still suffer from “banner blindness”; the condition that rich media advertisers find most annoying.

“People are not looking at the typical blinding, graphical ads,” said Nielsen Norman Group Director of Research Kara Pernice Coyne. “They are not [looking] enough time to absorb a complex ad or branding message.”

The study doesn’t really reveal anything new. Marketers have seen the decline of banner-ad click-thrus for years, and we all know that it takes a particularly eye-catching banner ad to see any success these days.

Ironically, the study reveals that banners that look more like simple text, end-up doing well.

There’s still hope for online ads. Pernice Coyne said graphical ads with text and contrasting colors, like white text on red, is less likely to be disregarded. “They’re looking at them if they’re text,” she said. “I hate to sound boring, but [it is best] if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page.”

The article concludes with suggestions that sponsored search still attracts the “eye” but warns that too many irrelevant text ads, could cause internet users to start filtering these out as well.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.