POPUP'S, SPAMMING, AND ADWARE, THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF MODERN INTERNET ADVERTISING

When I first became acquainted with the internet, advertising was rather scarce, and many websites were often created by a single individual or a group of people, or were related to institutions of higher learning, scientific acedemia, maybe even government agencies and the military. The internet's website suffix nominclature was just being introduced to the public in the early nineties and these should be intimately recognizable to most folks today. (.net, .org, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, ) Essentially, these abbreviations were used to represent in the same order: (ISP's or online network servers, Non For Profit Organizations, Commercial websites, Educational Schools and Colleges or related Institutions, The Government, The Military) In the beginning, sites followed this general set of guidelines and the internet was a very organized place where more often than not you could count on information on the website being related to the suffix in its address. Finding information online wasn't a simple task at first, you had to know where it was you were going. That is, until search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista appeared, and used keyword matching to sort out relevant sites with content related to the keyword you queried. In the early years this led to an efficiency of the internet that may never once again be fully achieved.

Most early commercial sites were crude and rudimentary at best. In the early to mid ninties there was no Ebay or Amazon, or any of the multitudes of online shopping cataloges and services vieing for your credit card number that are available today. In fact the earliest sites to show extraordinary profit were pornographic websites, and these were the most prolific commercial element early on, and marked probably the first true commercial boom online, although this may not necessarily go down in the history books because few are willing to acknowledge it. I remember some survey from around 1996 ranking the queries of keywords in search engines, and "sex" was #1, next to UFO's and Stocks, I believe. The internet was like the wild west of 19th Century America. It was a digital landscape that was largely composed of virtual homesteaders and trailblazers, paving the way for what would soon follow, however just like the wild west, the Online Gold Rush sent scores of entrepreneurs seeking fame and fortune in this new "Information Superhighway." This at first beget the proliferation of websites trying to sell you something, and the whole .com boom of the late nineties took shape at a breakneck pace. Everyone wanted a piece of the "three dubbs" and the promise of huge returns allowed for billions of dollars in venture capital to be poured into ideas and schemes to corner a piece of the online marketplace as the droves of internet users poured online and Personal Computers flied off assembly lines. Stock prices soared for companies that had yet to even see a profit, and were spending millions of dollars of television, magazine, radio, and bilboard advertizing. I think it was the 1997 Superbowl that proved the internet commerce bubble was expanding rapidly.

Early on, I remember one of the more often used tools of e-commerce was marrying content with a simple advertising scheme. In those times simply placing an ad banner directng users to a larger commercial presence on your site might give a webmaster a small revenue based upon how many "hits" or "impressions" your site achieved. Some free website hosting services like Geocities, Xoom, Tripod, Angelfire, etc. required that such banners appear on your website as a trade off for the service of hosting your website. I think the first major consolodated online banner advertising effort was a site called "LinkExtange" which Microsoft thought might be profitable and bought out sometime around 1997. Originally Link extange was a vast consortium of banners for websites, however not all of these sites were commercial based, rather at first many were just those aforementioned homesteaders and specialists who used the web as a delivery medium for their thoughts and ideas. Webmasters who developed personal websites often did so out of a need to express themselves or bestow some knowledge on the world. The initial profit of the internet was intangible, it was the ability to communicate with many people at the same time and share your views with anyone else who could access this medium. Sites like LinkExtange sort of became a doorway between sites containing similar content. The way it worked was, the more impressions or hits on your page, the more times your banner connecting to your site would be displayed somewhere else on the internet.

For several years the content of the internet and the content of television was completely divergent and the two mediums often had little relationship, but when the dot.com boom hit, multitudes of websites were (and still are) appearing daily, and becoming more and more associated with everything we commonly see in our lives or on television, from famous actors and actresses to toilet paper and condensed soup. The once pristine and colony-like ambiance of the internet quickly became like the crowded cities that occupy our analog world, filled with traffic noise, endless chatter, constant demands of our attention, pleas for our wallets, and an ever present franetic effusion of unimportant and frivolous information. Where there were once cottages now stand digital skyscrapers, strip malls, car dealerships, and billboards.

Where search engines could at one time be counted on delivering accurate and reliable links to keyword queries, today they largely are manipulated by commercial websites and spamming. More or less the function of search engines has been maintained, even elaborated upon to allow for searching of images, or other media instead of just websites, however there have been encroachments upon the effectiveness and accuracy of these internet tools by unscrupulous websites as well as "paid placement." Paid placement is what the search engine charges to basically place your website at the "top of the list" so to speak, regardless of how relevant it is to your search query. For instance you may type in "Regional Flower Growing Seasons" and the first entries on the search listing might be florists, although somewhat related, this is not the information you are looking for. As well, website developers have discovered ways of exploiting search engines to increase their placement in listing or make their website appear more near the top. Years ago, webmasters could place keywords into a "metatag" at the top of their HTML that would be found by the search engine's ever seraching online eye or "bot." These keywords may often describe the content on the page, or not, but would increase the listing of the developers website in the listing. However, web developers, most often porn sites, exploited this and placed entirely irrelevant keywords into this HTML command, and basically "spamdexed" themselves into the search engines. Now search engines caught on to this technique and would then determine the relevancy placement in the listing based upon the text within the actual page. Again this is easily manipulated by typing a bunch of unrelated words or nonsense sentances into the text of the page to trick the "bot" and get a higher listing. As well aggressive web developers will register a whole bunch of domains and place irrelevant websites on them that autorefresh to another site with paid content, again more often than not a pornographic site. A personal example of this occured when I was studying heredity and genetic mutation. When I searched Google for, "Albino Woman Photo," essentially I was looking for an image of an Albino Female. Using Google's image search ability only produced Albino animals, not Humans except for one image. The website listing on the first response page was 85% pornographic websites. One site that seemed like it was legitimate entry surreptitiously redirected me to a pornographic site, launched about 12 Pop-Up windows, and tried to install an adware virus onto my computer!

You've got to wonder about the reasoning behind the promoters and developers of modern internet advertising having learned their behavior from the internet's most unseemly content and ruthless web designers. Pop up Advertising at one point was the scourge of only porn sites or sites of ethical questionability. Essentially if you chose to visit sites with that kind of content you would come to expect the omnipresent bombardment. Pop up use was a tool designed to entrap the visitor in a web or cascade of material from which the visitor may never escape. In fact this was pop up window's specific use and design by online pornographers, and basically was a mutation of the "webring" idea, whereby the pop ups would direct the internet user to another porn site or domain name owned by the same entity or a group of entities cooperating together. In many cases porn site pop ups were designed to be very difficult to escape and often lauched lists of other pornographic websites in any possible flavor of sexual taste one might desire or be curious about. The ultimate goal of such sites was to bombard the user so much that they may be curious enough to go to one of these sites and enter their credit card number for a membership to the site or unknown to the aroused user, to scam them and empty their bank account.

Today the cancerous proliferation of Pop-Up advertising has blanketed the internet. More often than now you can not visit a popular or semipopular website without an assault of unwanted and annoying information often not even related to the content on that site. Some of these ads can fill the entire screen, or are purposefully programmed to be unclosable or lock themselves to a portion of the screen where the "X" close button is obscured. Furthermore, closing the pop-up can respawn another pop up ad, and so forth. "Mortgage Rates Lowest Ever! Refinance while you still can!" "You can lose 20 Lbs without Excercising and no Food Restrictions! Find out how!!!!!" The most famous one I remember is that X10 Microcam that claimed it could be used to spy on people. For a time, there wasn't much of a place online you couldn't go where you wouldn't be bombarded with an ad for the X10. Thankfully hackers and astute programmers created antipop-up ad software, although this software sometimes causes some sites to load more slowly or not at all and in fact some of the antipop up software is just a trick to make you install Adware.

A perversion of the Pop-up mechanism is Adware. Adware is basically a trojan horse program that installs onto your computer usually in conjuction with another piece of software. The Adware's installation piggybacks the installation of the primary software, and operates invisibly to most computer users. The Adware will download advertisements and launch these without warning, sometimes covering the entire screen without an ability to remove it from the background. In other cases the Adware will corrupt the Favorites folder and instead of a list of saved web addresses, your Favorites or Bookmarks folder will contain Ads or links to commercial sites, none of which you may even remotely be interested in. Adware drags down the performance of your computer and download rate, and can sometimes cause errors and glitches that are difficult to resolve. There are hacker warez and some mainstream programs to clean adware from your system, which is certainly recommendable.

The term, "Spam" or "Spamming" comes from the following Monty Python skit.

Some group of network wizgeeks around the dawn of the public internet associated this usage of the meat byproduct food, Spam, this skit, and the idea of being bombarded by inaccurate or useless information. Maybe you've encountered spam, spamming, or spammers, before. Spam can occur when you least expect it, are used to it, or most expect it. Perhaps you've been in a chatroom when a person holds down a key on their keyboard and keeps pressing return, this is a form of spam. If you log onto a message board and a poster makes repeated garbage posts or makes erroneous topics filling up the whole page, this is another form of Spam, also called "Flooding." Most often this is an activity enguaged in by teenagers or people looking to annoy other people purposefully. Perhaps the worst modern incarnation of spam is in your Inbox. There was once a time when an E-mail usually contained information you wanted to read, either from another person, or maybe a newsletter you subscribed to from a favorite site related to something you enjoy or a personal hobby. However the peace and tranquility of a uncluttered email box, has long passed, and now replaced with a digital representation of stuff you receive in you home's mailbox most often between Tuesday and Friday, that being junk mail. Unsolicited spam emails have grown to a staggering proportion. Spammers who send these out are actually utilizing computers that broadcast these emails across the internet by sending simultaneously millions of emails to random addresses in hope that some of the random addresses will be live accounts. "Enlarge your Penis Today!" "Discount Vicotins" "Refiance your Mortgage" "Cum Fuck this ladyboy anal whore now!" "Help me out, I'm a Nigiran exile with several Million dollars I need to hide!" "Canadian Drugs a Fraction of the cost!" "Bad Credit? We will approve you for a credit card NO FEE! L@@K!" Almost always these are scams, and provide links to scam websites that are designed to trick people and get ahold of either their identity information or their financial accounts. The same email spam technique is exploited by hackers and virus writers to spread their destructive computer code and mini-programs. Spam has today become a ubiquitous and annoying part of the online experience. Efforts are being made by Internet Service Providers to filter such garbage, however the spammers continue to find new and more creative ways to circumvent the filtering techniques.

How effective of an advertising technique can it be to annoy people? When I'm pressing the delete button over Spam emails, or my Antivirus software is quarantining infected email attachments, or I'm rightclicking and chooseing "close" on all the pop ups accumulating like moths near a floodlight at the bottom of the task bar I wonder what the point of it all is. Does annoying me make me want to buy something? Not in this universe! I can't imagine that by delivering unrelated annoying advertising to web surfers on websites or through their email boxes is very effective. Maybe at first it caught people off guard, and I'll admit that there are some truly novice and uneducated people who might fall for these things, but hasn't it sunk in by now that people are not buying things because you throw an ad in thier face? Effective internet advertising and commerce is a result of reaching your target audience in a less obtrusive way. If a site is devoted to rebuilding classic or antique cars, there should be ads or links to sites that sell these items, not an X10 Wireless Spycam. If you develop a personal website devoted to action figures, perhaps you could make a little extra money by having stores who sell action figures put an ad banner or link on your site. More people would likely click on or explore sites related to things they enjoy, especially if there is some kind of information or free content associated with the marketplace. You see these techniques make logical sense, and I imagine would be a lot more profitable in the long run, in contrast to this random blitzkrieg of worthless ineffective drivel advertisers are pushing today. You know, I don't have a Degree in Marketing, I can't even afford to attend college, and I was layed off from a national Electronics retail chain because I "made too much money" in commissioned sales (maybe I intuitively understood what people were really looking for) however I know I see something these companies don't comprehend. I've managed to enrich myself intellectually primarily through the internet and understand the dynamics of its culture, yet the Degree holding bozos making upscale incomes who flood your inbox and blast your screen with Pop-Up Windows don't have even the slightest ounce of common sense.

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