Just saw a post at Techdirt, “Advertisers Thrilled About New Ways To Irritate Readers” Though the rise of pop-up blockers is a clear indication that users don’t like intrusive advertising, publishers haven’t stopped looking for ways to annoy their readers. The trade magazines tend to be chief offenders as they often employ the dreaded dog-ear pullback and other intrusive flash-based ads that take over the screen. Then of course there are the embedded text ads delivered by Intellitxt and others. When you scroll your mouse over certain words, a small ad pops up on the screen....

I’ve seen a lot of tricks of the trade publishers will use to make their web site look bigger to the market than it actually is and how many people visit their site. Sometimes the claims may truly be out of ignorance of how the web really works, but more often than not, it’s a very crafty publisher trying to impress a marketer on how big they are and what a market leader they are. Here are some of my favorites: 1. Reporting how many hits they get I can’t believe that some sites still try to tell advertisers how many hits their web site gets a month, but it happens every day. A...

Vertical search is a very big topic right now for B2B publishers. It’s been covered in the business media press, covered in special sessions at media events like the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit, the ABM Spring Meeting in Scottsdale, (sorry y’all, really wish I would have been able to come to that, but had a prior family committment), and several others. ABM is even hosting a full day meeting on the topic May 15th in New York. Is it really the next big revenue opportunity for publishers? I personally don’t believe it. Hear me out… It’s very...

BtoB’s 2006 Interactive Marketing Guide just came to my office today. (Yes, Virginia, people do still read print magazines.) Of course the Online Publishers section caught my eye and I immediately checked the chart of online publishers on page 33 to see how Penton was represented. Only two Penton titles made the chart, Windows IT Pro and IndustryWeek, but the traffic shown for these two sites wasn’t even in the ballpark. BtoB reported Windows IT Pro as having 166,000 unique visitors in March 2006, but Windows actually had nearly 2.8 million unique visitors in March according to...

You may have noticed that my last few posts have gone missing. I installed a fresh copy of vBulletin (forum software) on my site last night and it completely wiped out my site’s database — including my blog. While installing vBulletin, the program said it detected an old installation of the VB database and gave me the option to delete the old data and start over with a new copy. I wanted to start fresh, so I clicked the option to delete the old data. A clever alert came up: WARNING WILL ROBINSON … WARNING! You’d think I would have taken a hint here. But...

Back in February I had the pleasure to attend the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit in New York. This was a very interesting summit attended by a true who’s who of executives in the business media world. I was honored to be on a panel with Colin Crawford, SVP of Online for IDG and Mitch Rouda, President of eMedia for Hanley Wood talking about vertical search. These guys really know what they’re doing and I had a blast being on the panel with these two and answering the questions thrown at us by Jeff Dearth, the panel’s moderator. (Jeff, you also did a great job...