Microsoft premiers its adCenter
p2pnet.net News:- Some web pages already look like your worst hallucinogenic nightmare. Painful, glaring pop-ups and pop-unders everywhere. Links through Doubleclick and the like. Bounces-on, etc.
In the interests of furthering your education, turn your cookie shield off and/or disable the ‘let them in’ function on your browser, sometime. You’ll be amazed ; )
And thanks to Microsoft, it’s about to get worse.
Pretty soon it’ll be like American TV (shudder) where it’s programming spots in between ads instead of the other way around.
“Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer took the wraps off the MSN adCenter in Redmond, Wash., adding one more component in its evolving search strategy,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. “Earlier, Microsoft’s MSN released a search engine that bears great similarity to Google’s popular page and followed that with a desktop search tool.
“The new tool will allow advertisers to buy not just keywords but also the demographics of the person searching on those keywords.”
‘Demographic’ means You. In other words, they want more on you, your personal habits and tastes, where you go and what you do online so they can ‘customize’ the advertising garbage they want to aim at you. And frequently, the databases that result are sold as ‘product’ in their own right.
“MSN can do that most effectively when the search is conducted by a registered user who has already provided some personal details to the site. MSN attracts more than 380 million unique users worldwide per month,” says the story, quoting said MSN product manager Karen Redetzki as saying, "We’re really giving advertisers a better opportunity to connect with their audience.”
Do you really want an advertiser to “connect” with you – to get inside your head?
The new “product” will be tested first in France and Singapore – nicely out of the way – and rolled out in the US later.
Now you know.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
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See:-
San Francisco Chronicle – Internet search rivalry widens, March 17, 2005
March 17th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
Why look at at a web page for all that? Just turn on all of XP’s defaults and you’ll be bombarded with a never ending assortment of pop up balloons, reminders, dialogs, etc.
March 17th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
You rail against intrusive ads on internet pages and yet you have devoted a good 1/4 to 1/3 of this very page to annoying and flashing ads.
March 17th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
You people complain too much! Microsoft is like any other company–your sense of endearing altruism has left you oblivious to the fact that the progression of computers has been made possible in large by Microsoft and other giants like them (i.e. Sun, IBM, Apple, etc)–don’t hatem’ cause their successful! You don’t like it–stop complaining–just buy something different; thats the amazing thing about being a consumer! I just think people find it easier to b!tch rather than contribute to making the experience better. And another thing–more to the point regarding the source of this reply; if you’d spend as much time learning how to customize Windows/Microsoft’s products as you did complaining about them, you’d prob. AMAZE yourself!
March 17th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
I’m with everyone else. I was zapping commmercials when zapping commercials wasn’t cool.
But the companies that do business these days have a substantially higher overhead for their IT issues. It only makes sense do everything they can to get the most out of every expediture.
Watch the finanance news for awhile. You’ll see that most companies have a pretty small profit margin.
March 17th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
Shame
March 17th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
You’re right.
But p2pnet isn’t an entrepreneurial site. It exists largely to try to unspin some of the garbage centering on p2p that’s routinely reported as fact by the mainstream media. And p2pnet survives ONLY because of the small amount of income derived from its advertisers.
p2pnet ads flash a little. Nothing else. No pop-ups, pop-unders, etc.
We don’t collect data on you, nor do we want to.
Your privacy is safe with us and if the minimal, extremely necessary (unfortunately) advertisinfg offends, you we’re sorry.
Cheers ! : )
March 17th, 2005 at 11:50 pm
“You’ll see that most companies have a pretty small profit margin.”
And that somehow makes it okay???
Take a look at what upper level executive “compensation” is these days. These SOBs are bleeding the rest of us dry.