Comments on: Eolas Patent Says Bye-bye to Flash Advertising

By: John Giotta

John Giotta — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:40:36 +0000

We’re already implementing changes to handle Flash Ads. It’s a matter of a few weeks before it’s company wide.

And like Mr Dowell said, most ad services already use JavaScript to embed ads.

By: Jensa

Jensa — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 07:28:13 +0000

Having JavaScript enabled is pretty common. Only 3% turn it off based on an average of 247 million internet.com readers (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/February/javas.php). Only time of year this is different is for some reason during the summer holidays? At that time, the percentage increases some.

Anyway – most sites use JS detection for ads so it’s not really such a big issue. The issue is rather all the other websites and “Can I bill them for fixing a site I made 2 years ago or will I have to fix it for free?”. If you were the one to push Flash over HTML it can certainly be a tough sell…

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:37:05 +0000

Certainly, they will still be displayed. In some cases, that might be okay. A lot of major companies might accept that to continue to simply have a presence in the public’s mind. Honestly, I looked at it purely from a revenue and clicks perspective.

My post’s title is probably a little too sensational too, but it was mainly to get people here to discuss. 😉

By: David R

David R — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:27:05 +0000

Sorry, I should have clarified: It will do nothing to stop flash ads from being displayed on your screen.

You have a point that it may discourage people from clicking on them, leading to lower revenue from flash ads, leading to less advertisers wanting to use them. So in that way you could say it stops flash ads.

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:31:08 +0000

I’m aware that many advertisers already use some amount of JavaScript. I have Adsense on my site, afterall. One thing though. Ads don’t necessarily have to be generated dynamically on the client-side. I’d be surprised if I heard that almost no major sites generated ads on the server. Though, it’s possible that I’ve improperly concluded that a lot of sites are wary of Javascript. Obviously, with Web 2.0, things are changing a lot.

I also don’t believe it will do “NOTHING”. An extra click is UNACCEPTABLE. If I click on an ad (which is rare, but it happens), and it doesn’t work, I’m not going to click again. If they’re going to hassle me, they’re not getting my business.

By: David R

David R — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:05:48 +0000

The changes to IE will do NOTHING to stop flash ads. All it does, is require the user to click once on the flash movie before he can INTERACT with it…the flash movie is free to animate, beep, and be obnoxious without you clicking on it.
It just means if you want to click a ‘Mute’ button, there’s an extra click now.
They can avoid the extra click with some simple javascript, and since most advertising (including google adsense) uses JS already, most likely they will incorporate the fix.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:03:20 +0000

For what it’s worth, most advertisers already dynamically write the tags into the HTML, due to the three-way nature of sites, the service, and the individual advertisers. (ie, very little advertising markup is embedded within someone else’s webpage anyway.)

Anyway, these folks won’t see much effect, because of the way they already do things… it’s individual, “all-my-own-content” sites which have had their tags inside the markup.