How To Spot A Psychopath

In these days of belt-tightening and margin-cutting, have “contextual” ad companies like Kontera finally been forced to actually live up to their promise of delivering ads that’re relevant to the text they link from?

That’ll be a “no”, then.

(Source.)

You’d think that contextual link-ad companies would be in a deadly downward spiral.

They can only deliver ads that’re actually relevant if they’ve got tons of advertisers to choose from (like Google, who often deliver ads that contradict a page’s content, but are at least talking about the same subject). But anybody with half a brain can see that, at the moment, actual relevant contextual ads seem to be very much in the minority.

So if you pay a contextual ad company to advertise your product, you can’t expect anything better.

But then again, the big contextual ad companies have been in business for several years now, and most of them still haven’t gone broke.

As I write this, RealTextAds (who contacted me in 2004) seem to be out of business, but Vibrant Media are more than eight years old and still going strong. So are Tribal Fusion, as mentioned in passing in 2005 and looked at specifically here; they’re about as old as Vibrant. And Kontera, responsible for the ad in the picture above, is six years old. They run ads under their own name, and also as “ContentLink“.

So somebody must still be paying for this crap.

Perhaps the ads actually do work - get clicks, and create sales. I’m sure plenty of people at least click on these weird little pop-ups, even if they’re only trying to make the thing go away.

I can’t see how the cost per conversion can be good, though.

One of my readers was delighted to discover this Google ad on this very site:

I agree with him that it is completely awesome.

(I’ve linked the above image to the online store of “Radmeister“, the people responsible. That’s not a paid link, of course; you can click on it without costing Radmeister any money. If you happen to see the same image to the right of this page, then that’ll be a real ad. Do tell me if something even better crops up.)

The ad was, no doubt, attracted by my recent series of posts about Lego tracks.

You wouldn’t think the nice lady in the bikini would find Lego tracks very impressive. But quantity has a quality all its own, and after the last post I was as good as my word and did indeed buy yards of new-style tracks on BrickLink. The only reason why you haven’t yet seen a picture of them lying there like Worf’s spare baldric collection is that the BrickLink dealer accidentally sent me a mere 400 links instead of the 480 I paid for.

When the rest of them show up - giving a total length of 5.76 metres, versus the lousy 4.8 I’ve got now - I shall make them into a fly-curtain or something while I design a vehicle worthy of them.

There is a post entitled Announcement: Alex Sells Out! on The Daily WTF which includes, in deference to the site’s purpose, an announcement that ads will be appearing on the site almost four years after ads started appearing on the site.

But it also includes what may be the best Venn diagram ever drawn.

Does your phone sometimes ring, and when you pick it up there’s silence (not even heavy breathing), and then whoever called just hangs up on you after a few seconds?

No, it’s not a burglar seeing if you’re at home. Well, probably not, anyway.

It’s a telemarketing company, using an autodialer.

The dialer works its way through its list of numbers, and when someone answers, it attempts to connect them to a human telemarketer. If all of those humans are already on another call, the autodialer just hangs up.

Some telemarketers say that this hang-up, or “abandon”, rate is only about five per cent - the dialers are configurable, to dial more or less aggressively when almost all of the humans are busy. But I can tell you that I get a heck of a lot more than one hang-up for every nineteen who have someone available to waste my time in person.

Hang-up calls do, of course, tarnish the otherwise sterling reputation of the telemarketing industry. But, one, many people don’t know that hang-up calls are from telemarketers. And, two, hang-ups tarnish the whole industry’s reputation in general, while the slightly higher number of successful connections that a telemarketing company gets if they crank their autodialer up to maximum speed translates directly into more profit for that company.

That’s right, kids; this is a Tragedy of the Commons. When an action X exists which is harmful yet profitable, and the harm is spread over a large group but the profit accrues only to whoever does X, it is in everybody’s interest to do X, even if they know exactly why they shouldn’t.

Here in Australia, it appears that telemarketers don’t even have to use outgoing phone numbers that’re visible on Caller ID, My hang-up calls are always from numbers that just come up as “PRIVATE”.

And I can’t, of course, ask the weasels responsible to take my number off their list, because I don’t get to talk to them!

Yes, the phone number here is on the Australian Do Not Call Register. That doesn’t seem to have helped a lot.

Getting an actual unlisted number genuinely does seem to work, but that ain’t free, and apparently has to come along with the same “silent number” Caller ID un-listing that the telemarketer source numbers use. I don’t want that.

To be fair, this is still not a major problem. The small Australian phone-sales market (our whole 775-million-hectare country has about 10% more people in it than 14-million-hectare New York State) just doesn’t seem to support a very large number of professional telephone nuisances. So even though this household has made the horrible mistake of giving money to some charities that know what our phone number is, we only get, I don’t know, maybe three telephone solicitations a week - versus the dozens per day that’ve historically been suffered by the worst-affected US households.

And I can’t remember ever getting a recorded-message “robocall”, though I know they do exist here.

To be perfectly honest, I prefer hang-up calls to the kind where an actual human says “Hello, is this Mr [surname of my girlfriend, to whom I am not married and whose surname I do not share]?”

I keep forgetting to tell those people to take me off their list. I can’t resist the urge to tell them, using a few by-now-carefully-honed words, that their salutation has given them away, then hang up immediately.

Still and all, though, my vote stands ready to be cast in favour of the first politician whose Law And Order Crusade aims at People Who’re Using Autodiallers For Anything Other Than Old-School Hard-Core Hacking, rather than the more traditional target of People Who’d Like To Be Happy.

On this page, I found the following:

That’s an ad from Kontera, the people with whom I had so much fun in this column.

I initially thought it was completely inexplicable that “Michael Jackson” and “financial ruin” were connected strings in Kontera’s laughable “contextual” ad database, but it turns out that those two strings have been seen in the headlines of lots of news stories. Which is no doubt why Kontera’s brainless ad server is linking them together.

You can really see why they get paid the big bucks, can’t you?

I presume that almost all of you dorks will, without my prompting, read the latest PA and its newspost.

For the benefit of the three of you who would not otherwise have done so (and who would therefore have missed out on the word “shitwizards”, which I feel obliged to state at this juncture is not only an obviously marvellous name for a rock band but will, I suspect, now become at the very least a nerd sub-meme, you see if I’m wrong), I was startled to see Tycho’s Doritos ad concepts.

I found them startling because they were advertisements which did not fill me with the urge to punch the face of the person responsible.

OK, the third one has a certain distasteful Nike-ish swagger, and the second one sounds too much like the work of Ray Smuckles to be considered on its own merits.

But the first one?

I’d seriously consider buying that chip.

Yes, I’ve been drinking.

What?

You got a problem? You wanna fight about it?

OK, you guys go and fight about it, then. I’ll stay here and maybe watch a Supreme Commander replay.

This is the Slashdot thread about a not-terribly-good example of the Gee, Isn’t It Funny That Crappy Computers Used To Cost A Lot Of Money genre of article.

The Slashdot thread contains, as is often the case, pointers to some rather more entertaining stuff.

Like this.

This ad, and two more like it, ran from 1979 to 1980 if somewhat flaky online sources are to be believed. If those dates are right then Tom Baker took the Prime’s advice; he married Lalla Ward in 1981.

And then divorced her sixteen months later.

Lalla’s been married to Richard Dawkins since 1992, a development which the Prime apparently did not foresee. 1992 was also the year in which Prime Computer ceased trading.

Another of the Prime ads:

Doctor Who had, of course, postulated far more impressive computers than this on numerous occasions, so Tom’s trademark enthusiasm was in this case difficult to justify.

In another piece of nerd synchronicity, the vast master computer system on Gallifrey was called The Matrix.

A reader, on seeing my post from the other day about the wretched hive of scum and villainy (and blatant payola) that is PayPerPost, wrote to observe that Text Link Ads appear, from his experience, to be eager to move in on the same area. Only more so.

Text Link Ads’ usual stock in trade is straightforward, non-annoying ads of the type described in their name. But my correspondent, let’s call him Harry, says they contacted him to try something a little bolder.

This new scheme apparently pays per undisclosed sponsored link. Include a link from a blog post to whatever dodgy dealer likes the idea of buying these kinds of ads, absolutely do not reveal to anybody in any way that you’re getting paid for it… and get paid for it. Genius!

Harry says he’s now seeing… unusual… links popping up on a number of blogs that also run Text Link Ads. When a blog that’s usually about Wordpress plugins and such (plus, tellingly, tips on how to make money with your blog…) suddenly runs a post about this k00l new site y0 that totally letz you watch Spider-Man 3 for free d00d, I believe it is not excessively cynical to suspect that something is up.

(I note that the above-linked blog runs, as well as Text Link Ads, those god-awful Kontera ads. As I write this Kontera are upholding their golden reputation for ad relevance by linking the word “movie” from the fishy Spider-Man post to an ad that says “Find Leading Lease Resources for rent movie online Here.” Excelsior!)

A reader noticed my lengthy and profitable career with ReviewMe (i.e. this one review), and suggested I check out PayPerPost instead.

Both are services that allow Web writers to sell their services to people who want someone to write about something. One big difference, though, is that ReviewMe take half of everything you’re paid, while PayPerPost take a much smaller cut.

So that was interesting.

As soon as I looked at PayPerPost, though, I saw the other big difference. PayPerPost lets people list “opportunities” that have the condition that whatever you write has to be complimentary.

ReviewMe specifically forbid that requirement. And that is, of course, their downfall.

It turns out that the kinds of companies that have to pay for blog attention are, by and large, not deserving of positive attention. And so they vastly prefer more… ethically flexible… services like PayPerPost, over ReviewMe.

PayPerPost claim that “open-tone opps” (i.e. “opportunities” to write either positively or negatively about an advertiser) are “the majority”, but this is obviously some strange usage of the word “majority” that I wasn’t previously aware of.

PayPerPost is, in brief, full of hopeful corporate johns trolling for a blog-whore to write something complimentary. There’s really almost nothing there but solicitations to journalistic prostitution, as far as I can see.

They pay lip service to journalistic integrity, saying that they “will not accept Opportunities that require our bloggers to be dishonest in any way”. But the “Opportunity” list in reality is a long litany of companies that want bloggers to “promote” or “create buzz” or write in a “positive tone only” about their Web sites or products.

And oh, the products on offer.

Beachfront real estate in northwestern Mexico - about which I, here in Australia, am welcome to hold forth at great length, for pay, as long as I keep it complimentary!

When I’m finished with that, someone wants me to “Review our new free Thai dating site”, a job which I’m sure will take no more than five minutes. Thailand’s practically in my back yard! Why not?

Oh, and I mustn’t forget the doctors offering “labia reduction surgery”, “anal bleaching”, and every other kind of genital-related plastic surgery that’s ever made you say “eew”. Positive tone only, guys!

And let’s not forget all the representatives of the fine and upstanding payday loan industry, who’re eager to get positive coverage for their super-competitive 500% APRs!

Needless to say, all this made me eager beyond words to sell myself out and become part of the burgeoning online payola scene.

Regrettably, though, PayPerPost rejected Dan’s Data as a suitable place for their priceless Opportunities.

Fortunately, the PayPerPost rejecting-dude told me what the problem was:

While the content of your blog is fine, I would like to give some advice on your format. When advertisers create opportunities, they are expecting that the post in it’s entirety will be shown on the blog. If the posts have the “…Read full post” or just one line with a link to the post, that is a major deterrence for the advertiser. If possible, please format your blog to show the full posts and re-submit.”

No problem, man - I’ll get right on that!

The fact that the average length of an article on Dan’s Data is more than 3500 words, with an average page weight of, I dunno, 200 kilobytes at least, would in no way impede putting the last five articles on the front page in full!

Hell, let’s make it the last twenty articles! I could have the biggest page on the Web! Take that, Gene!

The nature of the rejection, of course, is something of a giveaway. PayPerPost don’t want real writers to apply. Hell, they don’t even require your site to have an archive; all they ask is that your paid-for posts remain “active” for 30 days. Then I suppose you can delete them and swear up and down that you never said a word about how that Psychic Development Course was the best thing ever.

I’m not making that up, by the way. “Promote Psychic Development Course” is one of the current Opportunities, along with another bunch of courses and tutorials from the same people, all of which I’ll go out on a limb and say are just as bogus. And the quacks and shysters just keep on coming.

PayPerPost also say that “Nobody wants to hear how much you got paid for your sponsored post.”

Actually, y’know, I think I really rather would like to know whether someone’s getting a five buck tip or a $500 windfall in return for his post about how he sincerely believes some dudes have found the cure for dyslexia.

Be aware that people with a Google PageRank as high as mine can make three hundred US dollars, bang, just by answering the call to “Introduce free Spyware Terminator to your readers!”

Oh, and there are lots of YouTube videos about PayPerPost, too. Because PayPerPost listed their own “Opportunity” a while ago, asking for video testimonials. Awesome!

All of this is pretty much the outside scoop in the blogging community, where PayPerPost has been making friends since the middle of last year. But since I don’t hang out with the dudes whose benchmark is wringing a dollar out of every one of their RSS subscribers every month, and since I also missed the Slashdot story, it was all new to me.

Fortunately, it looks as if the network is (to coin a phrase) routing around this crap. Payola isn’t new, and it’s not going away, but it’s not making any great impact I can see, either. There’s a pretty sharp line between the sell-sell-sell scumbags with exactly one value who “monetize” their readers and the people like me who have, I dunno, maybe 2500 RSS subscribers specifically because I don’t keep trying to screw cash out of you all.

I’m sure there are readers out there who can’t tell the difference, but I don’t think blog payola’s going to make those readers any worse off than they already are. Everyone else ought to be able to detect the subtle signs of PayPerPost-ish bulldust.

All this isn’t to say I won’t put text ads or something in the Dan’s Data RSS feed (update: I’ve done it now!) at some point. The damn thing’s getting more than six hundred thousand pageloads a month all by itself. If y’all want to download it that many freakin’ times, I do not feel it’s unfair to ask you to occasionally punch a monkey or something in return.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a reputable feed ad agency - or a disreputable one, for that matter - that can handle my incredibly obscure “text file I upload via FTP” RSS creation technology. They all want to hook into blogging systems that I don’t use for good old flat-file Dan’s Data.

So my feed remains pristine. Dammit.

I’m sure you’ll all be very happy to learn that I just changed the top ads on the main and article list pages of Dan’s Data, removing the top-of-page Burst banner and replacing it with a Robert Sherman one, on account of how I quite like money and the Robert Sherman network may give me more of it than Burst does.

There’s also separate code for a Robert Sherman popunder - the old Burst banner code could spawn extra windows all by itself.

(As you may have noticed.)

I’ve been running Robert Sherman banners on this site for a while, now, but not popups.

If you’re one of the readers who, as I’ve previously recommended, blocks my annoying ads, then there’s nothing to see here; move along.

If you see the Robert Sherman ads, though, please comment below if you encounter anything particularly offensive. I’ve previously noticed one Robert Sherman ad from a purveyor of crappy Windows enhancing software which illicitly bundled an offensive popup into their banner whether or not you actually used the popup code (Astonishing! Crap-software vendors are usually so POLITE!). So it won’t surprise me much if there turn out to be some other spiders in the Robert Sherman woodpile.

If horrible things show up and Robert Sherman doesn’t squash them quickly, then I’ll go back to Burst. Ad money is important to me, but not so important that I’m willing to turn my site into a complete freak show.

You may consider those CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE THE 999,999,999TH VISITOR OMGWTFBBQ ads to be the location of my personal avarice-versus-tawdriness line in the sand. If you see stuff that’s worse than that, definitely including anything that says Your Computer Is Full Of Viruses Click OK On This Fake Requester To Install Some Crap Or Other, please tell me.

(Update: I gave Robert Sherman a month, then went back to Burst. Robert Sherman ran a few obnoxious ads like fake error messages, and a few other ads that were just plain broken. That wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except that Robert Sherman also don’t yet have an online control console that lets publishers vet ads and select which ones they don’t want to run.)