Re: Those F*@$!*&% pop up ads.

Mike,
have you considered contacting some of the developers who have worked on
these sites with the popups?   I'm sure that they would be happy to help you
with the numbers.  It just never makes sense to use technology for the sake
of using the technology.  There should always be good business reasons to
back up those types of projects.  Also, be prepared for what these
developers tell you.  There may actually be an increase in click throughs
from these popups (though I seriously doubt it).  Just keep in mind that so
few people actually click banner ads that it's not really that hard to
improve on those numbers.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago concerning
Yahoo! and how they've had to change their tone when dealing with
advertisers because banner ads just don't work.  One example that they had
concerned Pets.com. Back in 1999 and early 2000, Yahoo! was a dictator when
it came to selling advertising space. They would not give any projections as
to how many people may click on your banner ad, and they didn't want to talk
to you unless you were making a $100,000 ad purchase.  Well, Pets.com always
advertised on Yahoo! and when the market sky-dived in April-May of 2000,
their board of directors for the first time asked to see numbers showing the
benefits of their advertising on Yahoo!  This turned out to be a HUGE
learning experience for them. It turned out that for every banner click from
Yahoo! that turned into a $20 sale cost them $120 dollars(my numbers may be
a little off but they're close). So basically, it cost them $120 to get a
$20 purchase.

It was amazing to them, and also to us once we read that article.  We had
run several costly banner ad campaigns on Yahoo! in our early days in order
to drive our membership numbers.  The one positive thing in the article was
the CEO of eBay being quoted as saying our product(eTour.com) was a
"No-brainer", and that it just made sense to advertise with us. The product
we had was eTour.com. Here is how it worked:  An internet user would come to
our home page, and fill out a form providing us with demographic
information, we would then present them with a list of around 120 different
interest categories and they would place a check next to each one that they
were interested in. Then, they would set eTour.com as their home page. Now,
everytime they get on the Web, we would send them a hand picked web site
that fell within their selected interests.  The way we made money was by
selling priority web site views.  One of our first customers was a
subsidiary of Intel.  They wanted the next 50,000 eTour members who had
selected "Computers & Hardware" as an interest, and had an income of at
least $70,000 to see their site first the next time they logged on to the
internet. They paid us .35 cents for each one and we fullfilled that
contract in around 4-5 hours.  Another of our first clients was a hiking and
camping site.  They had also ordered around 50k views, 45 minutes into the
campaign(what we called our payed site views), they called us and asked us
to turn the campaign off because we had sent them way more concurrent
viewers than their web server farm could handle and basically brought their
whole site to its' knees.  After an emergency patch to our site delivery
application, we then had the ability to throttle the number of views that we
gave them and spread it out over a few days. In the times that we were
running their campaign, their buy rate went from .07% to an incredible 20%
buy rate. Basically, 20% of the eTour members who were sent their site made
a purchase. It was astounding to us.

What is even more astounding is the fact that _no one_ tried to compete with
us.  To this day there is only one site on the internet with this type of
delivery system.  I am no longer with the company since we were bought out
by askjeeves, but if I had the investment I would be working to create their
competition right now. I was the original designer and developer of the site
delivery application and took it from 0 to over 5 million members.  Now I am
 unemployed, and getting infrequent freelance opportunities.  Go figure.
Times sure have changed :)   I would attempt it by myself, but it is a huge
task, and doing it solo would take over 6 months to get off of the ground
and then another 4-6 months before any money started coming in. I've got
bills to pay... <.sniff>


Andre

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Taylor" <lonewolf(at)one.net>
To: <hwg-languages(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 10:11 AM
Subject: Those F*@$!*&% pop up ads.


> My boss just forwarded a message from our company CEO basically stating
> that "You know, more and more sites are using those pop up ads that appear
> underneath the homepage...maybe it's time we started using these, too"
>
> I can't believe companies work under that mind set, without hearing the
> evidence or using common sense.  I know sites like MSNBC.com and others
> are now pummeling us with those X10 banners that appear in the background,
> but how many of us actually click the damn things and order something?
>
> I'm looking for ammunition --concrete proof-- to back up what should be
> obvious.  If anyone knows of a site with statistics on just how many
> people are likely to click on these things, can you pass it
> along?  Marketing departments are amazing in that they go headfirst into
> some idea like this, without looking at the stats, but if you are against
> the idea, they ask you to back up your side with statistics.
>
> Mike Taylor
>
>
>
>

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