Horses driving carts

Obviously commercial organisations are aiming to monetize their internet presence. However, it seems to be increasingly the case that they are more concerned with ad revenue than the experience of their users. Some of the stupidities ...

• Mattel have a Scrabble game that connects to Facebook, and have aggressively chased off other companies that have produced games that are too similar. It is one of the most irritating Facebook apps. They have attached an advertising engine to it. For a long time, every time you played three moves, it would produce a black screen inviting you to buy their ad removal packages to avoid a seven second wait - in other words, it was advertising its own ad removal package.
  
  This pales into insignificance compared to the apps behaviour on a tablet. Here, particularly when playing against the computer, the same 30 second advert is generated pretty much between every turn, you can't exit from it, and when the advert ends, it shuts down the app.
  
• AVG anti-virus have a well-established free antivirus, which aside from the fact that it kills performance of computers, does provide what seems like a pretty good level of protection. In Windows 10 it produces pop-ups, and today, it has started producing the same pop-up advert every few minutes.
  
• The "click-bait" slideshows that you get to from social media, which sometimes suggest they have interesting content, now typically spread the text for one slide over three clicks - presumably to serve more ad views.
  
• I remember reading a grumbly Guardian article a while ago about ads on the internet - whilst downloading animated adverts on the same page was grinding my browser to a halt.
  
• One of the main suppliers of automated ads has this obsession with things that you have looked at or searched for. So you look for, say, Converse shoes on Amazon. Ta-dah! Every web page you look at for the next week has an advert for them. Now, think for a minute, Mr Ad Builder. The likelihood is that either 1) I bought the shoes or 2) I decided I didn't need to. That was a search I did two days ago - am I likely to want to do it again today?

These strategies are self-defeating. The reason Adblock gained traction was because of the increasing intrusiveness of internet advertising. If people find advertising intrusive and can't get round it, they will either block it or use different products - advertising on the internet drives people away more effectively than it promotes things.

Telebid - don't do it!

Telebid have significant amounts of advertising on Facebook, promoting the auction of new items at apparently very good prices, so I thought I'd go and see how it worked.

Here's their guide for new people.

Here's some commentary on how the whole thing actually works.

Effectively, it is bidding with added gambling. Unlike eBay, a late bid can extend the auction - that's a feature that would probably improve eBay. Unlike eBay, each bid only adds a few pence to the price - again, no problem with that. But most significantly, unlike eBay, you pay Telebid (50p!) for each bid that you make. It is this radical difference that makes Telebid gambling.

So supposing an item - let's say a mobile phone worth £100 - is sold for £20. To get to £20 from the starting price of 10p, there will have been about 200 bids, each of which cost 50p. The "lucky winner" may have only bid once, and only pay 50p for that bid, and the £20 closing price. However, to get to that price, another 199 bids will have been made and been unsuccessful. And the total income Telebid gets from those bids is about £100 on its own. Whoever made those bids gets nothing for them. So the person getting the phone for £20 may have done well. Telebid have certainly done well. But all the other bidders have done very badly.

Bids cost 50p each, even when they are unsuccessful. To highlight the fact that the real winner here will be Telebid, it is even possible to bid on "FreeBid vouchers". As I write, a bidding war is going on for a 300 FreeBid voucher. The price has reached £22.19, and the auction is continuing. So, with an increment on this auction of 7p per bid, 315 bids have been made for the right to make 300 bids. The "winner" may end up with the right to make 300 bids. But the real winner is Telebid, which will have already received over 300 bids as payment for the voucher. (An auction for just 150 FreeBids has reached over £41. That's £205 in bids for £75 worth of bids.)

If you are the sort of person who thinks, "It might be me" - as the National Lottery campaign used to suggest - this might be your cup of tea. Or if you are prepared to work out a system and cynically apply it, exploiting all the other suckers on the site, you might enjoy it. For the rest of the world, I would strongly suggest leaving well alone.

Changing times

I have a fairly visible, high probability gmail address, which means it gets hit with a lot of spam, relatively speaking. Until recently, this meant a couple of hits a day of phishing attempts from "banks" - websites pretending to be Nationwide, Co-operative, Egg and others, plus the usual assortment of dead and imprisoned millionaires' wives from the developing world.

Google almost always correctly identified these messages as spam - but also provided the option for them to be tagged as phishing, if so considered. Once reported as phishing, Google would also add a warning to them, and disable any hyperlinks in the message, further reducing the danger of people being taken in by them. I considered my willingness to tag such messages once received as a small, cheap favour I could extend to the rest of the internet community.

Well, the bank ones have stopped, almost completely. I simply don't seem to get spam messages on my email account any more asking me to confirm my security details. Have they finally met their nemesis somewhere?

Incidentally, I always thought that a 0.1 cent tax per email sent would provide a means of stopping spam - but since the "From" field seems to be forged on many occasions (judging by the number of automatic fail responses I get to a church email address that just isn't used to send emails at all), I guess this wouldn't work.