Latest in online advertising

I honestly never thought that I'd be paying for any sort of advertising for my blog, at least not until it entered into the "big time", with many hundreds of thousands of pageviews per day. I never really believed that the cost of advertising on a small scale could really be worth the results. If you only invest less than $10 a day into an advertising campaign, can it really have any impact at all? Don't most advertising campaigns require hundreds of dollars a month or more? This is the question that I set out to answer at the beginning of this year
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You can see these on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many other platforms, where companies pay to have their content appear in a prominent place on our feed. Granted, it’s not the only way to place ads, but it’s a good way to make sure we see them. What do you think of this trend? Do you mind these posts? Do you use them?
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Popular microblogging platform Tumblr announced yesterday that it's now serving ads on its iPhone and Android apps. This move comes a year after Tumblr initially allowed ads to appear on its Web interface. These ads will now be arriving on your mobile Tumblr interface, bu they will look a little different; when looking at a sponsored post, you'll be able to recognize it as such by an animated dollar sign which will appear on the top right corner of the post.
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Facebook users may soon see a new advertising trend arriving in their sidebars. The social networking site has introduced a new system of "partner categories" which advertisers can choose from to target more specific markets. The categories are made up of more than 500 groups, allowing prospective advertisers to choose exactly who they want to reach out to. One example provided in a press release depicted groups as specific as "people who buy children's cereals".
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We've had Web 1.0 and 2.0. Now we're into the era of the Smartphone Web, the time when every man and his dog has a smartphone in their pocket, playing Angry Birds on the bus, and doing price comparison shopping in the middle of a store. My wife and I are extremely guilty of that. We've been thrown out of many shops because we've stood there with our phones and compared prices with online stores to see who is cheaper.
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Apple is a company that you either love or hate; there's very little middle ground. This is because you either buy into the company and its culture or reject it outright. Seeing as I don't own a single Apple product I guess I belong to the latter group. However, even I, as a supposed hater, have been exposed to Apple's marketing machine over the last three decades. And while the ads haven't persuaded me to buy anything from the company, some have left a lasting impression.
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Last week I stumbled across Jaboody Dubs, a YouTube user with more than 300,000 subscribers and only around 50 videos. The bulk of these are cleverly dubbed, side-splittingly funny infomercials for products so bad they need their own hard sell. Such advertorials are some of the worst examples of advertising, particularly when customers are deceived in the process. This makes it all the more funny when the audio is replaced with something a little more fitting.
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I immediately identified with today's infographic, provided by Realplayer, because it describes my wife and I to a tee. When we are both watching television, we are alternating between looking at the screen and looking at our phones. It's comforting to know that this is a widespread practice, and not something anti-social, as someone once told me. I wasn't listening though as I was checking my phone at the time.
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Video gaming is now a mainstream hobby, with people of all ages taking part. As the industry has matured, so has the audience, and so have the commercials that are created to try and sell systems and titles to us. Over the years there have been amazing video game commercials that have stood out above all others. Often because they're brilliantly conceived and masterfully delivered, but sometimes because they're so weird to be eye-catching and memorable.
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Have you ever seen an advertisement in Android’s notification area? Some apps abuse their notification permissions to display advertisements when you aren’t even using them. The good news is that you can determine which apps are showing the annoying ads and block them from appearing. Google is starting to crack down on apps that abuse notifications, but many apps still use them.
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Selling advertising space on the Internet is big business and this is why Google is at the top of the tech totem pole. Very early on, companies very quickly came to the conclusion that online advertising was the way to get their message out there, and if you are Google, with a huge dominant popular search engine at your disposal, then you are ideally placed to offer that advertising. Cue flowing mountains of cash.
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Craigslist has become the go-to site for anyone looking to buy, sell, hire, be hired, etc. However, at the same time, it has the reputation of attracting “sketchy” people. But this article isn’t just about using Craigslist. It’s about getting the best results, and that can be hard no matter how savvy you are. However, I have had quite a bit of success in a number of areas, which I attribute to a number of things that I have done.
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Privacy, privacy, privacy. The Internet is known for its anonymity. Without personal privacy, it would be a very dangerous place. But are these companies infringing on privacy rights? How exactly does a website track its users? And what do companies do with that data? Let's look into it here.
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Advertising shouldn't be the only way for content producers to make money. Luckily, it isn't - plenty of reputable organizations fund themselves without ads, online and off. You, the readers, had a few things to say when James called AdBlock evil and when Chris asked AdBlock users to whitelist us. Many of you understood their point of view, but one recurring theme in the comments was alternatives to advertising.
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Leaving ethical discussions aside (since I made my views on that quite clear last time), it is nonetheless true that ad-blocking is a real problem for bloggers and site owners the world over whose only source of income is ad revenue. With that understood, let's look objectively at some tactics you can use to deal with ad-block users, and the effects those tactics might have.
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