On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 10:47:35AM -0400, Daniel Senie wrote:
William Allen Simpson wrote:
Dana Hudes wrote:
I vehemently disagree with the statement that impressions do not make any sense, only clickthroughs. There is such a thing as brand awareness, a situation where a banner ad is good for itself even if it doesn't lead to click through.
Of course, in that case, the benefit is to the advertiser. That is, they get the benefit, but you don't get paid. Not my problem.
So, when Sears buys a full page advertisement in the Boston Globe, they should get that for free, and only have to pay the Globe when someone shows up at the door holding a copy of the ad?
Try not to compare apples and oranges. If your assumptions are bad, that doesn't lend it for your conclusions to be accurate. ;-) (I'd love to see a serious non-flame response from the content junkies to address some of the verbiage below written by me, a service provider junkie). The trucking companies aren't sponsoring Sears ad's or the Boston Globe by shuttling around the Globe issue (including the printed ad) for free. In fact, as long as when a customer buys them (or they are pre-paid delivered to their doorstep) the issues look exactly like they came from when the Boston Globe printed them. Why do you care how the trucking company schedules its trucks, or what types of trucks it owns? It's irrelevant.. as long as... All the Boston Globe and shop owners care about is that they meet whatever SLA allows them to sell the paper at a well-defined time in the morning. Sure there's a problem with caches breaking content. On the other hand, paying your hometown ISP doesn't give you guaranteed world-wide rights towards an SLA. SLAs cost service providers money to enforce. So, how do you provide settlement between your implicit expectation and the myriads of different contracts people around the world have with their subscribers? Are you sure you *REALLY* want to be billed for the cost you might incur? Caches are a response to the lack of settlement, and the recognition that as long as site owners provide reasonable assumptions, caches will do reasonably well following those assumption. If a website is designed loosy, caches will do poorly and so on. Caches are in fact a reflection of the lack of settlement, or rather a totally different settlement mechanism in the Internet. Ever heard of the phrase "there is no such thing as a free lunch"? Think again. Just for a minute. Somebody has to pay for the pipe at some point. So, if you want guaranteed delivery, I'm sure no SP would ever turn you down if you wanted to subsidize the infrastructure your guaranteed delivery is occuring on by reimbursing them for their costs (or at least contribute). The Internet is not like other media in that there's not neccessarily the "cost causer cost" principle at work. In fact, a lot of times you get what looks like a free ride. And you get exactly what you pay for. If you want something else, *PAY* for a CDN.
Sears gains brand recognition through its ads in newspapers, on TV, and on any other medium it employs.
Sure it does. Are you going to tell a broadcasting station that it can't MPEG compress your ad as it is broadcast to be transmitted more efficiently over a satellite link or other digital distribution network? No, obivously not, because it is in your best interest to allow them to reach the furthest possible audience. That's what SPs do. It's a means for them to control the explosion in bw that they have to carry with no or little additional revenue dollars coming in to pay for it.
Banner advertising impressions serve exactly this purpose.
Except that you're stirring up all sorts of false assumptions about the similiarity between these other media and the Internet.
For example, go to Yahoo and do a search on Honda automobiles. Do you think it's a coincidence that the banner ad that shows is a Honda ad? Do you think Yahoo only gets paid for that ad if someone clicks through it? What is it about this medium which you think makes it so different from any other?
See above. (may I note that Y! stock just got tanked despite beating earnings because of among other things the fact that "click thru revenues" and "banner ads" in general are having less and less of an affect on users.) So, how does Y! pay the entire world for carrying it's traffic? Somewhere in your math there's a flaw as to who gets to pay for what. And only if you close that missing link, you'll understand why there's a difference, particularly who pays for bw on the Internet.
That seems to follow "not make any sense", but YMMV.
It is NOT for YOU to decide what business model makes sense for MY business relationship with MY advertisers.
Nope. You can have any business relationship you'd like. But, by the same token, it is not for *YOU* to decide that *I* have to pay to support YOUR business decision.
Last time I looked, there's no constitutional right that guarantees that you can make money.
I wonder if you've told your customers that you do the equivalent of clipping all the ads out of the newspaper you deliver to them? I don't know that the courts will consider your arguments to be valid.
This is beside the point of caching, but.. My $.02, quite frankly, if a newspaper had all blank pages where there are ads now, I would not mind at all. The cutouts are ugly (and are implying in your assumption that they make the product cumbersome to use, which is a false assumption because lack of banner ads does not make a wbepage cumbersome to use). But, say a printer (because the contract w/ Boston Globe specified no reimbursement relative to the number of pages) decides to not print the ads because it saves him ink. It's a free market, you can find a different printer and make sure the contract specifies he must print ads. You bet your supply chain will notice the difference in weight and start billing you appropriately. Point is, THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH. Why are you *STILL* expecting one. Or, better yet, the printer uses a different printing process for reoccuring ads to be more efficient. Contract specifies he can or doesn't explicitly prohibit that. Or, better yet, the customer who buys the paper clips the ads out himself or pays somebody to do so after they purchase the paper. Are you going to sue him, too, and why should you have an right to demand what happens with the article once I purchase it? So, how would you feel about an ISP who offers their customers junkbuster service to blow away all ads upon request by their customers, saving everybody bandwidth? In fact, one might argue, once you dump the packet on a wire payed for by somebody else, you relinquished ownership of the content. How would you like that? Isn't caching or other types of content distribution networks a much better approach all of a sudden? One that allows everybody to live and prosper rather than one living off the other?
I do expect it'll be the courts that settle this.
Sure, and don't expect them to follow your logic. The logic I just described looks awfully good to the various legal departments, and you can bet you will have just about any communications provider of any kind, land, terrestrial wireless, satellite etc countersuing.
ISPs claim the right to decide what traffic to pass over their wires.
And why is that wrong since they're paying for it? ISPs are not common carriers.
At the point at which you start selectively editing that content (which is essentially what's happening when you alter the content in some fashion) you may well get yourself in trouble later.
Well, not so fast. Perhaps I gave options to my subscriber and my subscriber said he wanted to be cached, or have his ads junkbusted.
I pay my ISP to carry IP packets around.
But, you don't pay ME to carry your IP packets around. My customers pay me. I pay my upstream. Therefore, I pay my upstream as little as possible.
And you've informed them that you filter and modify the information they look at over the Internet, right? I don't recall seeing that in the terms of service for the providers I use.
Woah. Where again did it *guarantee* delivery or a specific SLA? Do you also want to have the terms under which rerouting happens in a SPs network in the customer contract? I think not. That's like stating that a trucking company can only use Mack trucks to deliver the Boston Globe. If you push it that far, your content may not get all that far because people may flat turn you down. Sure, subscribers may complain, but they will scream even more if you charge them for the additional cost they incur. Remember now, as a subscriber you pay for bandwidth plus whatever other provisions the contract may have. That bandwidth creates cost somewhere. And you can bet that if you torpedo a SPs business model by generating more cost for them by generating disproportionate bw amounts which cannot be comp'ed by the subscriber revenues, you will get cancelled, the contract change or whatever else to make it fit again. Bottom line, it will have a consequence because the SP hardly will let you put them out of business. There is no free lunch. -- Christian Kuhtz Architecture, BellSouth.net <ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Atlanta, GA "Speaking for myself only."