[WEB4LIB] Web Advertising

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 10:20:29AM -0700, Jean Willis wrote:
> I am seeking information from any libraries who may utilize advertising
> on their library web pages.  Some libraries have been using links to
> various book vendors/stores in "affiliate programs."  These programs pay
> the library a percentage of the fee if a customer purchases something
> after arriving at the commercial site via the library website.

I doubt that the revenue derived would amount to much; here's a quote from:

	http://www.msnbc.com/news/774972.asp?0bl=-0

which is an article entitled "Viewers just aren't responding to online
marketing" by Vanessa O'Connell of the Wall Street Journal:

	July 2 - Consumers aren't clicking on banners, buttons and
	other annoying Internet ads-and now, they aren't responding to
	special e-mail links either. The latest data regarding online
	marketing show a sharp decrease in the consumer response to e-mail
	advertisements and promotions, and represent yet another bout
	of bad news for the recession-plagued online advertising industry.

	The current so-called average click-through rate on e-mail
	advertisements is an anemic 1.8%, according to estimates by the
	New York research firm eMarketer. That is down sharply from last
	year, when the rate was more than 3%. [...]

Add to this the means by which users can block advertising on web pages --
the tools at www.junkbusters.org, banner-ad blocking proxies, browsers which
prohibit the opening of unrequested windows (e.g. Mozilla), anti-spam
blacklists and so on, and there are plenty of ways for people to avoid
having unwanted advertising take up their time and screen real estate.
As a consequence, online advertising is becoming increasingly ineffective --
which I happen to think is a highly positive development, but doesn't bode
well for the direction you're contemplating.

(Example: I use a caching web proxy (squid) behind the firewall on my
connection.  It's configured to block about 1800 sites entirely (these
are banner ad sites like advertising.com, doubleclick.com, and so on).
I use Mozilla as my browser and have instructed it to ignore animated GIFs,
refuse cookies, refuse to open unauthorized windows or resize the current
one.  Mail is delivered via sendmail, which has a list of about 12,500
domains and 48,000 user addresses in the local spam blacklist.  I then
use fetchmail to POP my mail, which is then pushed through procmail using
SpamAssassin to try to nail whatever makes it past sendmail's filters.
Granted, not everyone goes to these lengths -- yet.  But the relentless
onslaught of advertising is driving demand for end-user solutions to
remove it, and so both free and commercial software solutions which tackle
the problem are rapidly evolving and becoming available for a variety
of computing platforms.)

References:

	<li> <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/"> Mozilla</a>
	<li> <a href="http://www.junkbusters.org/"> Junkbusters</a>
	<li> <a href="http://squid.nlanr.net/Squid/"> Squid Internet Object Cache</a>
	<li> <a href="http://www.sendmail.org/"> Sendmail</a>
	<li> <a href="http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/"> Procmail</a>
	<li> <a href="http://www.spamassassin.org/"> SpamAssassin</a>

---Rsk