So this is a really valuable marketing opportunity for toothpaste manufacturers, a rare switching opportunity. Here's a chance to get a guest to try their brand of toothpaste, in a market where driving change is difficult. They should be giving little tubes to hotel chains -- and very soon even paying the hotels to stock their brand.
This is a really fantastic solution in terms of functionality, but it also comes burdened with a bunch of JS calls and user profiling opportunities. It's very like Google Analytics in that respect; there's a quid pro quo if a publisher uses it.
We're still talking internally about what we're going to do with the social stuff -- we're leaning towards kicking it out -- as well as the user insight we're granting to Google in return for using its (excellent) DFP to serve our own ads. Is that what you mean, or have we missed something?
It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with.
The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense, the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of networks were infiltrating through that little window.
The only reasonable action was to just turn it all off and forgo the marginal ad revenue. We now only host ads we have sold direct.
Isn't that exactly what this is about though? They don't take these issues to the media, the customers/reviewers etc do. And when that happens, Tesla simply can't afford to take it lying down.
Where it jars for me is that if I publicly complained about treatment from a doctor or a hospital I'm fairly confident they wouldn't just produce my medical records and splash details that support their position all over the web. Tesla's approach is a little too close to doing this for me.
And this should also be read in the context of a whole industry going after one company... Tesla's PR often seems slightly combative, but that's because the company is engaged in a never-ending fight for its life against an array of deep pocketed interests that are not at all afraid to play dirty.
From my newspaper days, no amount of disclaiming will get round the fact that they put a picture of the guy next to the article. The test in the UK is if whatever you publish will make a reasonable person think worse of an individual and there are only a handful of very specific defences available, the best of which is that whatever you say is true.
Yup, I learned in retail during that time that you always deal with the customer in front of you before you answer the phone, too. Serving the person actually in your store is more important than serving the one sitting at home.
This is almost certainly because it is rooted, IMHO. All the serious banking/payment apps I have seen won't run on a rooted phone as they can no longer be sure of the integrity of the device.
Using a phone instead of a card isn't the end of the journey, it's just a step somewhere (early) along the way. As people get used to paying for stuff using a powerful connected computer instead of a card all sorts of new possibilities will open up.
In mitigation I run a smallish B2B news site and I only run ads we've sold direct (and vetted) and Google Adsense to fill some of the unsold inventory. However, I found out not too long ago that Adsense now throws stuff from literally hundreds of ad networks at its clients, which is definitely not what I expected when I signed up all those years ago. I've had to go in and manually turn them off, and will soon be turning off Adsense altogether. I'm not seeking to maximise my display advertising revenue though, as I've observed it usually comes at the expense of irritating readers.
I too am disappointed to see this here, though the young hotheads are obviously out in force today and relishing sticking it to the man.
Surely we are better than this.
One of the earliest lessons I was taught, and I taught my kids, is that if somebody else has something we want and doesn't want to share it, it's not OK to just take it.
I love it, but find it takes around the same amount of effort to send money by PayM as it does to send it by regular bank transfer to somebody already set up in my mobile banking app (my main use case is usually sending smallish amounts of cash to my kids, like a modern-day Al Bundy). PayM could do with a really nice streamlined app of its own, rather than being buried deep within each of my banks' own apps.
Yes, blame the publisher. Nobody sensible would allow other web properties to inject rubbish like this -- and it could literally be anything -- into their site. If they're going to do it, they should be held to account for it.
I believe it is a problem here in the UK, where one can expect to be ANPRed several times on any journey that takes one out of town. A little bit of black tape can turn a six into an eight and make one anonymous, or make a stolen car appear legit.
It may not have been actual code. Perhaps only values in a look-up table? Perhaps even values in an area of a multi-dimensional array that was never expected to be used.
These acquisition announcements are always the same, and always get the same sort of comments.
They tell of good fortune for the owners of the thing that has been sold, but never tell the users what's in it for them. And that's usually because there is nothing in it for them.
It's not a joke to the media, but fundamentally their job is to report new things. Not to take a view on the things, or check them for truthiness or flawed methodology -- just to report them.
(Your choice of media will determine how much extra value in terms of checking, discrimination etc is added to the news you see reported)
But they like telling you to forget what you know and take on board $newfact because it is easy copy (scientists say so!) and it gets pageviews/sells papers.
"Has about 80 BBC Micro computers... the majority form part of an interactive exhibit that recreates a 1980s classroom"
IME you only need one BBC Micro to recreate an 80s classroom.
At my school circa '82-'85 we had a beeb, a PET and two (different) Research Machines boxes that ran CP/M. That was all for the whole school, and with it we somehow managed to produce a remarkable portion of the UK's games programming talent.
Think of all the ways you could tempt a phone user to visit a specific URL. An email, Twitter, a QR code, graffiti etc. This is just another one of those -- and not particularly easy to execute, at that.
And if I wanted to carry a URL across borders or into a secure facility I would memorise a bitly link.