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20 Feb 1999 - 24 Jul 2008
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About this capture
COLLECTED BY
Organization: Alexa Crawls
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Collection: Alexa Crawls DG
Crawl data donated by Alexa Internet. This data is currently not publicly accessible
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20010812100951/http://www.fmn.net:80/FAQ/attitude.html
Once upon a time, the Internet was a mishmash of military and university computers, primarily in the United States. Commercial electronic advertising didn't exist, simply because these public entities prohibited it. In the 1990's however, the Internet has diverged from its origins. The educational and military slant on which the Internet was born has expanded to a wide international network, supported by governments, businesses, schools, and individuals alike. Commercial entities are now surrounded by a tremendous resource for reaching potential customers worldwide.
Despite the easy availability of this new medium for spreading information about your products, each of us must remember that the Internet is significantly different from traditional media like television, printed matter, and radio. The latter are financially supported almost entirely by the commercial entities which sponsor them through advertising. On the Internet, quite the opposite is true. The commercial entities pay practically nothing; the end users bear the cost. As a result, conventional wisdom dictates that companies do not have as much freedom to advertise as in other media.
The Usenet Marketplace has been a source for many philosophical discussions about advertising and the Internet. But, it is not the only source of opinions. Many other users have also published their arguments, and we invite you to consider their opinions as well. Your best bet to preserve your reputation is to listen to as many of them as possible. But hey, if you want to play Canter & Siegel, spam the newsgroups with useless information, and get kicked off the 'Net for life, be my guest!
All of these opinions have been issued by people whom I consider to be authorities on the issue. Joel Furr is more controversial than most, and possibly less authoritative, but he is one of the most vocal (and respected?) personalities on the Internet. Sally Hambridge's RFC is an official part of the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. This standards organization defines the software and hardware protocols of the Internet and its many services. Brad Templeton is the CEO of UUNet Technologies, one of the oldest pieces of the Internet backbone, and key connection between the U.S. and Europe. He is responsible for maintenance of the Usenet "Big 7" newsgroup hierarchies, including misc.* (but not biz.*).
I won't deny my bias. Commercial advertising has a very definite place on the Internet, but it should always be kept in its place. I'm paying for your advertising, so I had better want to get your ad; if you push your ad on me without a very good reason, then I won't be doing business with you again.
But, I also recognize that many companies have products which would be of great value to me. I may never know about these products unless the producer works to advertise them. So, I welcome advertising which is of great interest to me, and I'll tolerate advertising which is of great interest to others. I only ask that my "space" be protected against intrusion if I so desire (and that does NOT mean I have to tell you I don't want your junk mail).
The key, then, to successful Internet advertising is knowing where to strike the balance. I would prefer that you choose to preserve your reputation. But, you may choose to make me and thousands of other recipients of your ads mad, in exchange for a little bit more exposure. That is your choice. It is our choice to let your service provider know that we think you've overstepped your bounds. Then, it's up to your service provider(s) to determine the value of their reputation on the Internet. Your advertising etiquette reflects equally on them.
The factors in Internet advertising
In traditional advertising, most approaches involve subtle methods to convince Joe Q. Public, IQ of 100, that the product is a necessity of life. The advertiser may try to invoke emotions, patriotism, a sense of security, or lofty claims of performance for the purchaser. He may intentionally leave out facts which could scare Joe away from his product. Joe may be a college grad, a high school grad, or have less schooling. Sometimes Joe will criticize his methods, and sometimes a different Joe will ask the government to make him tell the whole truth. If the advertiser has executed his job properly, most people won't care, and some Joes will buy his product.
On the Internet, the advertiser won't find Joe Q. Public. Instead, his advertisement will cross the desk of Professor Stanford Mitt, IQ of 120 and a graduate of the University of Lyon, France. Assuming she can read English (which she most likely can on the Internet), she disects the ad. She remarks to her colleagues on the social consequences of all the insultingly subversive methods the advertiser used. She may send the advertiser a flame mumbling about how she disapproves of him treating her as a manipulable amoeba. Then, she asks why his ad for a Delaware state flag was sent to a list of people in 38 countries.
Are you beginning to understand how the Internet is different from TV, mass-mail, newspapers, radio, and telemarketing? The average Internet user in the U.S. is a professor, a college student, or a member of a well-educated household led by a 4-year-degree professional. The same is true for Canada, Germany, France, and a few other countries. What's more, there is very little direct 'government'. The users are empowered to enforce whatever social regulations they may choose to abide by, much to the chagrin of Bob Dole ;-).
Why, then, does bad advertising get widespread negative PR
The reasons are few, but ideologically important enough that many of the more experienced netizens have taken it upon themselves to spread ideas of "fairness" in allowing commercial usage of the Internet. The arguments have been hashed and rehashed over so many years that every time they come up for discussion, very little is new. Every day, you can find several of these discussions being refought in at least one newsgroup, but they generally boil down to the following topics:
You want to advertise your business. You are paying an Internet Service Provider (ISP), or perhaps AOL or Compuserve, to give you access to the Internet. If you have organized your access in a businesslike manner, you may be spending $70 per month. If you are AT&T;'s web site, you may be spending $10,000 per month for your access. So then, you are paying for the privilege of advertising, right?
Well... You are one user at your ISP. You are paying a share of the distributed subscriber costs for your ISP's connection to the Internet. But, so is everyone else with your ISP. So, effectively, you are helping to subsidize, with a very small relative contribution, the access of everyone else at your ISP. So far, so good.
But, you are not paying one cent to the ISP next door, so they have to charge their customers for the full expenses of the connection. If you send out an ad, the ISP next door has to have storage space for it because it is currently impossible to selectively exclude ads. That hard drive costs money; the cost is passed on to their subscribers. The ISP could have bought a smaller hard drive (for less money) if your ad weren't there. Those subscribers who are not interested in your product are now unhappy because money came from their pockets to pay for your ad.
The cost of a single ad sent to a single ISP is negligible. The cost of that same ad posted to a worldwide newsgroup is significant. Now, 2,000 ISPs have had to buy memory for your ad, not to mention the bandwidth demands on transmission lines! You haven't paid practically anything towards the true cost of your ad; instead, the cost has been spread among 20 million users worldwide. If one person did this, the cost would remain negligible, and people probably wouldn't care. But multiply this situation by the hundreds of thousands of businesses whose salespeople have access to the Internet, and we have a very expensive memory problem.
If you physically pay for a part of Internet connectivity, you may stand on better ground with those people who gratefully transmit across your connection. But be prepared. The smallest practical Internet link is a T-1 operating at 1 megabaud. This connection will cost you roughly $4000 per month to maintain, assuming you have made an arrangement with two ISPs to put your computers in their offices. Links on the backbone of the Internet are an order of magnitude faster, and an order of magnitude more expensive to maintain. Even with your T-1, you are still providing assistance to only a fraction of a percent of the entire Internet.
When the advertisers absorb the brunt of this cost the way they do with TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the post office, the users will be much less likely to complain. Taxes pay for an ever-decreasing small portion, but not enough for users to accept this as a reason to permit rampant advertising.
Oh, and before you start using the similar situations of telemarketing and fax advertising as an example in your favor, don't forget that recent U.S. legislation outlawed fax advertising and severely restricted telemarketing activities because of disgruntled phone system users.
The World-Wide-Web is different. On the Web, you pay for the storage, we choose to go visit your site. How you publicize your web pages is subject to these arguments; most major companies have chosen to preserve their reputations and use TV, radio, and other media. They have relied, quite successfully, on independent individuals to spread it on the Internet by word-of-mouth. Advertising your web page over other Internet media can be done effectively using the same guidelines as all Internet advertising. Some special additions include sponsoring other sites; Yahoo, Netscape, Internet Audit Bureau, and many other popular sites accept small web ads, for a fee, which you can use to point people to your site.
You can advertise almost anything on the web, using whatever format and tactics you prefer. You will still be most successful if you follow many of the suggestions later on, but you won't face losing your access if you don't. The World-Wide-Web is by far the best place for a commercial entity to advertise.
All of this does not mean commercial advertising is prohibited in the newsgroups or elsewhere. What it does mean is that advertising has to be of far-reaching interest to the people who read that particular service. In the case of the biz.marketplace.* newsgroups, the offering has to be out-of-the-ordinary; in some important way different than what can be found through traditional advertising means. But, much more on that will come later.
Some advertising is acceptable, even encouraged by almost everyone on the Internet. The problem is that too many advertisers have abused that privilege. Advertisers are welcome to let people know of their products when those people have asked for the information. Advertising is also welcome in many open forums when it is on-topic for that forum and when the users have agreed to allow it, whether it be a newsgroup or a mailing list.
It is a different story when a belligerent advertiser believes it is his constitutional right to market his snake oil in a vegetarians' forum. His ad would probably be welcomed in the snake-oil-user's newsgroup, but he chooses to post it to 5, or 50, or all 15,000 worldwide and local newsgroups.
If that weren't bad enough, he decides he wants to reach those people who don't read news often. He puts together a mailing list by culling old news articles, and he e-mails his ad to 1,000 people.
On a side note, this person's access is in jeopardy. His ISP would be inundated with complaints, his mailbox would be overflowing with flames and mailbombs, and he may also find that he will be billed for numerous unwanted magazines. Oh, and don't forget those switched long distance carriers, 3 a.m. phone calls from irate netizens, and so on.
Back to the topic, if you are an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is anger your audience by saying something which is in direct conflict with their opinions. Snake oil in a vegetarian newsgroup is a really bad idea for this reason.
Also, readers of the newsgroups don't like to see the same ad in several of the groups they read, nor do they appreciate ads about totally unrelated topics in a topical newsgroup. Snake oil in a computer operating systems forum evokes, unexplicably, almost the same reaction as snake oil in a vegetarian forum.
In addition, some newsgroups (like misc.entrepreneur.moderated) prohibit advertising. In this particular newsgroup, it's because too many people abused the system. The no-ads rule helps to maintain orderly conduct. In other groups, it may be because the readers aren't looking for commercial offerings, or even individuals' ads. As one example, news.announce.newusers won't accept any advertising. That group is intended to be informational only. The same will be true of most soc.* groups, and many, many others. And remember, a lot of new users make the mistake of posting an ad to places where it doesn't belong. You see their ad, and post erroneously as well. It's far better to look up the FAQ for that newsgroup and see if advertising is permitted. If the FAQ says "no", then don't do it. If the FAQ says "yes", then make sure your offering is appropriate.
If the FAQ doesn't say or doesn't exist, ask someone knowledgeable. Send e-mail to someone who looks like they are contributing frequently, i.e., answering others' questions on a regular basis. A good person to ask is the FAQ maintainer, whose address is almost always in the FAQ. Then, maybe he'll add the information to the FAQ and help others out as well...
Overzealous advertising wastes resources (Who Pays?), and can make it difficult to find the real articles among fluff in topical newsgroups.
Mass unsolicited e-mail should definitely be avoided. Public opinion of telemarketing is not good, as demonstrated by recent U.S. legislation. Mass e-mail is widely perceived to be in even poorer taste, and is probably prohibited by your access provider.
In addition to Who Pays? and the time issue we deal with next, mass unsolicited e-mail is perceived to infringe upon the sanctity and functionality of e-mail being focused on a particular use. Multiple e-mail accounts can be an inexpensive way to separate multiple roles. Some of us have accounts at work, which are used only for work. Then we have an account at home which is used for personal conversations. People don't want to sort through ten ads for snake oil in their personal mailbox to find the one message from their kid in college.
I have one account, the account from which this article is posted to the newsgroups, which I only read about once every couple of weeks. In this account I receive about 20 unwanted junk mail messages a week from idiots who cull newsgroups for e-mail addresses. I rarely have the time to waste on sorting through such garbage; when I do, their sysadmin hears about it...
The mass junk mailer responds that I could just ignore the junk mail. After all, it isn't doing any harm...
Or is it?
(More on that later...)
It may be possible to conduct an ethical mass e-mailing campaign, if you enlist an experienced, ethical consultant. You would have to screen the e-mail addresses to verify the candidates are interested in your product. Be careful; just becase someone subscribes to the rec.arts.disney newsgroup does not mean he wants Disney merchandise; he may be there to antagonize Disney enthusiasts. No, you'll have to find some other means.
I receive a lot of articles about entrepreneurial opportunities and other uninteresting topics which begin like this:
I apologize for sending this, and I won't do it again, but I saw your post in the newsgroups and thought you might be interested in ...
First mistake, in this statement you are telling me that you know what you are doing is wrong. You haven't taken the time to research your audience. Second mistake is that I have never posted an article in the newsgroups expressing an interest in your product. On the contrary, the FAQ explicitly prohibits your ads in the group(s) I frequent.
Does that sound like an interested audience? I think not. It may be reasonable if you read the articles I post, and see where my interests lie. If I often post about my dreams for a Sun Workstation in comp.sys.sun, then I might be a target for an e-mail. Then again, many of us don't want junk mail at all.
I would be much more favorable to your e-mail ad if you verified my interest by reading my posts, then developed a web site which feeds that interest. Not a blatant ad site, but a site with technical specs, lots of pictures, anecdotes, and other fun stuff, augmented by your ad banner at the top. Then, follow up with a short e-mail, to-the-point, no hype, which says "Hey, you like widgets, check out www.widgets.com!". I can't guarantee you won't lose your access, but I would be much less likely to complain.
But basically, e-mail is an untouchable. I do not recommend you use it for first-contact advertising.
And don't buy an e-mail list from anyone else. There may be some reputable list-marketers out there, but there are far too many lists which were formed by culling newsgroups or websites. You may end up with a time-bomb, and your reputation and access are too important to your business. And remember, the larger the list, the more likely you'll find people like me who will let your service provider know that we do not approve. How interested can the readers of a 600,000 circulation e-mail list be in your product? Not very.
You're looking through a newsgroup, or your mailbox, and see an ad for a Gooberschniffle. You don't need or want a Gooberschniffle, so you just delete or skip over the message. Such is the opinion of many advertisers on how people who don't want advertising should react.
What happens, though, when 10,000 people have to spend 15 seconds or longer to download and look at your ad, only to realize they don't want to read it? You've wasted 41 hours or more of other peoples' time. That's only a medium-sized newsgroup or mailing list.
If you're like some of us, you may have to skip 50 or more such inappropriate messages between mail and newsgroups you frequent on a daily basis. That twelve minutes a day per person can really add up. Especially in poorly-executed Internet advertising campaigns, it's likely that noone has any interest in your offering whatsoever.
Even if someone is interested in your product, how do you think they'll react if they have to read through 6 pages of hype to find the few facts they need? They'll hit the delete key, at best, and do nasty things to your private life at worst. Yes, irate netizens are very creative avengers.
Finally, if your price on long-distance telephone service is the same as 6 other people, then what advantage does your ad provide? If you are the second person to offer the same (lowest) price that can be found on the 'net or elsewhere, then there is reason to post; in case someone doesn't like dealing with the other company. If you have 3 competitors with the same pricing, then your ad had better offer something noone else can match, or you are wasting your time, readers' time, and readers' money.
You're reading biz.marketplace.non-computer and see an ad titled:
Melatonin For Sale; Cures All Sickness
What do you do? Most people will ignore it, others will comment on how stupid people would be to listen to such snake charming. Until the U.S. Food and Drug administration approves it for such use [NOT!], most readers will be insulted that you would ask them to buy your product because of such claims.
Our Prof. Mitt, from the first section, generally knows a little about most everything. He can recognize overzealous claims of product performance, and will publicize his knowledge vehemently if you try to state otherwise. The same thing is true of your asking price. If your price is the same as what can be found in Computer Shopper magazine, you are insulting the intelligence of most users; everyone on the newsgroups knows the commercially published prices aren't even close to what you can find in the biz.marketplace.computers.* groups.
The Internet marketing business thrives on posts and websites geared towards those with a college education. Give technical details, don't hide behind unsubstantiated claims, and don't hype your product. Be prepared to present sound scientific evidence to support your claims; you may be publicly challenged in the newsgroups. Do it the "traditional" hype-infested way, and people will see through your shallow mind in a second. We've seen a lot of good products go unnoticed because they tried to hide behind a lot of hype, and too little technical information.
Often, we see questionable ads with phone numbers or addresses for contact information, but no e-mail address. John J. Customer has a question about your product, but can't e-mail it to you. Bang, you've lost a customer. Instead, he'll go with a competitor who did list an e-mail contact.
Equivalently, if you don't list an e-mail address or if you forge your e-mail to intentionally remove traceability, you instantly draw question to your integrity. Internet users will believe you are a fly-by-night fraudulent organization who is trying to abuse the Internet, and will refuse to do business.
Yes, eliminating e-mail traceability prevents hate mail, particularly if you are trying to use shady marketing tactics. But, if they can't send the hate mail to you, then where will they send it? The next person up on the totem pole, your access provider, becomes your primary victim. This is a good way to lose your access.
Unless you are completely afraid of computers, e-mail is a cheap form of communication. Users on the Internet often scorn traditionally slow contact like phone and postal mail, except for those 3 a.m. phone calls when they think you are abusing their 'net. Don't lose customers by being behind the times; include your e-mail address in all advertisements. Then, accept responsibility for your actions; if someone complains to you about your advertising technique, then probably 1000 more people had the same opinion and didn't take the time to express it.
A popular means of responding to e-mail these days is the autoresponder. People send an inquiry to an address, and the computer on your end automatically sends out a message in response. This is a good way to advertise large catalogs over the newsgroups. But, it has one caveat...
Some people want to do business with a person on the other end of the line, not a robot. They will go to the competition if you don't provide an e-mail address that is read by an individual, in addition to your autoresponder. Human e-mail addresses provide multiple benefits; you can receive any mail about questions not answered in the autoresponse, and you can also intercept hate mail and improve your advertising technique. Again, if they reach your autoresponder and not you, then your sysadmin will receive an earful, and you may get a stern lecture or loss of access.
The Internet can be a valuable advertising tool if used properly. It can cost you your sanity if abused. Most traditional advertising executives would quickly be fired if they applied their older methods to the Internet, so it is important that you educate yourself on the standards of the 'Net, and discard the traditional approaches.
First, let your homepage people give you advice on how to build and present your offering on your World-Wide-Web site. Let your ad agency decide how to publicize the web address by TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper. Then, use the information in the next sections to selectively advertise on the newsgroups or in other Internet media.
hits since 6/20/96.