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"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne
a problem waiting to happen (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Another Stupid Idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dang (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya know what... I think this here internet thing is still evolving...
Jason
Re:a problem waiting to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
A need for Distributed Content Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Freenet does much of this, but still falls short of the ideal and still needs a lot of work to become viable. "Unpopular" data on Freenet is automatically destroyed to make room for more popular data, which makes it unsuitable for prolonged archival. There still isn't a decent search engine; finding data requires that you obtain the "key" from somebody who knows where to find it, which is inefficent and makes it hard for new Freenet users to locate data. If Freenet data could be made more permanent and easily searchable, or if somebody else could develop and promote a P2P network that isn't just a haven for warez and stolen music, it would become a great alternative to the struggling Web.
Re:Boy this is really surprising! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think it would work (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, how do you want to implement this? Something like banner adds? A little pay each time somebody sees it?
I don't think companies would agree to pay for that.
First, it's hardly targeted: no control of when people see it or on who sees it (think in term of countries.)
Second, how could they measure the effect? This is very important in term of marketing: No way to measure the effect == no perception of benefit. If they can't see it, they won't pay for it. Why do you think banner adds flopped so badly?
Something along the lines could work if they made company pay to put their adds on-line, but do you think the site would still be successful?
I think the idea is doomed!
Have you noticed how many similar sites went down as soon as they started to be popular for their videos?
Sheer Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
Here we have a company that had people look at ads 100% of the time. But they couldn't stay afloat even though they were sitting on top of a huge gold mine. Why? It's because they didn't bother to send a bill to the advertisers.
If they would just hire an administrative assistant to print out invoices, they would be in the black in no time!
Re:a problem waiting to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Ads for related materials that actually have the affect of diminishing both brands. McDonald's doesn't want a Slimfast ad associated with its product. They don't want people to think that fast food makes you fat.
2) Ads for competitors. If adcritic (and I not saying they did this) showed a lame McDonald's ad and a really cool Burger King ad, McDonald's would be upset because it would appear as if the site were using McDonald's copyrighted material to both trash McD and advance BK.
3) Old ads that are either inappropriate, out dated, or reference an item that no longer exists. Let's pretend that a year ago, you had an ad for your FlightSim game that showed people flying their simulated planes into the WTC? Or showed someone bursting into a cockpit to play with the real controls? Would you want that ad up and associated with your company now? How about an ad that promises premiums for proof of purchases for a promotion that expired a year ago? You don't want people sending in the junk and then being mad at you because the promotion is over (yes, people are this stupid and as a company, you have to protect yourself against stupid people). Or maybe there's a commercial that says "look for the bright blue bottle" only you changed to bright green 2 months ago.
4) What if the adcritic site is really doggy and people think you can't afford a good server because your commercial doesn't run. Or worse yet, what if they call you for tech support when they can't see the picture. We all know the people who call tech support for even stupider things.
I'm not saying adcritic did any of this or that these ads were there in this format. I'm simply pointing out that there are very good reasons for companies to want to control how their ads are presented to people.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not every problem can or should be solved.
The primary problem that causes most convenience stores to go under is the cost of labor. Do you want the minimum wage repealed to fix it? (Note: some people do, I'm not attempting to argue the point, just to present the things you have to consider.)
The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.
Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1) (Score:5, Insightful)
Bandwidth is probably their greatest expense, but it's almost pure text and thus not enormous. Granted, it's a lot of pure text, but one 30 second video is bigger than any Slashdot story will ever get to be.
Finally, you have something like five people running the site. I know Rob makes $90k a year, and everyone else probably makes correspondingly less. So it just doesn't take that much to keep it up and running, compared to (say) Salon, who has maybe 25-50 professional writers to feed.
D
Business 101 (Score:1, Insightful)
we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay in business
Doh! You're supposed to make more money with more customers, not loose more money with more customers.
The evil old economy rears its ugly head again!
apple.com/trailers (Score:5, Insightful)
I visit apple.com/trailers [apple.com] pretty regularly-- at least once a week. Apple uses it to showcase QuickTime technology, and I'm sure there's some arrangement between Apple and the movie studios to get those trailers out there.
I wonder if Apple would be interested in picking up Ad Critic's yoke? I mean, the infrastructure is already there; Apple's got their content for the trailers site akamai'd all to heck, so it's as immune to the Slashdot effect as a site can be. And I'm sure agencies would like to get more eyeballs in front of their ads, especially now when PVRs are just starting to give viewers a viable choice to watching them on tee vee.
(Uh-oh. I mentioned Apple, QuickTime, and advertising all in one post. From the time I click "submit" we'll have about two minutes to reach minimum safe distance.)
Will you distribute my bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad. Another victim of their own success; trampled to death by an insane bandwidth bill (judging from their content).
You know what would keep guys like these afloat? When somebody finally comes up with a viable P2P system that acts as a basic "userland akamai" for 'non-profit' fansites. As the audience size grows, the members continue to support the whole (well, at least when it comes to large, static pieces of content), instead of the site being crushed under the weight of its popularity.
Fat chance?
--
Re:My suggestions (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't the ads served from elsewhere, though? I would expect that the guy running the site doesn't have to worry about the bandwidth consumed by the ads.
Adcritic's problem seems to have been his own content. Serving video in exchange for banner impressions wasn't a sustainable business model given the popularity of his site versus the shrinking web advertising revenue, I guessing.
News alert: The Economy Sucks (Score:1, Insightful)
Also just forget the "our economy sucks" lines in your explanation. Yeah, it kinda does, but your business should react appropriately to the economic times. If it cannot, then it deserves to go under. I'm getting tired of company after company saying "we did nothing wrong, the economy just sucks." Yeah, right.
Truth is your company survived in a wildly speculative time and when the market took a conservative turn your "business model" did not cut the mustard. Funding dried up since the prospect of short-term profits was almost nil, and you had to close shop because your burn rate ate all your cash. At least be honest about it.
[At least they didn't blame it on 09/11.]
Re:Sheer Incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, from an advertiser's point of view, 30 seconds of a potential customer's attention should be a lot more valuable than standard banner ads which most people ignore anyway... Perhaps the CPM price charged by AdCritic could be even higher....
Re:How does this figure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. I mean, they could, but only in that specific context, so the information wasn't useful to them. Adcritic's audience was not the intended audience, and it's unlikely that any statistically meaningful information about the latter could be drawn from the former.
Advertisers probably have much better methods of judging the actual impact of ads than Adcritic could ever be.
Typical Internet Bust (Score:3, Insightful)
This is really nothing more than a small site, that got popular, found out it couldn't pay the bills with ads and dropped out.
When did they become the archive of television commercials? Does it strike anyone else as odd that archives are typically academic pursuits suported by trusts, grants and donations and not commercial ventures?
And abou the archiving
Yes, it was a cool idea. I used to send folks URLs to the ads I liked.
Is it a money maker? Nope.
Where they really archiving television commercials? Well, if you call picking out the funniest, most outlandish and humor filled then yes.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. Problem is, there is no good business plan available for most sites that want to distribute content or news. If you run a TV/radio station or a newspaper with a regular audience in the millions, you can do quite well off of the advertising $$. If you run an even more popular website, you're going to make a fraction of that amount.
Some say the scarcity of advertising money is due to the limitations of the format. To a larger extent, thought, it's an artificial situation brought about by major advertisers' unwillingness to gamble on an unproven format. They have the money, so they say which formats live or die.
A good example of this is advertisers' unwillingness to experiment with time-shifted TV advertising. Right now it's well within the limits of technology to customize the advertising displayed to every viewer with a modern cable box or Tivo. But advertisers don't even want to experiment with this technology because they've got a very reliable system that works purely on the basis of what type of people tune in at a given time. Even though a lot of their money is being wasted on people with no interest in a given product.
That's business, and I understand your point. However, I do find it to be a shame that such a promising area of business is being starved to death as a result.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
It's very bad for the competition to have some pressure point to use to drive smaller buisnesses out of the market. If a larger competitor can drive up the cost of raw materials, or labour, or bandwith and he can weather the storm at a loss then he can easily create a monopoly, and raise his prices to a point that hurts the consumer.
The upward spiraling cost of bandwith coupled with the lowering pay of banner ads and the mom and pop web pages being run out of buisiness because of these costs are definately a bad thing, and something needs to be done to fix it. The internet is the proverbial freeing of the printing press, it's something that humanity has needed for quite some time. Driving the cost of using the internet up is stripping the average person from having a medium to publish his works, and that isn't good. We are quickly returning to a state where mega-corporations (including the government) can destroy any negative speech towards them by driving the average person off the web and stripping their ability to self publish. It's definately bad here on the net, because what's to stop a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).
This is definately a problem that needs to be solved.
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.
Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.
So, yeah, the system works.
In other stupid things you said:
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.
If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...
Today's lesson: if the only way to win is to be big, get big!
-jon
Re:a problem waiting to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew the site was dead long ago, it used to be my favourite site, then they cut bandwidth, to the point where anyone trying to download something to watch was just stupid. It took hours to download a 30 sec clip on a connection which can normally do it faster than real time.
The whole model was stupid, and the site should have forced the company the ad was for to host their own damn commerical, as they were getting free advertising anyways, and half a dozen commericals draws not much bandwidth compared to the hundreds on the site.
I haven't visited the site in months, and then only to see it was still the most useless site on the web, as you can basically preview the commerical name...and thats about it.
Giving kids a bunch of money to run a business isn't smart, as most kids are stupid (hell, I'm still one).