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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> a new way to advertise on the web
        
(Message started by: amichail on Nov 9^th, 2006, 12:36am)

Title: a new way to advertise on the web
Post by amichail on Nov 9^th, 2006, 12:36am

Imagine a service where you can browse the traffic of numerous web sites in real-time, maybe using a cool visualization such as this:

http://www.visitorville.com/ss.html

I think advertisers would be willing to broadcast their web traffic if it will make their site look more interesting thus increasing the probability that more people will visit and stay longer on their site.

This goes beyond conventional web advertising because potential visitors would see at a glance how busy the site is overall and also which parts of the site are currently being visited frequently at that very moment. They would also be able to see what sorts of visitors the site attracts and how those visitors found the site.

Would you broadcast your web site traffic live? Do you think many people would? Do you think this approach would make advertising more effective?

P.S. I'm thinking of providing such a feature in Target Your News, a service for free advertising that uses a novel targeting method:

http://targetyournews.com/ajax/TargetYourNews.html

Title: Re: a new way to advertise on the web
Post by towr on Nov 9^th, 2006, 1:10am

I'm not sure how interesting it is to know how many other people are at a site, unless there is a possibility for interaction.
And even if it were interesting, a company can easily fake traffic, pretending some dull subsite is more interesting than it is.

Title: Re: a new way to advertise on the web
Post by amichail on Nov 9^th, 2006, 1:17am

on 11/09/06 at 01:10:21, towr wrote:

Web traffic can tell you more than just how busy the site is. For example, you can see where people are going in the site in real-time, how they got to the site, where they are from, etc.

Yes, a company can fake this traffic, but it would probably be caught sooner or later. It wouldn't look good.

Title: Re: a new way to advertise on the web
Post by towr on Nov 9^th, 2006, 2:28am

on 11/09/06 at 01:17:31, amichail wrote:

Web traffic can tell you more than just how busy the site is. For example, you can see where people are going in the site in real-time, how they got to the site, where they are from, etc.

That's starting to get creepy.. I don't think I'd want to visit sites like that. Before you know it someone's stalking me online.
Lumped together statistics like webcounters give is one thing, but it shouldn't be that if there's one current visitor you can track down all the sites and places he's been to.

Quote:

Yes, a company can fake this traffic, but it would probably be caught sooner or later. It wouldn't look good.

It depends on how much they fake, I suppose. It doesn't seem terribly difficult to do it subtly enough to escape notice.
Just look at how many guest this forum has that you never hear from. You might gradually double the number and no one would be suspicious.

Title: Re: a new way to advertise on the web
Post by amichail on Nov 9^th, 2006, 2:42am

on 11/09/06 at 02:28:36, towr wrote:

Yes, that's a danger of combining all that web traffic from many sites.

One way around this is to anonymize the traffic from each site differently, so that the same IP would have different identifiers across different sites.

As the owner of a web site, it is your responsibility to protect the privacy of your users. So you need to make sure that anonymization is done when sending your web traffic data to this advertising service.