How Much For Your Title And Status Bar?

from the advertising:-it's-everywhere dept

By now you should realize that advertisers will try to find just about any unencumbered real estate where they can put their message if they think enough eyeballs will scan that area. So, perhaps it's no surprise that some firms have been looking for poorly "monetized" areas of your screen real estate where they can stick an ad. There's a new company, apparently, (and, honestly, if we were a bit closer to April, we might wonder if this were really an April Fool's joke) that wants to sell your browser's title and status bars to advertisers. The company positions it as an unobtrusive way of getting advertising out there -- which would make sense minus the fact that it's so unobtrusive that it's in a spot where no one ever looks. Still, if the company can actually sucker some advertisers into believing it's worth it, it could be a decent extra revenue source for some sites -- though, the CPM of $0.65 is extremely low on the payout side (advertisers are expected to cough up $1 CPM so, the ad firm is keeping 35%). Still, you have to wonder how many advertisers will pay up -- or renew after they realize how few people actually see their ad.

7 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    zcat, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 2:57am

    More than just unobtrusive, it's practically subliminal!

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    How Much For Your Title And Status Bar?

    identicon
    desilu, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 3:10am

    And of course you can't click through on ads in those places

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    Chris H, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 5:21am

    That wouln't bother me I never look there. As long as they don't have my status text flashing or scrolling... that's annoying.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    title bar

    identicon
    dan mayer, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 7:58am

    i dont know about you all but i use the hell out of tabbed browsing and if all of my tabs were Ads I would be forced to read them because i could never find the right tab to switch to. So it would make me read the ads, but hate the sites that used those ads, because i couldnt find the right tab to switch to. If you have 8 tabs open the only way to move around is from the tab title... So all of you i never read the titles are either using IE or do some pretty limitted browsing or didnt realize how this would negatively affect your browsing experience.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Re: title bar

    identicon
    dblanchard, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 8:21am

    I'm with Dan on this one, and would be even more frustrated by it if it messed the names of bookmarks/favorites. I would really dislike having to rename bookmarks as I create them so they don't read "Safely enlarge yo..."

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  6.  

    Re: title bar

    identicon
    aReader, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 1:34pm

    May be it is time to build a Firefox extension that will not show the actual title that has an ad in it but to derive the title based on the URL or some other context - problem solved!

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  7.  

    Re: How Much For Your Title And Status Bar?

    identicon
    Bob, Jan 6th, 2006 @ 2:20pm

    Bubble 2.0?

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss
From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This