Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Category: Advertising
, Business
Not for the first time, alternative models to page views are in the news.
This time, comScore has announced a new “visits” metric. “AJAX” is cited as one of the motivations.
comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties and categories for February 2007 and introduced a new suite of metrics based on site visits. The visits metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement. Included among the new suite of metrics are: total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.
As technologies like AJAX change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties, said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. The introduction of these new metrics based on visits provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
Category: Advertising, Security
Nat Torkington on the O’Reilly Radar recently commented on the rise of “floats” (AKA “divdows”, “Ajax dialogs”).
One of the really big issues facing us, IMHO, is the new Javascript-driven ad technology called “floats”. They’re not separate windows popped up, they’re in-window divs that move up to obscure the web page and force the user to click to dismiss them. They can’t trivially be blocked because they’re generated by Javascript code within the page, and identifying such code is a similar problem to identifying viruses. They ruin the user’s experience by being unavoidable and maximally intrusive.
At the moment they’re rare (e.g., TVNZ and MSN only show them once per user per day) but if we learned anything from 2001 it’s that greed will ruin user experience if it can get an extra buck in ad revenue. We got popup blockers as a result of the 2001 popup orgy. What’s going to save us from the 2007 float invasion?
It’s really not as scary as it sounds, as these new popups can only live inside the tab/window of the app that launched them - sites that run annoying Ajax popups are only doing themselves a disservice, the web equivalent of nagware. Christian Flury has outlined the counter-arguments.
- Javascript pop-up windows left a trace in your working environment: Even after leaving the page that had triggered them, you still had those few additional browser windows open – and those were the days before tabbed-browsing became popular, so it was already difficult enough to stay on top of your zillions of open browser windows
- Psychologically, from a site owner’s perspective, a pop-up window is not as closely associated with your page as an ad that occupies your own real estate, so to speak.
- More importantly, back in the olden days, it was far from obvious, especially to the not so tech-savvy, which page had actually triggered the pop-up window.
That said, there are still security implications - with richer graphics and browser scripting, it’s easier to pretend you’re a native OS dialog box.
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
Category: Advertising
Anyone who's running an Ajax site knows the frustration of showing static ads on a page that might not refresh for minutes or hours. Until the ad providers begin offering rotating Ajax ads (which would be suit some non-Ajax sites as well), you're stuck with the same ad for a long time. Or are you?
In this JGuru article, Kevin Cho outlines a hack to offer rotating ads. Summary: Put the ad in an IFrame, embed the IFrame on your page refresh the IFrame on every XHR call. Sprinkle invisible keywords into the IFrame for extra context.
refreshAd() is where the magic happens...
JAVASCRIPT:
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var oXmlHttp = createXMLHttp();
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oXmlHttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
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if (oXmlHttp.readyState == 4) {
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var storyDiv = document.getElementById(layerName);
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storyDiv.innerHTML = oXmlHttp.responseText;
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refreshAd();
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}
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};
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function refreshAd() {
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var currentTime = new Date();
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googlead.location = "pages/ad.jsp?s=" + currentTime.getTime();
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}
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If you're wondering if this is fair game by Google, you're not alone. Does it violate Google's adsense policy? Maybe, but that's not to say Kevin hasn't considered the implications.
Ok~ so let see what is fair use of this adsense. In my opinion (yours may differ..even Google), if there's a content change in your web site then it's fair to show a new ads on your page ... That's right! I'm using IFRAME.. I can already see you're not surprised as if you already know the solution. There's really no other option since any other solutions will be breaking Google's TOS.
Check out Kevin's article for all the details.
