The Concerns of Online Advertising

By: Aulia & Nathania

• Banner blindness is web page zones that likely to contain display ads. (Banner blindness is the tendency of people to ignore banner ads on Web sites.)

• Eye-tracking studies have shown that Internet users often ignore banner blindness.

• But studies suggest that even those ads "ignored" by the users may influence the user subconsciously.

Fraud on the Advertiser

• Click fraud is an illegal practice that occurs when individuals click on a website's click through advertisements (either banner ads or paid text links) to increase the payable number of clicks to the advertiser.

• The illegal clicks could either be performed by having a person manually click the advertising hyperlinks or by using automated software or online bots that are programmed to click these banner ads and pay per click text ad links.

• Click fraud is especially associated with pornography sites.

• Online impression fraud can occur when publishers overstate the number of ad impressions they have delivered to their advertisers.

Technological Variations

1. Heterogeneous Clients

• Because users have different operating systems, web browsers and computer hardware (including mobile devices and different screen sizes), online ads may appear to users differently from how the advertiser intended, or the ads may not display properly at all.

• advertisers may encounter legal problems if Alegally required information doesn't actually display to users, even if that failure is due to technological heterogeneity.

2. Ad-blocking

• Ad-blocking, or ad filtering, means the ads do not appear to the user because the user uses technology to screen out ads.

• Approximately 9% of all online page views come from browsers with ad-blocking software installed, and some publishers have 40%+ of their visitors using ad-blockers.

3. Anti-targeting Technologies

• Some web browsers offer privacy modes where users can hide information about themselves from publishers and advertisers.

• Most major browsers have incorporated Do Not Track options into their browser headers, but the regulations currently are only enforced by the honor system.

Privacy Concerns

• The collection of user information by publishers and advertisers has raised consumer concerns about their privacy.

• Sixty percent of Internet users would use Do Not Track technology to block all collection of information if given an opportunity.

• Many consumers have reservations about by online behavioral targeting.

• Advertisers often use technology, such as web bugs and respawning cookies, to maximizing their abilities to track consumers.

Trustworthiness of advertisers

• Scammers can take advantage of consumers' difficulties verifying an online persona's identity, leading to artifices like phishing and confidence schemes.

• Consumers also face malware risks, i.e. malvertising, when interacting with online advertising

Spam

• The Internet's low cost of disseminating advertising contributes to spam, especially by large-scale spammers.

• Numerous efforts have been undertaken to combat spam, ranging from blacklists to regulatorily-required labeling to content filters, but most of those efforts have adverse collateral effects, such as mistaken filtering.

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising

• http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/click_fraud.html

• http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/banner-blindness