The New York Times' Web site will begin displaying half-page magazine-style ads adjacent to its articles, making its online pages appear more similar to their print counterparts.
"It's a nice, big ad unit," said Jason Krebs, vice president of advertising sales for the NYTimes.com. "We're trying to make the most of what the Internet can offer."
Make the most of what the Internet can offer!
Not that I really give a shit about the NYTimes web site -- I only ever read it when someone sends me a link to the rare interesting article, and even then I read it through an ad-blocking proxy -- but I thought this quote was really classy:
Tags: computers, copyright, corporations
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16 Responses:
hahahaaaaaaa
Oh my god. It's like those XM Radio billboards that facetiously say "Do you like commercials with your music?"
Only, like, they ACTUALLY THINK THAT.
I think it's becaues XM doesn't have any commericals, but you pay out the nose for more clearchannel bullshit.
Radio is so, so over. Talk Radio isn't, because there's actual content there, but commerical radio will suffer a horrible death. We all have mp3 players in our cars now ;)
I have my radio station. It's just too bad no one plays new music for us to explore anymore. Everything's stagnated.
Yeah, my car stereo was "XM Ready" and so I looked into it, but apparently what the means is, spend another $100+ for the actual XM receiver ("XM Ready" apparently means little more than "there's an XM button on the face plate"), and then spend like $18/month or whatever the actual service costs. And all this just to get radio that might suck marginally less? Thanks, I'll stick to CDs.
Rae: keep in mind that the NYT folks aren't really crazy, it's just that you are looking at it as if the readers of the paper are their customers. But they're not: the advertisers are their customers, and the readers are the product NYT sells.
"It's just too bad no one plays new music for us to explore anymore. Everything's stagnated."
Wha? John, did Devon just hijack your journal?
Also, why shouldn't talk radio go the way of FM? NPR already has a large portion of their broadcasts archived online in audio format (which I actually dislike, since I prefer reading articles over listening to them).
And yes, Jamie, I know; but I figured maybe a VP wouldn't be so dumb as to say something like that in a forum that readers of the NYT would see it. In addition, I think it's kind of wierd that their idea of "making the most of what the internet has to offer", design-wise, is accomplished by regressing to a print format. Now, I don't know shit about print or graphic design, but I would think that pop-ups, banner ads, and other web-specific forms of advertisement would constitute using the full potential of the internet better than a page design locked in a 2d mentality would.
But maybe it's just a classic case of a sales droid not knowing shit about what he's talking about, and calling it "cutting-edge" for good press...regardless of whether it's actually an advancement or not.
You'd think they'd know better! After all this time!
But designers and marketeers spent their educations learning about creating and selling print ads, and my experience has been that they all want the web to be exactly like print. (Or, depending on where their last job was, exactly like TV.) That's what they know, and so, where it diverges from the old ways, the web must be Fixed.
Oh, but they do like the tracking/lack of privacy thing. They like that lots. They don't know how to actually use it for anything yet, but they think they might someday.
Many XM channels are free of commercials. The ones that aren't tend to be feeds (like CNN) that get commercials added where a local cable company would do the same.
An XM set seems a bit pricy, and there is the subscription, but it's not all that bad. And while Clear Channel has some stake in XM, there are channels that are the very thing people hate CC for killing. Deep Tracks (album based rock), for example.
For most folks, it's probably not a critical thing, but when one travels long distances frequently (2 hour drives to a major airport) it's nice to not have to change stations as one drives. Also, the old time radio channel is nice. Listening to old radio shows can make the longer trips (6+ hours) far easier. Oh, the old time radio channel has some of the old commercials... which are interesting as they're so much less annoying than most modern commercials.
(observe my phat delay in replying. woo.)
That might be so, but why does it matter if XM sucks slightly less than standard radio if it still sucks? Your p2p software of choice, a decent CD burner and a spindle of cheap blank CDs renders traditional radio totally irrelevant. And for finding new music in your preferred genre, there's always internet radio stations.
So just out of curiosity, do you have a WSJ account, or did someone email this to you, or both? (I have an account, myself; it's one of the few things I'd consider worth paying for, although I did sign up accidentally.)
And is anyone else disproportionately disturbed by this quote:
?
No, I don't have an account; I forget where I stumbled on the link, probably somewhere in friendsfriends.
All that means is that they cookie your browser so that one advertiser can advertise to you for every page in that visit; that way they can hand you the same meaningless ads multiple times.
It may seem simple, but don't worry; I'm sure they have a patent in the works.
you gonna be at yer concrete bunker for Deathguild 2.0 on thurs? if yes, I probably bring camera.
Indeed.
You know, I tried really hard to convince David to call it "Clone Guild" but he didn't think that was funny for some reason.
I've occasionally referred to it as Midian Guild since DK really only spins at Midian.
I hope you don't hate "They Might Be Giants".
Some how I'm less annoyed by in-page as then pop up ads. Easier to ignore I guess.