The term adware frequently refers to any software which displays advertisements, whether or not it does so with the user’s consent. Programs such as the Eudora mail client display advertisements as an alternative to shareware registration fees. These classify as “adware” in the sense of advertising-supported software, but not as spyware. They do not operate surreptitiously or mislead the user.

Many of the programs frequently classified as spyware function as adware in a different sense: their chief observed behavior consists of displaying advertising. Claria Corporation’s Gator Software and Exact Advertising’s BargainBuddy provide examples of this sort of program. Visited Web sites frequently install Gator on client machines in a surreptitious manner, and it directs revenue to the installing site and to Claria by displaying advertisements to the user. The user experiences a large number of pop-up advertisements.

Other spyware behaviors, such as reporting on websites the user visits, frequently accompany the displaying of advertisements. Monitoring web activity aims at building up a marketing profile on users in order to sell “targeted” advertisement impressions. The prevalence of spyware has cast suspicion upon other programs that track Web browsing, even for statistical or research purposes. Some observers describe the Alexa Toolbar, an Internet Explorer plug-in published by Amazon.com, as spyware (and some anti-spyware programs report it as such) although many users choose to install it.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. Many IM systems offer a directory of users, including demographic information such as age and sex. Advertisers can gather this information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services merely requires scriptable software and the recipients’ IM usernames. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising messages. Because most IM protocols are proprietary, it is easier to enact unilateral changes to make spamming more difficult.

A similar sort of spam can be sent with the Messenger Service in Microsoft Windows. The Messenger Service is an SMB facility intended to allow servers to send pop-up alerts to a Windows workstation. When Windows systems are connected to the Internet with this service running and without an adequate firewall, it can be used to send spam. The Messenger Service can, however, be easily disabled. [1]

Messenger service spam, in particular, has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable Windows machines consisting of text like “Annoyed by these messages? Visit this site.” The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free by the user, this scam works because it creates a perceived need and then offers an immediate solution. Oftentimes, the only “annoying messages” the user is receiving through Messenger are advertisements to disable Messenger itself.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been from the start important to the Google algorithm [1]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

But manipulated it was. Webmasters had already developed link manipulation tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google’s algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank’s reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page’s value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

It was time for Google—and other search engines—to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Much current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely speculation and informed guesses. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization.

The following, though, are some of the considerations search engines could be building into their algorithms, and the list of Google patents [2] may give some indication as to what is in the pipeline:

• Age of site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Standard on-site factors
• Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for sites with extensive keyword meta tags indicative of having being SEO-ed)
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
• External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (finance/financing)
• Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
• Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
• Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
• Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
• Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
• Semantic connections of hosted documents
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
• Technical matters like use of 301 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
• Hosting uptime
• Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
• Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

 Paying people to hold signs is one of the oldest forms of advertising, as with this Human directional pictured above

Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards (outdoor advertising), street furniture components, printed flyers, radio, cinema and television ads, web banners, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, taxicab doors and roof mounts, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, the opening section of streaming audio and video, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place an “identified” sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.

Covert advertising embedded in other entertainment media is known as product placement. A more recent version of this is advertising in film, by having a main character use an item or other of a definite brand – an example is in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character Tom Anderton owns a computer with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watch engraved with the Bulgari logo. Another example of advertising in film is in I, Robot, where main character played by Will Smith mentions his Converse shoes several times, calling them “classics,” because the film is set far in the future.

The TV commercial is generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising format and this is reflected by the high prices TV networks charge for commercial airtime during popular TV events. The annual Super Bowl football game in the United States is known as much for its commercial advertisements as for the game itself, and the average cost of a single thirty-second TV spot during this game has reached $2.5 million (as of 2006).

Virtual advertisements may be inserted into regular television programming through computer graphics. It is typically inserted into otherwise blank backdrops[1] or used to replace local billboards that are not relevant to the remote broadcast audience[2]. More controversially, virtual billboards may be inserted into the background[3] where none existing in real-life. Virtual product placement is also possible[4][5].

Increasingly, other mediums such as those discussed below are overtaking television due to a shift towards consumer’s usage of the Internet as well as devices such as TiVo.

Advertising on the World Wide Web is a recent phenomenon. Prices of Web-based advertising space are dependent on the “relevance” of the surrounding web content and the traffic that the website receives.

E-mail advertising is another recent phenomenon. Unsolicited bulk E-mail advertising is known as “spam”.

Some companies have proposed to place messages or corporate logos on the side of booster rockets and the International Space Station. Controversy exists on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising, and the pervasiveness of mass messages.

 A DBAG Class 101 with UNICEF ads at Ingolstadt main railway station

Unpaid advertising (also called word of mouth advertising), can provide good exposure at minimal cost. Personal recommendations (“bring a friend”, “sell it by zealot”), spreading buzz, or achieving the feat of equating a brand with a common noun (“Xerox” = “photocopier”, “Kleenex” = tissue, “Vaseline” = petroleum jelly, “Kotex” = tampons, “Maxi pads” = sanitary napkins, “Scotch Tape” = Clear Tape, “Band-aid” = bandage, “Visine” = eye drops, “Q-tips” = cotton swabs, “Rollerblades” = inline skates) — these must provide the stuff of fantasy to the holder of an advertising budget.

The most common method for measuring the impact of mass media advertising is the use of the rating point (rp) or the more accurate target rating point (trp). These two measures refer to the percentage of the universe of the existing base of audience members that can be reached by the use of each media outlet in a particular moment in time. The difference between the two is that the rating point refers to the percentage to the entire universe while the target rating point refers to the percentage to a particular segment or target. This becomes very useful when focusing advertising efforts on a particular group of people. For example, think of an advertising campaign targeting a female audience aged 25 to 45. While the overall rating of a TV show might be well over 10 rating points it might very well happen that the same show in the same moment of time is generating only 2.5 trps (being the target: women 25-45). This would mean that while the show has a large universe of viewers it is not necessarily reaching a large universe of women in the ages of 25 to 45 making it a less desirable location to place an ad for an advertiser looking for this particular demographic.

 A bus with an advertisement for GAP in Singapore. Buses and other vehicles are popular mediums for advertisers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The great majority of telemarketing presentations are legitimate calls from companies that offer valuable services. Unfortunately, telemarketing has also been negatively associated with various scams or frauds like multilevel marketing, pyramid schemes or with fraudulently overpriced products or services.

The prospective customers are identified and qualified by various means, including past purchase histories, previous requests for information, credit limit, competition entry forms or application forms. Names may also be purchased from another company’s customer database, or obtained from a telephone directory or some other public list or forum. The qualification process is intended to find those prospective customers most likely to purchase the product or service being sold or advertised. Charitable organizations, alumni associations and political parties often use telemarketing to solicit donations.

Market survey companies often use telemarketing techniques to survey prospective or past customers of a client business to assess market acceptance or satisfaction with a particular product, service, brand or company. Public opinion polls are conducted in a similar manner.

Telemarketing techniques can also be applied to other forms of electronic marketing using e-mail or fax messages.

Telemarketing is often criticized as being an unethical business practice as some companies make unsolicited calls, using high-pressure sales techniques. Such practices may be subject to regulatory or legislative controls related to consumer privacy and protection. In particular, telemarking in the U.S. is restricted at a federal level by the FCC’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 and the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. Many professional associations of telemarketers do have codes of ethics and standards that member businesses follow to win public confidence.

Do Not Call Listings

Some jurisdictions have implemented “Do Not Call” listings, either through industry organizations or legislation, in which consumers can indicate that they do not wish to be called by telemarketers. Legislative versions often provide for heavy penalties for companies calling individuals on these listings. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has now implemented a National Do Not Call Registry in an attempt to reduce intrusive telemarketing on a national basis. Although challenged by telemarketing corporations and trade groups as a violation of commercial speech rights, the National Do Not Call Registry was upheld by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on February 17, 2004.

Avoiding Telemarketing Calls

There are several methods that people use to avoid telemarketing calls. Using caller ID or a privacy manager can allow the targeted subscriber to identify the caller before the call is answered and make the decision not to answer. Answering machines and voicemail can also be used to screen calls, as telemarketers generally do not leave messages. A device called the Telezapper foils telemarketing calls by issuing a tone which causes the autodialer at the call center to log the number as out of service.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: How to Piss off a Telemarketer

E-mail marketing is popular with companies because:

• It is extremely cheap. Compared to direct mailing or printed newsletters the costs are negligible. The advertiser does not need to pay for production, paper, printing or postage.
• It is instant, as opposed to a mailed advertisement, an e-mail arrives in a few seconds or minutes.
• It lets the advertiser “push” the message to its audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.
• It is easy to track. An advertiser can track bounce-backs, positive or negative responses, click-throughs, rise in sales.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them
• It has been proven successful when well done.
• When most people switch on their computer the first thing they do is check their e-mail.
• Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other messages to be automatically delivered.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Amazon at the Affiliate Meet Market

Early days

In the early days of affiliate marketing, there was very little control over what affiliates were doing, which was abused by a large number of affiliates. Affiliates used false advertisements, trademark bidding on search engines, forced clicks to get tracking cookies set on users’ computers, and Adware. Many affiliate programs were poorly managed.

This changed dramatically over the last few years for multiple reasons. Revenue generated online grew quickly. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. Many companies hired outside affiliate management companies to manage the affiliate program.

When Google, the most popular search engine on the Internet, introduced AdWords (pay-per-click advertising pioneered by Goto.com, then Overture.com and now Yahoo! Search Marketing) many Merchants became aware of the issue of trademark bidding by affiliates. The terms of service were quickly modified by most merchants and structures were put in place to monitor affiliate activities.

Adware

Adware is still an issue today, but affiliate marketers have taken steps to fight it. Merchants usually had no clue what adware was, what it does and how it was damaging their brand. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much quicker, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites their tracking cookie and results in a decline of commissions. Affiliates who do not use adware became enraged by adware, which they felt was stealing hard earned commission from them. Adware usually has no valuable purpose or provides any useful content to the often unaware user that has the adware running on his computer. Affiliates discussed the issues in various affiliate forums such as ABestWeb and started to get organized. It became obvious that the best way to cut off adware was by discouraging merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that did not care or even supported adware were made public by affiliates, which damaged the merchants’ reputations and also hurt the merchants’ general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates simply “canned” the merchant or switched to a competitor’s affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban adware publishers from their network.

The new Web

The rise of blogging, interactive online communities and other new technologies, web sites and services based on the concepts that are now called Web 2.0 have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. The new media allowed merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improved communication between each other. New portals like Return on Affiliates allow affiliates, merchants, and networks to interconnect easily, on a professional and a personal level.

New developments have made it harder for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Network Marketing and the Economy! Can Distributors Survive?

When marketing online, the general four step process of marketing is still the guiding idea, in the online world the character of marketing becomes more deeply a conversation between a marketer and a market-of-one a concept that is central to The cluetrain manifesto. In such a role as a communicator, the online marketer is in a position to build awareness of her/his company or business in more personal terms than otherwise, and in so doing enables a more human conversation. Such conversations tend to be more warts and all and should establish confidence of the potential purchaser in the potential vendor.

Smith and Chaffey (2001) claim that Internet technology can be used to focus marketing on the customer, while at the same time linking to other business operations so as to achieve profitability. This can be done by:

• Identifying – the Internet be used for marketing research to find out customers’ needs and wants;

• Anticipating – the Internet provides an additional channel by which customers can access information and make purchases – understanding this demand is key to governing resource allocation to e-marketing. For example, low-cost airline has an online revenue contribution of over 90% since demand for a standardised product online is so high.

• Satisfying – a key success factor in e-marketing is achieving customer satisfaction through the electronic channel, this raises issues such as is the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are physical products dispatched?

Detractors of this concept of human-to-human contact through online conversations suggest that companies are going to be careful about marketing in this manner and perhaps will never really have honest and open conversations as the interests of companies and businesses are not the interests of potential purchasers. The cluetrain manifesto allows for this type of thinking suggesting that businesses when marketing in this manner need to be thinking about more than just making money; if a business is thinking only about making money, it will become apparent in close online conversations and the market will treat that business in whatever manner it may as markets can now talk to each other through the same means marketers talk to potential customers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Application

Adware is software integrated into or bundled with a program. It is usually seen by the programmer as a way to recover programming development costs, and in some cases it may allow the program to be provided to the user free of charge or at a reduced price. The advertising income may allow or motivate the programmer to continue to write, maintain and upgrade the software product.

Some adware is also shareware, and so the word may be used as term of distinction to differentiate between types of shareware software. What differentiates adware from other shareware is that it is primarily advertising-supported. Users may also be given the option to pay for a “registered” or “licensed” copy to do away with the advertisements.

Controversy

There are concerns about adware because it often takes the form of spyware, in which information about the user’s activity is tracked, reported, and often re-sold, often without the knowledge or consent of the user. Of even greater concern is malware, which may interfere with the function of other software applications, in order to force users to visit a particular web site.

It is not uncommon for people to confuse “adware” with “spyware” and “malware”, especially since these concepts overlap. For example, if one user installs “adware” on a computer, and consents to a tracking feature, the “adware” becomes “spyware” when another user visits that computer, and interacts with and is tracked by the “adware” without their consent.

Spyware has prompted an outcry from computer security and privacy advocates, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center [1]. Often, spyware applications send the user’s browsing habits to an adserving company, which then targets adverts at the user based on their interests. Kazaa and eXeem are popular programs which incorporate software of this type.

Adware programs other than spyware do not invisibly collect and upload this activity record or personal information when the user of the computer has not expected or approved of the transfer, but some vendors of adware maintain that their application which does this is not also spyware, due to disclosure of program activities: for example, a product vendor may indicate that since somewhere in the product’s Terms of Use there is a clause that third-party software will be included that may collect and may report on computer use, that this Terms of Use disclosure means the product is just adware.

A number of software applications are available to help computer users search for and modify adware programs to block the presentation of advertisements and to remove spyware modules. To avoid a backlash, as with the advertising industry in general, creators of adware must balance their attempts to generate revenue with users’ desire to be left alone.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.