A New Idea, For People Who Want To See More Banner Ads 167
Jacob53 writes "Scott Kurnit is a very bright guy. He founded About.com, and has raised over $8,000,000 for his new business AdKeeper. So, who am I to judge? But his new start-up sounds more like a Saturday Night Live skit than an emerging marketplace." As someone who actually enjoys a lot of advertising, it sounds only mildly weird to me — the basic idea is to let people easily archive ads they think might be interesting for perusing later.
No - this is a great idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Convince advertisers that you'll look at their ads later if they don't bug you with them right now. That'll be the compromise. Get your lousy popups and spam off of the pages I'm interested in and you betcha I'll read them later.
Then set up a cron job to wipe the folder every so often.
Re:Forget the article, submitter is weird (Score:5, Interesting)
This dumb-seeming idea is potentially a great way of getting those people who are still susceptible to advertising to stick their hands up and shout 'hey, advertisers, over here'. That's it's actual value, it potentially allows targetting of ad spending on people who don't adblock.
Scott 'dilbert' Adams pointed out a while ago that the holy grail for advertisers is an accurate list of people who are gullible, rich and not resistant to ads. He uses the example of a absurdly expensive house-cozy (like a tea cozy, but for your house). It's so stupid and over-priced that only a handful of people in the whole would be rich and dumb enough to buy one, so it's an awful idea for a business... unless you know exactly who those handful people are. If you do then then you have a workable business model.
The only time I wanted to archive an ad (Score:4, Interesting)
The only time I wanted to archive an ad was when I was complaining to the company that booked my flight about their shady behind-the-scenes sale of my credit card number. I got this ad in my itinerary promising me 20% cash back from my purchase if I signed onto a trial for this "Great Fun Site" (run by Trilegiant). Thing is, I'm pretty detail oriented (what most people call "weird") and I actually read the terms of use. Sure enough, although they ask for only my e-mail address, the terms of use said Priceline already handed them my credit card information before I even entered anything. The idea behind this company is that after the 1-month free trial (where I hear you don't really get any of the coupons they promise), they start billing you monthly and you have to call their customer service line to cancel (entering your e-mail address is formal agreement to their billing terms). Naturally, I didn't enter anything.
At the time, I had more important/productive things to do than complain about it. A few months later, I wound up with around $700 of international charges for Cyprus-based adult websites on that same credit card. It was a new card, and in protest to bad practices of banks I always pay with cash when possible, so Priceline was the only company I gave the information to. So, when I went to complain and show them the link, the ad was conveniently gone so I had no evidence. Priceline insisted they did not send anything to Trilegiant (even though the terms from the ad said they already had it) because I didn't enter my e-mail address nothing was sent, and their systems were "unbreakable" and had "never been hacked as long as Priceline existed".
I guess in summary, the only reason I would want to save an ad is for legal documentation when the advertiser oversteps his/her bounds.
To be fair, in this case it could go either way. The issuing bank, 5/3 Bank, has been careless and tried to pass the cost of fraud onto me several times in the past (this time by refusing to dispute the international transaction fees). I can narrow it down between 5/3 Bank or Priceline & Friends, but in my opinion they're both equally shady and equally likely to have had a data breach somewhere they're not telling anyone about.