How commercial trends are transforming the web from a great provider of CONTENT into a nightmare of utterly useless banner clicking
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Courtesy of fravia's page of reverse engineering
30 May 1998
Well, here you go... have a look by yourself, this is only one out of a serie of continuous offers... tsch, tsch: they don't read the faq, they don't care in the least about the content of the sites they would like to commercialize (else they would have realized that I don't like these things and that I have (almost) 100.000 hits per day, not per month :-) and above all, this kind of guys are so money oriented that you get the creeps... they don't even try to understand what's going on under their noses... therefore I believe it is time to show all readers, trasparently, how the 'caterpillar' commercialism is destroying the net... this kind of guy will turn YOUR surfing into a nightmare of banner clicking (thus DAMAGING your own search for content) just in order to do some (small potatoes) profit...
Enjoy this kind of trasparence... I don't believe that anywhere else than at fravia+ you'll be able to get so many real info about the 'behind the scene' activities... well, if you do find this kind of info elsewhere, please tell me where! I'll link! BTW, notice the part I have underlined in red below... and Kent will be amazed to read, at the bottom, that I could actually publish his 'integrated shopping' crap... subject to some conditions :-)
Sender: kent@bottomdollar.com Slimfiltered_for: <WEBMASTER@fravia.org>; Fri, 29 May 1998 12:12:33 -0400 Received: from webcent (ppp-208-18-65-155.wchtks.swbell.net [208.18.65.155]) by mail-gw4adm.rcsntx.swbell.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id LAA07217 for <WEBMASTER@fravia.org>; Fri, 29 May 1998 11:11:15 -0500 (CDT) From: "Kent Johnson" <KENT@bottomdollar.com> To: <WEBMASTER@fravia.org> Subject: Advertising on your web site Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 11:10:57 -0500 Message-ID: <18F301BD8B1C$5d19a9b0$0100005a@webcent> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2173.0 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.2106.4

Hey, great site at http://www.fravia.org. We are interested in launching price comparison searches directly from this site. We can do this in one of two ways:

1) We can purchase advertising spots on your web site for our HTML banner that is capable of launching searches. See http://www.bottomdollar.com/htmlbanner as an example of this. Just send us your rate card information and we'll evaluate this against our other advertising alternatives.

2) We can create a customized "Power Shopper" for your site and pay you for its use. This would allow your users to find the best prices on hardware, software, books, movies, toys, etc. without leaving your site. For an example of how we can create integrated shopping agents, see http://cgw.gamespot.com (try the Price Search on the bottom of the home page).

With option #2, you get a cool enhancement to your site that attract more users and you earn revenue for its use. We get more searches executed because the shopping agent looks like a part of your site. See http://www.bottomdollar.com/bdn.html for additional details.

If you have less than 100,000 page views per month, feel free to signup for option #2 at http://www.bottomdollar.com/bdnsignup.html.

If you have more than 100,000 page views per month and would like to explore option #2 further, please contact me and we will: 1) provide a revenue estimate based on your expected traffic 2) create a custom prototype for your site

We look forward to establishing a profitable relationship with your site.

----------------------------
Kent Johnson E-Mail: kent@bottomdollar.com
Chief Technology Officer, Phone: 316-220-1861
WebCentric, Inc. ICQ: 9307582

OK, I'll tell you one thing Kent (or whoever else would care): as a matter of fact I will ACCEPT one (and only one) of your (or anybody else) crap banners/simple agents if you (or whoever) will pay A LOT OF MONEY (and I mean a lot) to the nice people at WebcafÈ that are hosting my fortress (I -fortunately- don't need money at the moment and they surely deserve it for being grat DONORS, not ugly SPONSORS). But watch it! Placed at the bottom of my index.htm page, your crap banner will be tabled with the following exact wording:

The following crap advertisement is the only one that you'll be able to find on this site
red
(insert your ad here)
red
N.B.: The paid advertisement above is being published on this site only in order to deliver the sum of (put exact sum here) dollars monthly to the nice guys at WebcafÈ that host my fortress

So Kent (or whoever), you don't like that? Well, bad luck: get lost... or if you are really a 'professional advertiser', take this opportunity as it is... if you do you'll probably get nevertheless a lotta hits (not mine for sure :-) and if you don't... somebody more shrewd than you probably will accept it in due time... see, there is no bottom ethic for commercial oriented minds, and that's exactly the kind of thing that only those that really don't care for money can merrily exploit :-)
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