Ad networks serving clicks on Porn sites
I have recently noticed that two other mobile ad networks in India were serving massive amounts of AD inventory on Porn sites masking them as porn ads (which by the way is illegal in India, in case someone forgot to mention them). This is a fraud that they do not want the advertisers to know and this also happens to generate them a lot of one time, 100% bounce rate user clicks.
Pressure from advertisers = 100% bounce rate of the Click Throughs
This issue is part driven by the advertisers need for more click inventory but hey, Sure - results do matter but are they really pertinent?. How do you check whether they are coming from a right TG?. Whether the user landing on your landing page will really generate results for you?.
Advertisers must understand it is easy to generate clicks, especially from tons of porn, irrelevant and fake clicks that most small publishers indulge in. Porn sites based clicks are irrelevant for most advertisers because they are fake clicks where the intent of the user is something else when he sees the ad and the end result is something else (therefore the user might come on your landing page but he will never ever come back again because your brand / advertiser) has somehow cheated the user.
I am sure that this click fraud will show dismal results on the long term for those advertisers and I pity them because they’re being cheated. Anyways, lets see how this works.
1. Networks advertise on Sites which are not really targeted by the advertiser under FAKE but enticing ads.
2. Networks generate a dummy page which gives no other options but a few of their own ADS
3. User clicks on to the landing page (now where the hell is that naked pic???)
With all the fuss and furor over Behavioural Targeting (BT) it is worthwhile to see what the brouhaha is all about in general, and what it means to the mobile community.
In a nutshell, BT allows advertisers to target relevant ads to you as a person as opposed to the page you are currently viewing. In order to do this, the ad engine needs to understand you in a broader context – as an example if you are viewing a page on Credit Cards – are you looking to get a new credit card or are you already a customer of ICICI Cards and are looking for their customer service number because you don’t have it handy. Knowing the difference can save the advertisers precious ad budgets and can save you a lot of irritation. The difference is a subtle one, and in order for the advertiser to know the difference they will need more information than the page you are viewing. They would need a history of your interactions – that is, whether you reached the aforementioned page through a search string “top 5 credit cards” or “ICICI Cards” that would tell the advertiser which camp you belonged to. Piece of cake!… Au Contraire! This would require what a benign but pranky “Peeping Tom” does… or “wiretapping” what the powerful but hideous US President Nixon did and impeached. A subtle but a serious difference.
The essence of contextual targeting (CT) vs Behavioural Targeting (BT) comes down to what is depicted in the following table
Table 1 – Contextual Targeting vs Behavioural Targeting.
In order to facilitate BT Ad engines collect a range of pertinent information such as:
Pages Viewed
Ads clicked
Search queries
Search clicks
Blogs visited
As depicted in the following figure
Figure 1 – Elements of Behavioural Targeting:
When used in a morally conscientious manner BT can add significant value to users and deliver enormous value to advertisers. Likewise, it can save users significant amount of irritation to users by providing them a quality experience and reducing irritating and irrelevant ads. But who is to decide how much of the user behavior the system should know and how much is too much?. [Some of you might remember the CRM – Customer Relationship Management system in a large hotel chain in the US in the mid 90s that worked a bit better than planned - bell captains in any one of its 185 locations knew about the “double scotch” and other intimate preferences of its marquis clients. Owing to customer complaints around “respect my privacy, you shall not know too much about me” the Hotel Chain had to decommission its CRM application]. This is the counter argument to “Information is Power” – Too much information is dangerous. Hence, despite the power and potential of BT, advertisers are hesitant to leverage BT. This is depicted in the following figure:
Figure 2 - Marketers Rank Content Based Targeting More than BT
When advertisers consider BT, it is imperative that they give users more control over their personal information. “It is mine. You cannot have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me” says Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web.
Luckily for advertisers, viewers are willing to receive targeted advertisements if they can partake in the monetary upside from the advertisements. This is depicted in the following figure.
Figure 3- % of customers who would willingly share personal information in exchange for
This brings us to the whole subject of permission based marketing (www.permission.com) as pioneered by Seth Godin. ZestAdz is built on the philosophy of permission based marketing, where by users/subscribers opt-in to receive tangible and measurable value for the privilege they afford to marketers to make offers to them. Mobile marketing tends to focus on short attention spans, instant purchase decisions and tends to be targeted at younger audience. Hence as depicted in Table 1, contextual targeting is a better mechanism for mobile advertisements. Not to mention the fact that people view their mobile device to be a lot more personal than their web terminal and any intrusion (real or perceived) is viewed as an intrusion to their privacy.
Hence mobile advertisers will be better off staying with contextual advertising… at least for now.
We’re organizing The Chennai Edition of Mobile Monday, July, 2008
The upcoming edition of momo Chennai will focus on iPhone - web / SDK based development. Having said that, the target audience will be Mobile Software Developers, Enterpreneurs, etc who is technically inclined and who is interested in capilizing on the iPhone Launch in India.
The momo sessions will be primarily developer oriented sessions and therefore targeted at people who know technology. However there will be one general session as well aimed to give an overview of the capabilities of the iPhone and possibilities of apps / services on the iPhone.
For more information write to me - asif [at] mobile-worx . com or call +91 98400 89876
Date: 27 July 2008 (which happens to be a Sunday) at 10.00 AM
Location
Mobile-worx No. 71/1,3rd Floor, McNichols Road, Chetpet, Chennai - 600 031. Call +91-44-4285 7183 for Directions
Register to Attend the event
The max registrations can be 60. Register on the Attendees page
Speakers
CSS Labs from Chennai who have been working on iPhone SDK Development / Hacks will be giving a presentation on iPhone SDK Development including demos.
Promote
Do Blog about the event and add your link to the BlogRoll
Based on some of our successful SMS Campaigns, we have compiled a summary of SMS Campaigns, strategies that has made them successful along with a brief overview of SMS Advertising with ZestADZ. This has been shared as a slideshare presentation below.
One key thing that we realized is that SMS could be a very powerful discovery medium for mobile new applications and services and mobile coupons could be a real rage if a great offer was sent to the user.
Preview the presentation and write to us at advertiser [at] zestadz.com for more information on SMS campaigns or sign up on ZestADZ.com to create your own SMS Campaign.
Learn how to integrate ADS into your WAP site with this simplified demo.
This demo will go live on ZestADZ.com soon, in the meanwhile you can check it out from this link
(Opens a new window & requires speakers or ear phones for audio).
We’ve been busy expanding the team and searching for experienced technologists, sales, business development and a whole bunch of other positions, more details of which are available at http://www.mobile-worx.com. Please advise your friends and refer to us - experienced or freshers for the following and other positions. Feel free to also write to our HR manager (satish at mobile-worx.com) for more information.
To accelerate the hiring process, we participated in the first Chennai Startup Lunch program held at Amethyst in Royapettah where we held discussions with Freshers and Experienced candidates over a casual lunch. It was a great event, just hope that there are more people attending the event in the future. Here’s a photo of the event attached
Yesterday MobileMonday announced the 25 nominees for its Barcelona Peer Award. The selection of the winning mobile startup will take place during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in ten days on February 11, 2008. The nominees for the award represent early stage and emerging start-up companies from 25 different world cities. We’re reprinting the list here because some really cool, mostly unknown startups have been nominated and given how big we think the mobile web will be this year, any one of these companies could make a huge splash in 2008.
* Amsterdam - Movels
* Bangalore - Mobisy
* Barcelona - skuair
* Berlin - ViiF
* Boston - SnapMyLife
* russels - Mobixx
* Chennai - Mobile-worx
* Dusseldorf - Cellity
* Helsinki - Fromdistance
* Istanbul - Mobinex
* London - The 3G Dating Agency / Taptu
* Madrid - Kimia
* Milan - Waymedia
* Mumbai - Ziva Technologies
* Munich - hiClip
* New York - BuzzD
* Oslo - Adactus
* Paris - WebWag
* Rome - Nanology
* Shanghai - DuoGuo
* Silicon Valley - Funambol
* Singapore - mBit.tv
* St. Petersburg - 4Mobi.TV
* Stockholm - Momail
* Taipei - Toro
This blog is a re-print from an older personal blog - a good entry so I thought I’d share it again. The scenario stands a little changed today.
–
India’s carriers are amongst the fastest growing in the world. So is the Value Added Services (VAS) market here. But it is sad to see that most of the carriers operate strict walled gardens and are extremely slow in launching newer services with the help of entrepreneurs independently. The best that they generally do is that they take up the service within their own brand within their “walled” gardens. Airtel operates a walled service called Airtel “Live” so does reliance with their service “RWorld”.
So if you are an entrepreneur in the wireless VAS space and have some exciting ideas they best that they’d do (with a lot of restrictions) is open up the short codes. Otherwise any other service that involves other than short codes really has to be carrier branded.
The west has traditionally complained that India is best at providing services but will never have the capability of producing their own world class products or platforms which the rest of the world could leverage on. We have the capability to bring out some world class wireless solutions, but in wireless industry the current scenario in India is pretty much one sided - where the carriers want everything for themselves - 80% revenues, carrier branded, closed & walled approach to launching the service, 1 year of exclusivity and so on.
It is shameful to see such huge brands act so selfishly and grab everything they can. This situation is no way conductive to groom and bring out world-class mobile solutions from India I can tell you that they will be more willing to allow TV channels to operate a short code service - “Send a prayer for this person. Save him” and charge the poor consumer on the other end unknowingly at least Rs 10 for that “prayer” he sent in, than allow entrepreneurs to bring in exciting new services that actually benefit the consumer. India is booming but the wireless industry isn’t quite, with a handful of companies operating fighting it out in the wireless space.
We’re hardly a comparison even with a country like Malaysia where over 200 content provider and VAS companies operate on a small subscriber base of less than 20 million. The operators have test labs, device loaner programs, easy signup programs and are extremely approachable. The Indian carriers could learn a lesson or two from them and help the local industry to groom more entrepreneurs and help them with their business ideas rather hog all the revenues for themselves.
We will be at both events being held tomorrow and the day after, looking for prospective publishing partners for ZestADZ. If you have a great mobile site, SMS service or mobile application, reasonably good traffic and would like to monetize it, we’re looking forward to meeting you!
HeadStart - 20th Jan, Contact Person - Vikas ( vikas at mobile-worx.com)
Proto.in - 19th / 20th Jan, Contact Person - Asif (asif at mobile-worx.com)
We are growing and as we began to expand our teams we realized that we need a new office and finally we were able to move to our new office in the heart of Chennai (Chetpet)…. Right across Ega Theatre (by the way we all went to watch “Tara Zameen Par”). We went through all the stress of finding a new office space…..I guess now I have realized that how fast Chennai is growing when negotiating for space, looking for the right place/contractor, renovation to actual moving of furniture. Anyways now we have a new office…..really cool and we still need to fill cubicles and are looking for sales managers from Advertising industry, creative folks, web designer and programmers…… (Referrals are welcome)
Here are some of the pic’s of our office…..and have a very Happy New Year!
