Youtube blocks ASCII art.

[fr0stbyte124]

Internet ads are incredibly broken right now. Consultants sometimes flood social networking sites with bots to artificially inflate a company's user base. Even though these aren't and never will be customers, the consultants get paid the same just for making the appearance of having done something productive. Basically, parasites. Online advertiser have to be hemorrhaging money. There's no way "impressions" can actually result in sales. But until they figure that out, I guess it does pay everyone else's bills.

I wouldn't be surprised if the practice dies off in the future. Word of mouth is still the most effective advertisement on the internet and with a bit of creativity you can get that for free. For everything else, I think we are going to see more AI based advertising like adsense. Honestly, if it was a bit smarter and had a better feedback system, I wouldn't mind at all. If I, say, offhandedly remarked in a message board that I was in the market for new PC build and Google ads change to listing PC components on sale in my price range, I would probably look at those. On the other hand, if I am watching a Family Guy clip on Hulu and Hulu asks me which of 3 Mazda commercials I would like to watch, that is not a choice, and I am not going to buy a Mazda no matter how many times you make me look at it.

On the other hand, if, hypothetically, I had a midget fetish, I wouldn't want adsense populating my advertisement list with videos promising hot midget on midget action. It needs to be smart enough to know that I never pay for that stuff (again, hypothetically speaking). I think that's the biggest weakness of the current generation of targeted advertising. It doesn't make a distinction between how you use the internet and what you actually spend your money on.

[Iv121]

MJ-12 FTW ! Google bots are dumb ....