Ads are closing in! Sunday, October 19, 2008

Watch out... It might be standing right next to you.

I almost never pay for anything I take from the Internet. Of course all of these are free stuff, for which these web sites get their visitors. I live in India and this is the way it works for most of Indians. Advertising campaigns are effective on Google, the most important reason is that they keep throwing the same ad across all the sites you use. The same ad shows up on all sites that I visit, that has partnered with Google on adsense. This is one of the hundreds of tricks that Google uses for advertising on web sites. The ad that is right on top of my gmail's inbox an one line text ad grabs my attention, because of its placement.

When Google launched Chrome, I saw it running on my friend's computer, I dint like it. I chose not to download it on to my computer. But guess what Google did to persuade me to get chrome, it placed that ad in the right place, as a text ad above gmail inbox, after it showed up for a series of sites where this ad was chasing me, all of those places are where I avoided ads. Look! this ad followed me till my gmail inbox and finaly I clicked on to see what the heck this chrome is all about. There comes the funneling strategy, showed up a good squeeze ad page for Chrome and finally I downloaded it.

I wonder what would happen to the music industry if content distribution is not controlled, well is there a way to control distribution? I'm not thinking about the possibilities like digitally preventing copy theft or something like that. But the large user base held by peer to peer software users could be controlled to some extent but cannot be eliminated. In India, the ISP s never do anything to prevent the spread of illegal music, up in the Internet cloud, probably because they have enough bandwidth to feed their hungry downloaders. But this situation will change when more people get connected to the Internet. There will be a time when an ISP X who slows down P2P downloads and another will make it by not doing it and gain market share. I'll probably choose the second option :-)

0 comments:

Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape