Wikia's advertising

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Crash
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Wikia's advertising

Post by Crash »

I was browsing the Aquanox Wikia tonight and came across this ad:
"Convert to Islam
Let us help you to become a Muslim Native Muslims in private live chat"

What do you make of that? As a semi-responsible webmaster, I'm not sure I'd have that ad on my site. Sure, Wikia's ads are driven by outside agencies and they'll have scripts that load advertising 'content' from other servers (which I think is a bad idea in general because I don't trust other people) but if an advert like that appeared on my site, I'd have some concerns.

At the end of the day, Wikia is not the Pirate Bay. It's not having to operate on the fringe of legality.

I tried to put the matter to them but their contact form wouldn't work.
Not sure if that's a temporary condition or not - not sure I care.
Dream big and bold and daring.
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felice
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Re: Wikia's advertising

Post by felice »

Crash wrote:"Convert to Islam
Let us help you to become a Muslim Native Muslims in private live chat"
What do you make of that? As a semi-responsible webmaster, I'm not sure I'd have that ad on my site.
Why not? Personally I'm not particularly fond of any religion, but I don't think it's significantly worse than many of the other products people try to sell.

The real question is: why are you seeing ads in the first place? Don't you have an ad-blocker? 8)
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Crash
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Re: Wikia's advertising

Post by Crash »

I dunno, my concern wasn't based on religion itself.
When we have people being groomed online to fight for our enemies abroad; apparently in the name of that religion, that's where the alarm bell starts ringing.

I used Adblock with Firefox some time ago and it seemed to slow the browser down and make it unstable.

I know there will be a combination that works better but I don't understand why Wikia would design their sites so that when you open a *single* Wikia tab, the browser slows down on an i7 with hardware acceleration enabled to a 7970M.
That is the point where a website has taken its advertising too far.
Apparently, if you "log in", you get far less ads. Why would I want to create an account to view a website properly?

One thing that does work for me is just to turn Flash off in Edge. Since Windows 8, I've seen less point in installing separate browsers.
I tend to use Chrome at work but I don't like the company that makes it.

It confuses me why anyone would think "Flash, let's make an advert with that" and then say "aces, lets put 10 of those on the same page".
Flash is quite a high-performing runtime. It can do a lot but it is resource-intensive. That's why it's makes sense for *content*, not advertising.

One sympathy I have for Wikia is that it's based around that MediaWiki rubbish that we played about with a few years back in trying to create our own Star Fleet Wiki.
It must absolutely hammer the database and file servers because we had about 5 pages on it and it ran like an absolute dog. That, and it wasn't good to use either.
When you think how many pages and pageviews Wikia must have, their server costs must be megabucks.
Dream big and bold and daring.
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felice
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Re: Wikia's advertising

Post by felice »

Crash wrote:I dunno, my concern wasn't based on religion itself.
When we have people being groomed online to fight for our enemies abroad; apparently in the name of that religion, that's where the alarm bell starts ringing.
Was there any hint that the ad had anything to do with such things? Islamic State is only a tiny fraction of one percent of the world's Muslin population, and most of the people they're killing are other Muslims. And I'd expect them to be targeting recruitment efforts at people who are already Muslim, and playing on the discrimination they experience because of that. People who are just curious about Islam seem like a very poor prospect.
I used Adblock with Firefox some time ago and it seemed to slow the browser down and make it unstable.
Ah, that's unfortunate.
I tend to use Chrome at work but I don't like the company that makes it.
No, they're pretty evil.
It confuses me why anyone would think "Flash, let's make an advert with that" and then say "aces, lets put 10 of those on the same page".
Flash is quite a high-performing runtime. It can do a lot but it is resource-intensive. That's why it's makes sense for *content*, not advertising.
Every individual ad designer would probably prefer theirs to be the only flash ad on a page; they don't want people to be distracted by other ads. While the site owner wants to maximise revenue by showing as many ads as possible. And they probably get served the ads by a third party and don't know what format the supplied ads will be in.
One sympathy I have for Wikia is that it's based around that MediaWiki rubbish that we played about with a few years back in trying to create our own Star Fleet Wiki. It must absolutely hammer the database and file servers because we had about 5 pages on it and it ran like an absolute dog.
Presumably they have good caching, so most requests won't go anywhere near the database.
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Crash
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Re: Wikia's advertising

Post by Crash »

What you say is quite right.
At the same time, I can't imagine an advert saying:

"Convert to Christianity
Let us help you to become a Christian, Native Christians in private live chat"

There would be something a little strange about that as well. Maybe it was just a bit out of place among all the adverts for video games that I can't be bothered to play.

While IS may be a very small subset of many very large populations, its evil is remarkable, even to a television violence culture.
It's a kind of brutality from the dark ages mixed with 20th century convenience and hedonism.
Executing a person by tying them to a tree and firing an RPG at them is something that you can't classify or evaluate with words.

Diverting away from that, advertising is like antibiotics, it loses its effectiveness from overuse, reducing revenue, which puts you in a vicious circle: more ads, more revenue, less impact, less revenue, more ads ...

I think this will be my last android phone. I'm looking forward to this Microsoft Lumia 950 handset (I think it is). I never install any apps because they're a waste of time and I think a Windows phone would integrate better with my computer.
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felice
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Re: Wikia's advertising

Post by felice »

Crash wrote:At the same time, I can't imagine an advert saying:
"Convert to Christianity
Let us help you to become a Christian, Native Christians in private live chat"
Well, the wording would be a bit different since Christianity is the dominant religion in the English-speaking world 8) But I'm sure there are similar ads inviting people to find Jesus or whatever. Christian evangelism is certainly a big thing in at least some denominations, and I'd be astonished if various groups aren't trying more modern approaches.
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