“The user’s actions are irrelevant until they choose a browser capable of communicating correctly or make use of some means other than DNT.”

There’s a very simple reason newspapers and periodicals have such a low cover price (usually a few dollars, always less than $5) and are still chock to the gills with advertising.

To charge the advertisers more.

The logic goes like this….

The more a reader pays – the more the actually care about what’s being published.

The more readers care about what’s being published (the price they pay) the more they publication can charge advertisers to reach those readers.

Now, there’s a maximum price where only 1 person pays and a minimum price where the broadest group of qualified (as defined by the advertisers) readers pays.

In the end, the cover price is how the advertisers know the publication is reaching the intended audience.

For example, contrast the types of advertisements within your city’s entertainment weekly to those say in Entertainment Weekly or The Economist or even the NYTimes.

This is the also why annual subscription prices are usually a small fraction of the annual cover price (the difference is the value of your delivery address to the advertisers).

Because so much demographic data can be extracted from IP Addresses – we drop much of the data gleaned from offline purchase decisions in every http request. So any price tag on an ad-filled publication is money a publisher can use to raise their ad rates.

So, what did you pay for? – A higher quality advertisement.

I had a really fun lunch today at the Bewiched Deli (I highly recommend the roast beef w/ horseradish sandwich).

As we were sharing some of the projects ideas we’re working on he stops the conversation suddenly and commands:

“Stay away from advertising. If I have to beat it into you – I will. Stay. Away. From. Advertising.”

When a user visits one of these …. sites, the Web page launches dozens of pages that are hidden from the computer user. These hidden sites are filled with paid links to legitimate websites. Unbeknownst to the user, software built into the …. sites forces the user’s computer to click on these links, sometimes hundreds of times, sending a flood of computer-generated traffic to legitimate websites. – Emily Steel

Note: I removed the adjective Emily used in her piece to describe these sites for its not that different from what JCPenny was accused of doing.

“Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.” – David Segal

This is simply sandbox to flush out this idea. I promise more incoherent ramblings and typos than usual.

Scrabble now allows proper nouns in some game play. Seems like a great opportunity for Mattel to sell double word scores to the highest bidder.

If every proper noun is marketing, who are you marketing right now?
There’s only one right answer.