The display advertising portion of online advertising is increasingly dominated by rich media, generally using Adobe Flash. Rich media advertising techniques make overt use of color, imagery, page layout, and other elements in order to attract the reader’s attention. Some users might consider these ads as intrusive or obnoxious, because they can distract from the desired content of a webpage. Some examples of common rich media formats and the terms of art used within the industry to describe them:

• Interstitial or Expanding ad: The display of a page of ads before the requested content.
• Floating ad: An ad which moves across the user’s screen or floats above the content.
• Expanding ad: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.
• Polite ad or Polite download: A method by which a large ad will be downloaded in smaller pieces to minimize the disruption of the content being viewed
• Wallpaper ad: An ad which changes the background of the page being viewed.

In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.

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

Googletestad appears to stand for Google’s Test Ad which is used for live testing of their AdWords and AdSense pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system.

At the moment there are no define: googletestad definitions in Google’s database for this keyword.

The Google Test Ad

The following paid advertisement appears for a Google search on googletestad:

Popularity of googletestad as a Search Term

In June 2005, googletestad began appearing increasingly in the top search terms for search engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing. and WordTracker.

In July 2005 this keyword was consistently in the top 30 searches as measured by WordTracker, and received over 100,000 searches according to Yahoo! Search Marketing thus:

• 72,161 searches – google googletestad monitor query
• 39,436 searches – googletestad
• 96 searches – foo google googletestad monitor query

The WordTracker Keywords Report dated August 9, 2005 (top 10 queries from the last 48 hours) reported:

• 1 jessica simpson (3377)
• 2 jessica alba (3314)
• 3 music lyrics (2679)
• 4 daniela hantuchova (1955)
• 5 paris hilton (1469)
• 6 playstation 2 cheats (1243)
• 7 xbox cheats (1231)
• 8 jokes (1069)
• 9 googletestad (1048)
• 10 google (1013)

Regarding the keyword’s trend, back issues of that service’s Top 200 long-term keyword report (for the last 110 days) showed gaining popularity:

(date – rank, and count)

• August 9, 2005 – 55 (35,032)
• August 2, 2005 – 64 (32,737)
• July 26, 2005 – 94 (28,793)
• July 19, 2005 – 105 (24,878)

As of August 13th 2005, there were 12,800 hits found for googletestad in Google’s search engine.

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ

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

In Internet marketing, search engine marketing, or SEM, is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). The three main methods are:

• Search engine optimization, or improving rankings for relevant keywords in search results by rectifying the website structure, and content such that they could be easly read and understood by the search engine’s software programs. It is seen that website containing the latest trends and updates are first available to the visitor.
• Search engine advertising, or paying the search engine company for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results (commonly known as pay per click advertising).
• Paid inclusion, or paying the search engine company for a guarantee that the website is included in their natural search index.

Search engine marketers are experts and firms who explore of weaknesses and strengths in the methods and individual products to find the best way to promote a particular website in search engines.

Links

Products

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing

External Articles

• Search Industry Explained – Four part article that gives the past, present and future of search engine marketing, optimization and related technologies.
• The Symbiotic Relationship Between SEO and PPC

Organizations

• Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)
• SEO Consultants
• SeoPros.org
• Search Marketing Association of North America
• Romanian Association for Telework and Teleactivities

Industry resources

• ClickZ
• Searchviews
• Searchblog

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

Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, one of a few reliable commercial anti-spyware programs, scans the hard drive of a clean Windows XP system.

Many programmers and some commercial firms have released products designed to remove or block spyware. Steve Gibson’s OptOut, mentioned above, pioneered a growing category. Programs such as Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware SE and Patrick Kolla’s Spybot – Search & Destroy rapidly gained popularity as effective tools to remove, and in some cases intercept, spyware programs. More recently Microsoft acquired the GIANT Anti-Spyware software, rebadging it as Windows AntiSpyware beta and releasing it as a free download for Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 users. In early spring, 2006, Microsoft renamed the beta software to as “Windows Defender”, currently “beta 2.” The renamed software for now exists as a time-limited beta test product that will expire (beta 1 in July 2006, and beta 2 in December, 2006). Microsoft has also announced that the product will ship (for free) with Windows Vista. Other well-known anti-spyware products include Webroot Spy Sweeper, PC Tools’ Spyware Doctor, ParetoLogic’s XoftSpy, and Sunbelt’s CounterSpy (which uses a forked codebase from the GIANT Anti-Spyware product).

Major anti-virus firms such as Symantec, McAfee and Sophos have come later to the table, adding anti-spyware features to their existing anti-virus products. Early on, anti-virus firms expressed reluctance to add anti-spyware functions, citing lawsuits brought by spyware authors against the authors of web sites and programs which described their products as “spyware”. However, recent versions of these major firms’ home and business anti-virus products do include anti-spyware functions, albeit treated differently from viruses. Symantec Anti-Virus, for instance, categorizes spyware programs as “extended threats” and now offers real-time protection from them (as it does for viruses).

Real-time protection blocks spyware in the process of installing itself. Here, Windows AntiSpyware blocks an instance of the AlwaysUpdateNews spyware.

Anti-spyware programs can combat spyware in two ways:

1. real-time protection, which prevents the installation of spyware
2. detection and removal of spyware.

Writers of anti-spyware programs usually find detection and removal simpler, and many more programs have become available which do so. Such programs inspect the contents of the Windows registry, the operating system files, and installed programs, and remove files and entries which match a list of known spyware components. Real-time protection from spyware works identically to real-time anti-virus protection: the software scans incoming network data and disk files at download time, and blocks the activity of components known to represent spyware. In some cases, it may also intercept attempts to install start-up items or to modify browser settings.

Earlier versions of anti-spyware programs focused chiefly on detection and removal. Javacool Software’s SpywareBlaster, one of the first to offer real-time protection, blocked the installation of ActiveX-based and other spyware programs. To date, other programs such as Ad-Aware and Windows AntiSpyware now combine the two approaches, while SpywareBlaster remains focused on real-time protection.

Like most anti-virus software, many anti-spyware/adware tools require a frequently-updated database of threats. As new spyware programs are released, anti-spyware developers discover and evaluate them, making “signatures” or “definitions” which allow the software to detect and remove the spyware. As a result, anti-spyware software is of limited usefulness without a regular source of updates. Some vendors provide a subscription-based update service, while others provide updates gratis. Updates may be installed automatically on a schedule or before doing a scan, or may be done manually. Not all programs rely on updated definitions. Some programs rely partly (for instance Windows Defender) or entirely (BillP’s WinPatrol, and certainly others) on historical observation. They watch certain configuration parameters (such as the Windows registry or browser configuration) and report any change to the user, without judgment or recomendation. Their chief advantage is that they do not rely on updated definitions. Even with a subscription, a “critical mass” of other users have to have, and report a problem before the new definition is characterized and propagated. The disadvantage is that they can offer no guidance. The user is left to determine “what did I just do, and is this configuration change appropriate?”

If a spyware program is not blocked and manages to get itself installed, it may resist attempts to terminate or uninstall it. Some programs work in pairs: when an anti-spyware scanner (or the user) terminates one running process, the other one respawns the killed program. Likewise, some spyware will detect attempts to remove registry keys and immediately add them again. Usually, booting the infected computer in safe mode allows an anti-spyware program a better chance of removing persistent spyware.

Malicious programmers have released a large number of fake anti-spyware programs, and widely distributed Web banner ads now spuriously warn users that their computers have been infected with spyware, directing them to purchase programs which do not actually remove spyware — or worse, may add more spyware of their own. ^{[1] [2]}

The recent proliferation of fake or spoofed antivirus products has occasioned some concern. Such products often bill themselves as antispyware, antivirus, or registry cleaners, and sometimes feature popups prompting users to install them.

Known offenders include:

SpyAxe
AntiVirus Gold
SpywareStrike
SpyFalcon
WorldAntiSpy
WinFixer
SpyTrooper
Spy Sheriff
SpyBan
SpyWiper
PAL Spyware Remover
Spyware Stormer
PSGuard

On 2006-01-26, Microsoft and the Washington state attorney general filed suit against Secure Computer for its Spyware Cleaner product. [1]

References

1. ↑ Roberts, Paul F. “Spyware-Removal Program Tagged as a Trap“. eWeek. May 26, 2005.
2. ↑ Howes, Eric L. “The Spyware Warrior List of Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites“. Retrieved July 10, 2005.

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

Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In fact, many online users have even suggested (though they were presumably joking) that cruel forms of capital punishment would be appropriate for spammers. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the internet; this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Net, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and even the commercialization of e-mail.

One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it. A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called “stealth blocking”, a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users’ knowledge. These groups’ concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as “spam-friendly”. SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire.

Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the Can Spam Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some spammers and organizations which support spamming, and opposed by many in the antispam community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against spam.

Court cases

Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice.

Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. In another case against Soloway, U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.

In the first successful case of its kind, Mr. Nigel Roberts from the Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account. [15]

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

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keyword stuffing.

Because of the ability to track results of online advertising at a more granular level than what is available through traditional advertising, varying ways have developed for the advertisers and publishers to do business. The three most common ways in which online advertising is purchased are CPA, CPC, and CPM.

CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser only pays for the media on the basis of the number of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up.

CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising is also performance based and is common in search marketing, where it is often known as Pay per click (PPC). In this scheme, an advertisement may be displayed (and assumedly viewed) many times, but the advertiser only pays based on the number of user clicks. This system provides an incentive for publishers to target ads correctly (often by keyword), as the payment depends upon the ad not only being seen, but the viewer responding and following the hyperlink.

CPM (Cost per Thousand) advertising is the most common basis in the business and is used for most display advertising and rich media. This scheme most closely resembles offline advertising, wherein the advertiser is paying for exposure of their message to a specific audience. CPM costs are priced per thousand, so that a $1 CPM, means that the advertiser pays $1 for every thousand impressions.

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

Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose src attribute includes the URL of the page. Google’s servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. (Some of the details are described in the AdSense patent.) If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.

The storage requirements of an AdSense system are stunningly modest. If each URL has just 8 “high-value” keywords, each represented by a single 32-bit number, then the keywords for each URL could be represented with just 32 bytes. The high value keywords of 4 billion URLs could be stored in 128GB, which would cost only $100 (circa 2006). 400 billion URLs or 100 drives (for a redundancy of 100) would require only $10,000 in storage costs.

AdSense serves a very large number of pages each day. If each day around 1B people saw 10 AdSense impressions (or 100M people saw 100 AdSense impressions), then AdSense would serve around 10B requests/day, or 115,741 requests/sec. If one machine can serve 20 reqs/second (seek times to read a random 4096-byte location on a drive allow for bursts of well over 100 reqs/second), then Google would require 5,787 servers to serve these 10B reqs/day. If each of these servers were hosted at a cost of $100/month, then it would cost $579K/month to run the adservers needed.

Suppose these 10B impressions/day generated clicks at a clickthrough rate of .3% and an average CPC of $.10. Then each day Google would receive 30M clicks/day (347 clicks/sec), generating $3M/day ($34.77/sec), or 900M clicks/month, generating $90M/month.

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

Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a product or organization. The product could include anything from traditional goods and services, to celebrities, or works of entertainment.

From a marketing perspective, publicity is one of the variables that comprise the promotional mix. The other components of promotions are advertising, sales promotion, and personal selling. promotion is one of the variables that comprise the marketing mix.

Publicity is a tool of public relations. Whereas public relations is the management of all communication between the firm and selected target audiences, publicity is the management of product or brand related communications between the firm and the general public. It is primarily an informative activity (as opposed to a persuasive one), but its ultimate goal is to promote the organization’s products, services, or brands. A publicity plan is a planned program aimed at obtaining favorable media coverage for an organization’s products – or for the organization itself, to enhance its reputation and relationships with stakeholders.

A basic tool of the publicist is the press release, but other techniques include telephone press conferences, in-studio media tours, multi-component video news releases (VNR’s), newswire stories, and internet releases. For these releases to be used by the media, they must be of interest to the public ( or at least to the market segment that the media outlet is targeted to). The releases are often customized to match the media vehicle that they are being sent to. Getting noticed by the press is all about saying the right thing at the right time. A publicist is continuously asking what about you or your company will pique the reader’s curiosity and make a good story? The most successful publicity releases are related to topics of current interest. These are referred to as news pegs. An example is if three people die of water poisoning, an alert publicist would release stories about the technology embodied in a water purification product.

But the publicist cannot wait around for the news to present opportunities. They must also try to create their own news. Examples of this include:

• Contests
• Walkathons
• Art exhibitions
• Event sponsorship
• Arrange a speech or talk
• Make an analysis or prediction
• Conduct a poll or survey
• Issue a report
• Take a stand on a controversial subject
• Arrange for a testimonial
• Announce an appointment
• Celebrate an anniversary
• Invent then present an award
• Stage a debate
• Organize a tour of your business or projects
• Issue a commendation

The advantages of publicity are low cost, and credibility (particularly if the publicity is aired in between news stories like on evening TV news casts). New technologies such as weblogs, web cameras, web affiliates, and convergence (phone-camera posting of pictures and videos to websites) are changing the cost-structure. The disadvantages are lack of control over how your releases will be used, and frustration over the low percentage of releases that are taken up by the media.

Publicity draws on several key themes including birth, love, and death. These are of particular interest because they are themes in human lives which feature heavily throughout life. In television serials several couples have emerged during crucial ratings and important publicity times, as a way to make constant headlines. Also known as a publicity stunt, the pairings may or may not be truthful.

Publicists

A publicist is a person whose job is to generate and manage publicity for a product, public figure, especially a celebrity, or for a work such as a book or movie. Publicists usually work at large companies handling multiple clients.

Effectiveness of Publicity

The theory any press is good press has been coined to describe situations where bad behaviour by people involved with an organisation or brand has actually resulted in positive results, due to the fame and press coverage accrued by such events.

A good example would be Paris Hilton’s many antics, from lurid sex tapes to clumsy behaviour on TV shows actually increasing business at the family’s chain of Hilton Hotels.

Another example would be the Australian Tourism Board’s “So where the Bloody Hell are you?” Advertising Campaign that was initially banned in the UK, but the amount of publicity this generated resulted in the official website for the campaign being swamped with requests to see the banned ad.

Definition: Publicity is the means of using an external entity ( celebrities, people from the media, etc) to increase the awareness levels of the product, company, goods etc amongst the public and/or buying segment.

Links

• Publicity Resources
• MMA Publicity Resources – Australian focus

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

Gaining unauthorized access to a computer is illegal, under computer crime laws such as the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Since the owners of computers infected with spyware generally claim that they never authorized the installation, a prima facie reading would suggest that the promulgation of spyware would count as a criminal act. Law enforcement has often pursued the authors of other malware programs, such as viruses. Nonetheless, few prosecutions of writers of spyware have occurred, and many such producers operate openly as aboveboard businesses. Some have, however, faced lawsuits.

Spyware producers primarily argue in defense of the legality of their acts that, contrary to the users’ claims, users do in fact give consent to the installation of their spyware. Spyware that comes bundled with shareware applications may appear, for instance, described in the legalese text of an end-user license agreement (EULA). Many users habitually ignore these purported contracts, but spyware companies such as Claria claim that these demonstrate that users have consented to the installation of their software.

Despite the ubiquity of EULAs and of clickwrap agreements, relatively little case law has resulted from their use. It has been established in most common law jurisdictions that a clickwrap agreements can be a binding contract in certain circumstances. This does not however mean that every clickwrap agreement is a contract or that every term in a clickwrap contract is enforceable. It seems highly likely that many of the purported contract terms presented in clickwrap agreements would be dismissed in most jurisdictions as being contrary to public policy. Many spyware clickwrap agreements appear intentionally ambiguous and excessive in length, with key contract terms made inconspicuous. These are all grounds on which similar agreements have been rejected as contracts of adhesion.

Nor can a contract possibly exist in the case of spyware installed by surreptitious means, such as in a drive-by download where the user receives no opportunity to either agree to or refuse the contract terms.

Some jurisdictions, including the U.S. states of Iowa [1] and Washington [2], have passed laws criminalizing some forms of spyware. Such laws make it illegal for anyone other than the owner or operator of a computer to install software that alters Web-browser settings, monitors keystrokes, or disables computer-security software.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has pursued spyware companies for fraudulent installation of software. [9] In a suit brought in 2005 by Spitzer, the California firm Intermix Media, Inc. ended up settling by agreeing to pay $7.5 million and to stop distributing spyware. Intermix’s spyware spread via drive-by download, and deliberately installed itself in ways that made it difficult to remove. ^[1]

Another spyware behavior has attracted lawsuits: the replacement of Web advertisements. In June 2002, a number of large Web publishers sued Claria for replacing advertisements, but settled out of court. Other spyware apart from Claria’s also replaces advertisements, thus diverting revenue from the ad-bearing Web site to the spyware author.

One legal issue not yet pursued involves whether courts can hold advertisers responsible for spyware which displays their ads. In many cases, the companies whose advertisements appear in spyware pop-ups do not directly do business with the spyware firm. Rather, the advertised company contracts with an advertising agency, which in turn contracts with an online subcontractor who gets paid by the number of “impressions” or appearances of the advertisement. Some major firms such as Dell Computer and Mercedes-Benz have “fired” advertising agencies which have run their ads in spyware. ^[2]

In a sort of turnabout, a few spyware companies have threatened websites which have posted descriptions of their products. In 2003, Gator (now known as Claria) filed suit against the website PC Pitstop for describing the Gator program as “spyware”. ^[3] PC Pitstop settled, agreeing not to use the word “spyware”, but continues to publish descriptions of the harmful behavior of the Gator/Claria software. [3]

References

1. ↑ Gormley, Michael. “Intermix Media Inc. says it is settling spyware lawsuit with N.Y. attorney general“. Yahoo! News. June 15, 2005.
2. ↑ Gormley, Michael. “Major advertisers caught in spyware net“. Business Week. June 24, 2005.
3. ↑ Festa, Paul. “See you later, anti-Gators?“. News.com. October 22, 2003.

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