Web Marketing Strategy Update

Recently, I finally got around to looking at the scripts available for the Firefox plugin, Greasemonkey. I was not expecting what I found.

From the main site:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.

For example, you could:

• Make sure that all URLs displayed in the browser are clickable links
• Improve the usability of a site you frequent
• Route around common and annoying website bugs
• Use the Coral content network selectively.

Most of the scripts are fairly innocuous and are designed to help users get more out of various websites.

But MANY are designed soley to strip ads from pages, remove redirects and even change affiliate links.

Here are some examples:

Bloglines Moreover Ad Remover
Description: Get rid of ads in moreover feeds on bloglines
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Ad Blocker
Description: Block advertisements
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

This excerpt of the script shows what ads are blocked:

createOptionInput(appendTo, “Block items from known ad servers”, “blockAdHosts”, true);
createOptionInput(appendTo, “Block items with common banner sizes”, “blockBannerSizes”, true);

// Ad elements:
// – Elements commonly used for ads
// – Blocked ad sources
var AdElements =
{
adTagNames:
[
"a",
"img",
"iframe",
// "script",
"embed",
"object"
],

blockedSrcs: new RegExp(
[
// Paths
"//ads\.",
"/ad/",
"/adclick", // "/adclick/" and "/adclick.php" both seen in the wild
"/ads/",
"/advertisers/",
// "/banners/",
"/klipmart/",
"/sponsors/",

// Filenames
"ad_banner",

// Hosts
"2mdn\.net",
"clk\.about\.com",
"z\.about\.com/0/ip/",
"adbrite\.com",
"addynamix\.com",
"adknowledge\.com",
"adlegend\.com",
"adlog\.com\.com",
"adserver\.com",
"adsonar\.com",
"advertising\.com",
"atdmt\.com",
"atwola\.com",
"blogads\.com",
"casalemedia\.com",
"centrport\.net",
"creatives\.as4x\.tmcs\.net", // CitySearch
"cl\.cnn\.com/ctxtlink", // CNN contextual links
"directorym\.com",
"doubleclick\.net",
"emarketmakers\.com",
"falkag\.net",
"fastclick\.net",
"feedstermedia\.com",
"mads\.gamespot\.com",
"gms1\.net",
"googlesyndication\.com",
"hitbox\.com",
"industrybrains\.com",
"insightexpress\.com",
"intellitxt\.com",
"kanoodle\.com",
"klipmart\.com",
"kliptracker\.com",
"linkshare\.com",
"click\.linksynergy\.com",
"maxserving\.com",
"msads\.net",
"rad\.msn\.com",
"pointroll\.com",
"primaryads\.com",
"qksrv\.net",
"rightmedia\.com",
"adsremote\.scripps\.com",
"serving-sys\.com",
"spylog\.com",
"trafficmp\.com",
"tribalfusion\.com",
"vpptechnologies\.com", // Intellitxt
// "public\.wsj\.com/marketing/",
"yieldmanager\.com", // Rightmedia
"ystweb\.com",
"zedo\.com"
].join(”|”)),

blockedIds:
[
"adbrite",
"adstrip", // kuro5hin.org's blogads
"cnnTravelot", // cnn.com
"overtureIframe", // wsj.com
"spons-links" // forbes.com
],

var Banners =
{
knownSizes:
[
new Dimension(728, 90), // Leaderboard
new Dimension(468, 60), // Full banner
new Dimension(392, 72), // Full banner w/ nav bar
new Dimension(234, 60), // Half banner

new Dimension(120, 240), // Vertical banner
new Dimension(240, 400), // Vertical rectangle
new Dimension(180, 150), // Rectangle
new Dimension(300, 250), // Medium rectangle
new Dimension(336, 280), // Large rectangle

new Dimension(300, 600), // Half-page ad
new Dimension(160, 600), // Wide skyscraper
new Dimension(120, 600), // Skyscraper

new Dimension(250, 250), // Square pop-up
new Dimension(125, 125), // Square button
// new Dimension(120, 90), // Button 1
// new Dimension(120, 60), // Button 2
new Dimension(88, 31) // Micro button

So, if your site has ads that fit ANY of the above criteria, a Firefox user with this script installed won’t see any of them. On top of that, the script is of course easily modified to add addtional hosts or ad dimensions, etc.

Here’s some more Firefox extensions designed to deceive:

AmazonAffiliate
Description: Exchanges Amazon affiliate ID’s with your own (claim the Amazon links on websites.)

Dont Require Email
Description: Pre-fill a fake email address on WordPress / MT / TypePad comment forms
Written By: Adam Vandenberg

Bloglines FeedBurner Ads Remover
Description:
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Economist Links
Description: Rewrites Economist links to ask for the printer (ad-free) page
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Flyertalk Adremove
Description: Removes Sponsored Links ads in threads on Flyertalk
Written By: Guttorm Aase

FoxNews Ad Remover
Description: Removes the top banner, middle banner and middle right box ads.
Written By: Vlajbert

FoxNews Friendly Video
Description: Removes the video ads.
Written By: Vlajbert

Gizmodo Hide Ads
Description: Hides ads on Gizmodo.com Pages
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Good Will Press
Description: v0.2 – Replaces popup window JavaScript with ordinary links and provides easy access to swf files for direct downloading.
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Google Ad Remover
Description: Removes ads from Google search result pages
Written By: Max Kueng

Hide Gmail Ads
Description: (2005-04-03) Hides Gmail content-sensitive ads.
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Hide Google AdSense Ads
Description: (2005-03-30) Hides Google AdSense Ads iframes anywhere.
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

IMDb Image Deblocker
Description: removes transparent gif that blocks saving some IMDb images
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

IntelliTxt Disabler
Description: Disable Vibrant Media IntelliTxt automatic text links, like on AnandTech.com. Update: 2005-08-03
Written By: Steven Barnett

Iskon AdRemover
Description: Remove the ads from Iskon pages
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Launch Fox
Description: Open all Yahoo Launch videos in WMP, commercial free
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

music.download.com ad remover
Description: Removes ads at the top of music.download.com
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

New York Times single page format
Description: Rewrites New York Times links to ask for single page format; derived from neugierig.org version
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

New York Times Convert Popups
Description: Rewrites New York Times links to convert javascript popups to regular links; derived from neugierig.org version
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

NYPost Ad Remover
Description: Removes the story inline ad.
Written By: Vlajbert

OnlyLady News Ad Remover
Description: Removes the ads in the pages of onlylady.com
Written By: Roger

Penny Arcade strip page ad remover
Penny Arcade sticks that ad above each strip, right? And you have to scroll down a bit to see the strip unless you have a huge screen. I hate having to scroll when going through comic archives. This kills that ad.
Written By: Jay Kominek

PopCap Ad Remover
Description: Removes video ads just before game start.
Written By: Vlajbert

pornCrapFilter
Filter out everything on TGP pages, showing just the images that are linked to other images (i.e., the thumbnail images). Removes everything else on the document. Filter porn sites to only list the interesting stuff (images!)
Written By: ydant

Pure Google
Description: Cleans Google’s interface of extraneous links and text.
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Prefetch Google Ads
Description: Prefetches Google Ad Links
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Idea is to generate clicks on all the ads. This robs advertisers, and risks the webmaster being banned by Google AdSense, which is prresumably the point.

RaagaAdSkipper
Audio ads gets inserted whenever songs are played from Raaga.com. This script skips Raaga audio ads.
Written By: Saravana Kumar

Remove CNN ad column
Description: Remove the “ad column” from the right hand side of cnn.com
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Remove ads from TitanTv
Description: Remove ads and “featured channels” from Titan TV’s grid
Written By: David Twist

Remove ads from ARS News
Description: Remove the “ad columns” from the ARS News Articles
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Remove IMDB ad column
Description: Remove the “ad column” from the right hand side of imdb.com
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Removes link adverts
Description: Removes the advert pages getting in the way of uComics strips
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Salon Premium Pass
Description: Allows you to visit Salon without having to view the prem-pass ad.
Written By: Vlajbert

Salon Ad Remover
Description: Removed inline story ads from Salon.
Written By: Vlajbert

Skip Top Frame Ads
Description: Skip top frame ads and go directly to the second frame
Written By: LouCypher

Sina News Ad Remover
Description: Removes the box ads in the news page and cleans up the start page of news.sina.com.cn.
Written By: Roger

Something Awful Forums – AdStripper
Description: Gets rid of the registration ad for the Something Awful Forums
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Sohu News Ad Remover
Description: Removes the box ads in the news page and cleans up the start page of news.sohu.com
Written By: Roger

SMH RemoveAds
This script removes advertisements and other clutter from the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age web pages. They are much nicer pages to view with less content on the screen detracting from the articles.
Written By: Alexander Else

StraitsTimes Ads & Width
Description: Adjust width & remove Ads
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Stright Click (sic)
Description: Click straight through links that just redirect somewhere else (looks for another URL embedded in the link).
Written By: arantius

Stream MP3
Description: Add a link to stream MP3s
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

TimesPagingRemover
Times Group websites (timesofindia.indiatimes.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) present a story in multiple pages and it is really annoying to click several times to read a single story. TimesPagingRemover script gets the printer friendly page of the article and shows the full article in a single page.
Written By: Saravana Kumar

Unblock Right-Click at Wretch
Description: Wretch blocks three attributes of HTML elements: onDragStart, oncontextmenu and onSelectStart. This script unblocks the three events.

WashingtonPost Auto-Login
Description: If you end up at the WashingtonPost.com login/register page this script will automagically fill in and post the register form for you.

*At first I thought this filled in your own details, but a look at the code shows this is not the case:

setValue( ‘EmailAddr’, t + ‘@mailinator.com’);
setValue( ‘Password’, ‘abc.123′);
setValue( ‘PasswordConfirm’, ‘abc.123′);
setValue( ‘Zip1′, ‘12345′);
setRadio( ‘Gender’, 0);
setValue( ‘DobYear’, ‘1965′);
setOption( ‘JOB_TITLE’, ‘BOSS’);
setOption( ‘PRIM_RESP’, ‘IT’);
setOption( ‘INDUSTRY’, ‘INTERNET’);
setOption( ‘COMP_SIZE’, ‘SIZE_1′);

Written By: Vlajbert

Washington Post RSS Query String Remover
Description: removes query string from pages loaded from Washington Post RSS
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

WSJ Ad Remover
Description: Removes selected ads from WSJ.
Written By: Vlajbert

Yahoo! Mail Ad Remover
Description: Removes ads from the free version of Yahoo! Mail
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Yahoo Groups Sponsored Links Remover
Description: Removes Yahoo Sponsored Links from Yahoo Groups
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

Yahoo Ad Removal
Description: Gets rid of all ads on Yahoo (the ones that show up after using AdBlock to get rid of the graphical ads)
Written By: DesertFox

Yahoo Group Interstitial Skipper
Description: When a Yahoo Groups message inserts an interstitial, automatically move on to the next page.
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown

_blank Must Die
Replaces annoying _blank targets in hyperlinks with a _self target. It replaces target attributes containing _blank as well as values like blank, _new, new, _neu and neu.

All the scripts above are freely available for plug-and-play installation by every Firefox user. The number of scripts like this will only grow, unless people look at them in the same light as porn or warez, and put them in the same generally unacceptable bracket when it comes to providing hosting and promotion services.

What I want is a script I can put on my site that detects this sort of thing and redirects to a page saying, “ENTRY DENIED! We have detected you are blocking advertisements on our site. The creation and maintenance of this site is not free. Web hosting costs money. Our time designing, writing, editing, etc., is not free. The advertisements pay for the site. If you refuse to accept that, we refuse to accept you!”

To the users of these and similar scripts, my message is:

This is just like spamming, only the other side of the coin.

My website is MINE. It belongs to ME, not you.

Understand?

It appears on your computer by your choice — I don’t put it there, you go out and fetch it.

You wouldn’t visit it unless you found it valuable in some way.

That value costs me time and money to produce. And if that wasn’t enough, I even pay for hosting, etc., so you can download and view my site on your computer for FREE.

I don’t charge you to access my site.

Instead, the revenue from ads PAYS FOR YOU.

Now I don’t mind if you want to change the fonts or appearance of the site to something you find more appealing, but when you block the ads, you cheat me out of my income. Even worse, it’s money that wouldn’t have come out of your own pocket anyway. That kind of mean, begrudging mentality is sickening.

The fact is that without income from advertising sales, newspapers, magazines, television and much of the Internet would probably not exist at all, because if consumers had to bear the true full cost of production, they would be too expensive for mass consumption, and therefore exponentially more expensive to produce.

Where would the world’s favourite search engine be without advertising? It either wouldn’t exist, you’d have to pay to use it, or all the websites would have to pay for inclusion; which without advertising, would in turn have to charge you for access, sell you something or be goverment funded from taxes.

Advertising revenue is the oil that keeps the wheels of popular media turning.

There are a lot of emails going around at the moment promoting a new service for product sellers and affiliates called PayDotCom. Here’s a taste of the marketing blurb:

I am sure you have heard of ClickBank (R)

They are a great marketplace but limited to many restrictions to sell products or earn affiliate commission…

Well, there is a new FREE marketplace to sell any product you want. Yours or become an affiliate for any item in the marketplace.

This site is going to KILL all other marketplaces and I bet in the next 3 months EVERY SINGLE online marketer will have an account…

I must confess PayDotCom is interesting concept, and fills a gap in the market. But whether it will “KILL” other marketplaces remains to be seen.

Personally, I doubt it.

I actually set about writing a piece to explain the key differences in PayDotCom and ClickBank, but whilst going over the site for more details I came across the table below and decided it would be far easier just to post it so you can see the bulk of the information at a glance:

*There is no set-up fee to open basic PayDotCom Vendor or Affiliate Account. You are only allowed one free Vendor Account to sell products. To sell multiple products you must pay a onetime $29 lifetime activation fee. ** If there is no affiliate, then the Vendor pays the fee in full.

PayDotCom charges the following processing fees per sale:

As indicated above, the PayDotCom’s fee is split between the vendor and affiliate responsible for the sale (if no affiliate, the full fee is charged to the vendor) and automatically deducted from affiliate commissions.

PayDotCom’s fee to the Affiliate is $0.50 to $1.50 for each transaction (Based on the sale price of the product/service sold.) The Vendor’s account will automatically deduct this amount from your commissions each month.

If you’re an affiliate you probably don’t like the sound of that. But the problem for PayDotCom is trying to make the cost of what is basically an “add-on” service attractive to vendors in comparison with ClickBank.

PayDotCom wants to position itself as a better option than ClickBank by claiming it offers more features and is cheaper.

From the site:
Other companies charge $1 plus to 7.5% of the sale price. All you pay is our fee plus the cost of your PayPal or StormPay fees.

So how does the service actually stack up in terms of cost?

At first glance it seems very attractive, as can be seen from this table on the site:

But let’s take a look at what you will be paying in total once your PayPal (2.9% + $0.30) or StormPay (6.9% + $0.69) fees are included.

Using PayPal:

Using StormPay:

When using PayDotCom with PayPal, the fee on the sale of a $50 product is $4.75. The fee on a $50 product sale through ClickBank is also $4.75.

PayDotCom is only cheaper for products priced over $50.

Note: These examples are for US users only. For non-US accounts, PayPal rates are 3.4% + $0.30:

(In addition, PayPal also charges non-US users a small fee to withdraw funds. Varies with currency exchange rates but in the region of $0.50-0.60)

However, the examples above don’t take into account the situation where the fee is split with an affiliate.

When there is a referring affiliate, fees for vendors using PayPal would be as follows (I’m not going including figures for StormPay, since we have already seen that if coupled with PayDotCom it’s far more expensive than using ClickBank):

But what about the referring affiliate?

The table below shows how the affiliate’s commission is effectively reduced:

What we can see from all this is that a vendor who’s sales are mainly driven by affiliates (and this after all is PayDotCom’s target market) will find PayDotCom slightly cheaper than ClickBank. They can save on per sale costs whilst (on the surface at least) still offering the same commission as at ClickBank.

Kinda like having your cake and eating it.

If you make most of your sales yourself (i.e. not through affiliates), then PayDotCom will cost you more than ClickBank for all products under $50. However, if you are not intent on building a large number of affiliates to make your sales you’ve no need to use PayDotCom at all, and can simply use PayPal alone.

Of course, there’s no set-up cost with PayDotCom. But that is only as long as you are selling a single product, so it is unlikely to apply to most sellers for very long. If you want to sell more than one product, the set-up fee is $29. Still substantially cheaper than the $49.95 ClickBank charge for a single product account, although it’s also worth mentioning that there are several scripts available that enable the sale of multiple products through a single ClickBank account.

Another plus for ClickBank users is that affiliate payments are taken care of by ClickBank, completely hands off. Whilst PayDotCom does provide sellers with PayPal Mass Pay files to pay affiliate commissions, the vendor still has to log in to their PayPal account, upload the file and go through the Mass Pay process. It doesn’t take long, but it’s still an additional task.

Nevertheless, vendors using affiliate marketing may find PayDotCom’s extra features, plus the lower overall cost per sale and cheaper setup more attractive than ClickBank. Let’s face it, there’s currently no other service at this price point that enables you to do recurring billing or sell physical goods with a 2 tier affiliate program.

It’s a different story for affiliates though.

The generally negligible benefit of 2nd tier commission potential aside, affiliates are better off with ClickBank. At ClickBank a 50% commission means half the sale price goes into your pocket, not half the sale price less $1.50 (incorrect, see comments below). I’m afraid the idea of charging affiliates for the pleasure of using a service catering for the vendors they make money for sticks in the throat somewhat.

Look at it how you want, but basically, the vendor pays PayDotCom a commission on every sale, and the PayDotCom system legitimizes the affiliate commission advertised not being the true commission paid to the affiliate.

But then the PayDotCom site makes the position pretty clear:

Vendor Does Not Pay Affiliate The Full Commission Earned.
Vendor charges to fee to the affiliate (automatically calculated) and pays it on the affiliates behalf to PayDotCom.com at no additional cost to the Vendor.

The Vendors Net Profit Stays The Same.

This is done this way because PayDotCom has a better relationship with Vendors then we may have with come and go affiliates that do not have products with us. This simplifies billing for all parties involved.

The Vendor is responsible for the full fee but the Vendor gets to split the fee with the affiliate by withholding it from their commission. This is all automatically calculated by PayDotCom for all parties involved.

Nevertheless, assuming it proves to be well run and reliable (still some website “issues” evident when I was last there), PayDotCom is likely to become popular over time. It’s a vendor driven site being heavily promoted, and inevitably the mass of affiliates will follow the products they want to promote, even if they are losing out in the process. I may even end up trying it myself if that happens and see if the pain is worth the gain. Although then again, a service that disparagingly calls one of the parties it depends on for its existance “come and go affiliates” gives me the urge to suggest affiliates simply, “go”…

Of course, if PayDotCom does start to take a significant slice of business away from ClickBank, it could well lead to the long overdue upgrading of the ClickBank offering so that it provides the services users have been requesting for years, and possibly with a revised rate structure. There’s nothing like a bit of competition to stimulate a company into listening to it’s customers and providing more benefits to the end-user.