As for the article, it is interesting but not the first to handle targeted spying on that part of the world, definitely represents a shift in the direction our nation’s will go to that relies less on a physical carpet bombing of earlier wars and does a virtual carpet bombing instead.

I earn my living largely by creating and managing PPC campaigns and conducting media buys. A typical CTR on a on well run Adwords campaign is 2-3% – and indeed Google encourages higher CTR by materially punishing those advertisers with low CTR (your bid price goes up to achieve the same number of impressions vs entities bidding on the same triggers).

There has not been a drop in Google’s revenue from Adwords revenue which currently sits at over $100 million … per day.

Bottom line is advertising online is not dying by a long shot.

And if you don’t see the ads because you’re blocking them (like most of us) why don’t you consider clicking on the PayPal Donate button and sending some coin to Brian so he’ll keep posting his excellent and unique content. I’m going to do it right now, why don’t you join me!

BUT, that means I have to install Flash to support your site through advertising. I do know for a fact that I CAN’T trust other sites, and the simplest defense is to not allow FLASH in my primary browser.

Yes, I do have a browser installation to view flash items when I want to, but, I do not use it for day to day browsing. So I don’t see your flash ads, and I therefore you lose potential click-thru revenue. Sorry, but my simplistic approach to security is more important to me than me denying you 2cents (or whatever …) worth of advertising revenue.

Today maybe ads are more an instrument of SEO… (I prefer sponsorship – and no, Flash isn’t an option if the audience includes iOS or Chrome users…)

I would agree in most circumstances it is unlikely. However if anyone has a grudge against Brian specifically (hmm, how many people has he painted the connection to X or Y with his articles that they wouldn’t have liked known?) — This is a fairly cheap and very easy way to exact some revenge. The code (as a developer) is very, very simple (around 4 lines to redirect to another site) and it all depends on how much damage “I” as the bad guy wants to do. The simplist and cheapest way is the first flash add has a date bomb half way into the month. Doesn’t matter how many times Brian views it — it won’t trigger anything bad until mid-month.

I’m not worried about myself; I’m already paranoid about security on my computer and run with several things like noscript, ghostry and requestpolicy, etc.

But I happen to hope Brian will stick around for a long time and don’t want to see him take any hits that he could have easily prevented. Very much like we recommend boot disks or dedicated computers for financial stuff. It can easily be prevented…

Nathan

The reason I say this is because (my guess) this isn’t a property where entities would pay for non-performing ads (read losing money) to stop competitors running their ads on the same property – this often happens in some verticals on larger properties such as relevant SE results pages. And I’d also expect Brian to stop running with these same ads and try something else if they aren’t at least profitable.

Oh and in some circumstances Flash/banners will outperform text by a country mile BTW but it comes down to circumstances.

Or you could just accept that the scenario you just painted is possible but very unlikely due to the number of hoops an attacker would have to jump through.

On the other hand if Ads still rely on flash they’ve still to learn something from Google… so much text-ads… how uncool, Google must be stupid. oO