Is The Internet Becoming Like The Old Times Square?
from the or-maybe-just-the-new-times-square dept
The latest opinion piece from Larry Magid worries that the internet is becoming like the Times Square of old, where anything goes - and it's not the sort of place you'd want your kids wandering around late at night. Magid makes some good points. He usually sides with techies, and points out that he's generally against censorship online. But, as his children are receiving porn spam or having their homepages force-switched to casino websites he begins to wonder what he can do. He wants to know if there's a way to "clean up" the internet, in the same way that Rudy Giuliani "cleaned up" New York. An interesting article to read alongside this one, is one from the Washington Post today talking about how the various big destination sites (Yahoo, MSN, AOL) are getting more intrusive in their advertising. I still wonder if it will ever occur to these companies that all this intrusive advertising pisses people off. It strikes me that business models that rely on pissing people off don't tend to support long term sustainable businesses. They're just begging for someone else to come along and make their customers happier.
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backwards much
Advertisers are getting more annoying with audio, vidio, and bright flashing popup screens because they know that leading Internet portals -- MSN, Yahoo and America Online -- are still too relient on their business for survival.
The portals used to tell the advertisers what works and what doesn't. Now that the agencies have more of the power we will see more uneffective and annoying garbage. I'm still under the belief that the music and movie industries want to kill the web. I also believe that the advertising agencies are dedicated to them enought to help. Ya, Ya, conspiracy...
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