______________________________________________________________________________ Netiquette: Advertising on the Internet Q. How can I advertise on the Internet? A. Carefully. The following information is offered as a guide to using the Internet as an advertising medium. While it does not address all possibilities, it does give some good, common-sense pointers. Q. What's the difference between "forsale" and "biz" groups? A. The "forsale" groups might be likened to a garage-sale type of environment. Basically, people-to-people, stuff you have lying around and want to get rid of, etc. "Forsale" groups are not to be used for "commercial" ads or flagrant, business-oriented posts. Q. But, I see "forsale" type postings in all of the newsgroups! A. And probably in opposition to the wishes of the readers of the newsgroup and in violation of the newsgroup's charter, for starters. In short -- don't post ads outside of "forsale" or "biz" structures. Q. Well, I'm going to do it anyway. So there. A. You may lose your account if you persist on violating the rules, as "virtual" as they might seem. So there. ================================================================== John Quarterman has been around for centuries, or so it seems. His books on email and other Internet services are widely read and respected. Here's what John has to offer... Advertising on the Net John S. Quarterman Smoot Carl-Mitchell Copyright (c) 1994 Texas Internet Consulting (TIC) tic@tic.com +1-512-451-6176 fax: +1-512-452-0127 1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W Austin, TX 78723 U.S.A. This article first appeared in Microtimes, July 1994. We recently co-sponsored a conference in Austin called Making Money on the Internet. How is that possible, since there is a widespread belief that even advertising is forbidden? Let's not try to address all issues of commercialization of the Internet here. Let's just discuss advertising. Advertising on the net has hit the traditional news media lately, with various newspapers and occasional television shows reporting on recent postings advertising about advice for getting your green card, a cream to thin your thighs, and a 900 sex number. Many of these reports have latched onto the angle of advertising, as if these postings were the first instances of advertising ever seen on USENET, the Internet, or related networks. I guess they never heard of the USENET newsgroups comp.forsale, misc.forsale, the more specialised newsgroups like misc.forsale.computers.workstations, or all the more local newsgroups such as tx.forsale, or, for that matter, all the *.marketplace and *.jobs newsgroups. The problem with the particular postings we've mentioned was not that they were advertising, rather how they were posted, namely to hundreds of newsgroups. This is called spamming, and it was spamming, not advertising, that was the main problem. USENET users like spamming about as much as they would having their office building spray-painted in gang grafitti. If the CBS Morning News were suddenly interrupted during the weather report by an unscheduled advertisement for thigh cream, and the same thing appeared on all other television programs that day, in the middle of the Oprah Winfrey's latest revelations, preventing Jean Luc Picard from saving the cosmos, halting Rush Limbaugh in mid-complaint about Bill Clinton, I suspect lots of television viewers would be upset. Television schedules commercials by time slot. USENET schedules advertisements by newsgroup. Posting to lots of inappropriate newsgroups is like broadcasting on television at lots of inappropriate times. Reporters don't seem to think of this analogy, probably because broadcasting on television is difficult, and posting on USENET is easy. If you prefer, think of an analogy of a pirate radio station broadcasting on dozens of frequencies. I suspect Metallica and Travis Tritt fans would be just as annoyed as Nirvana or opera fans to have their favorite song interrupted in the middle by an ad for legal advice about the use of 900 numbers for purchasing thigh cream. The point here is not whether the radio station is KRAS or KNPR. The point is that the conventions of broadcasting in a limited bandwidth medium such as radio and television fit programs and advertising into time slots. The conventions of computer networks, where you have not half a dozen or forty channels, rather thousands, are different. As we were writing this, NPR (National Public Radio) carried a story which mentioned that the main daily newspaper in Topeka, Kansas once refused to print movie reviews because it considered them advertising. It seems that advertising is in the eye of the beholder even in the most traditional media. The problem with postings such as the advertisment by Canter and Siegel of legal advice on getting a green card in the U.S. Immigration lottery was not that it was advertising, but that it was rude. They didn't bother to follow the simplest convention of the medium they chose to use, namely post only to a few appropriate newsgroups. Even if their posting had offered to give their advice away for free, it still would have been inappropriate, because of how it was posted. What did it have to do with alt.sex or sci.geology, after all, newsgroups among those it was posted to? They are not heroes bringing the benefits of capitalism to a new market. They're just crass. In fact, the more focused your posting, the more likely you will not only reach your target audience, but also be accepted by them. If you want to sell a workstation, post your notice to misc.forsale.computers.workstations, not to talk.politics or rec.pets.cats. If you don't know which newsgroup to post to, read the misc.forsale FAQ (Answers to Frequently Asked Questions). It's posted to the misc.forsale newsgroups. This is not to say commercial information can never be posted to USENET outside of certain newsgroups specifcally designed for advertising. Far from it. Announcements of new products, bug fixes, answers to technical questions, and addresses for prices are all welcome in newsgroups related to a product, platform, or company. Hype and bragging about prices is generally unwelcome, it's true. If you write a message like a newspaper department store ad and post it to any USENET newsgroup, you will almost certainly get flamed. You have to tailor your message to the medium. You'll probably get flamed eventually anyway (it's customary on USENET, no matter what you post :-), but not as much. Informational postings that include an electronic mail address or other pointer to a way a reader can ask for wanted information are generally welcome. Just stick a line on the end saying something like "for details about MIDS publications, send mail to mids@tic.com". Let's not forget that a USENET posting is not static ink on newspaper. If you want more information, you don't have to write a letter, put it in an envelope, stamp it, give it to the Post Office, and wait weeks for a reply. You don't even have to call a telephone number and suffer through voice mail. USENET itself provides only news, and for that matter isn't really even a network, for that same reason. But USENET news is carried over other networks, including BITNET, FidoNet, UUCP, and the Internet. All of them have electronic mail. If you want information, you can reply in seconds to the original poster, or to an address included in the posting. If the information provider has set up an autoresponder, you may get detailed pricing information within seconds. If you're on a slow network you may have to wait minutes or maybe even hours; still a lot less than days. If you are on the Internet, you have a wide range of other options, as well, including file location by archie and transfer by anonymous FTP, menu browsing with Gopher, database keyword searches with WAIS, and hypertext with WWW. All of these are information services that you can use if the information provider has supplied a server. Since you contact them when you want more information, there is no question of them forcing information on you. If you really want to provide information that looks like a newspaper department store ad, you can do that with WWW, and nobody will mind. That's the key, whether the additional information is supplied by mail or by a more sophisticated services, such as through WWW with nifty color graphics displayed by Mosaic. The user asks for it. You don't force it on them. Yet the user can get it quickly and readily whenever it's wanted. So information postings on USENET (and in other media on other networks) can have more effect than full blown advertisements in traditional media, becausew the information provider doesn't have to try to cram everything into a 30 second TV commercial or a half page newspaper ad. Instead, the advertiser can provide pointers and let the user select the information desired. But doesn't this violate the NSFNET AUP (Acceptable Use Policy)? And isn't the first rule of the Internet that it shall not be used for commercial gain? These are both questions that turn up again and again not only in reportage in the traditional media, but also on the net. The answers are no and no. Let's take them in reverse order. Starting way back before the Internet, its predecessor, the ARPANET, was funded by U.S. government money but largely built by private contractors. BBN, for example, was in it not only for the considerable intellectual interest, but also for commercial gain. It's also hard to believe that MCI and IBM have been involved with NSFNET for all these years without any consideration of eventual commercial gain. Many CIX (Commercial Internet Exchange) members, such as PSINet, AlterNet, and CERFNET are certainly providing Internet backbone services for commercial gain. Many computer vendors, including Apple, Digital, and Intel, use the Internet to distribute information about their products, to communicate with their customers, to provide bug fixes and sometimes whole operating system releases over the net. They are using the Internet for commercial gain. ClariNet is an information service using USENET news technology to distribute for-pay newsgroups, most of it over the Internet. It has been merrily doing this for quite a few years now, with nary a protest from anyone. But what if ClariNet distributes over the NSFNET backbone, or Apple sends a price quote to a university over it? Doesn't that violate the NSFNET AUP, which says the NSFNET backbone (actually, it's the NSFNET backbone service these days) is only to be used for research and educational purposes? Nope. The NSFNET AUP includes a loophole you could drive a television studio through (actually, Carl Malamud already did that). It also says activities in support of research and education are OK. Translated, that means that if a researcher or educator asks for it, it's not a problem. The NSFNET backbone service is increasingly irrelevant as an arbiter of behavior in the Internet anyway, now that CIX members supply several other national backbone networks in the United States, and almost half of all Internet users are in almost 60 other countries, where NSFNET does not reach. The issue of solicited vs. unsolicited information is not irrelevant, however, and is in fact the heart of the matter of advertising on the Internet, USENET, and many other networks. Time does not limit what can be transmitted in the way it does on radio or television, but it does limit what computer network users can and are willing to read. Information overload is real, and unwanted information is even less welcome online than junk paper mail. The reason is much the same (waste of time and other resources). The reaction is often stronger, because junk online can arrive right on your disk and your screen. It's as if the annoying car dealer who advertises on TV suddenly took to breaking into your telephone conversations and insisting on detailing how his prices are so much better than the competitions'. I might write letters to his company, to the telephone company, to the Better Business Bureau, and maybe the FBI. Is it any wonder that the online reaction to spamming is similar, especially since sending off an electronic mail message is so much easier than sending a paper letter? Some say the real problem here is flaming. That is, that the spammers did nothing to justify all the verbal abuse they're getting. Well, on the net, exactly what else is the recourse? Calling the FBI about anything online, experience shows, is likely to get you little action or potentially very inappropriate action. Law enforcement agencies in general have little knowledge of the online world and even less funding to get it. Besides, what law did Canter and Siegel violate? Apparently none. But that doesn't mean we want them in every one of our online salons. Spamming does reduce the value of the net to its users. A few cases do not produce the long-predicted imminent death of the net. They are worrisome, however, because if a lot of people see spammers treated as heroes by the traditional media and choose to emulate them, an epidemic could ensue. The solution is not legislation, it is education. Discussions of possible recourses on the USENET have gotten up to the idea of cancelling offending articles. This is very worrisome in itself, because it raises the question of who decides what is offensive? USENET already has enough self-appointed censors at universities and companies. We don't need any more. We'd rather see the offenders flamed. Practically, though, if the problem persists, spam articles will get cancelled (it's already happened) and other measures will be taken, probably including isolating hosts that repeatedly post them. A better way would be for such posters to channel themselves into more appropriate newsgroups. Stranger things have happened on the net. As the influence of the net spreads to the general public, perhaps we'll see spamming recognized as bad manners. Meanwhile, you can advertise on USENET and on the Internet. We've just told you how; now you don't need to pay anybody to learn it. Just follow the simple guidelines listed here and learn the rest as you go. ========================================================================= Q. Well, that's fine, but what are the penalties for bad behavior? A. You might show up on someone's hotlist: Archive-name: advertisers-blacklist Posting-Frequency: every 3-4 weeks BLACKLIST OF INTERNET ADVERTISERS * 1. What is this? * 2. Who gets on the list, and for how long? * 3. What is the philosophy behind it? * 4. What can I do with it? * 5. What if I wanted to punish YOU? * 6. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk? * 7. What other blacklists are out there? * 8. How can I help? * 9. The Blacklist in itself. 1. What is this? This is the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. It is intended to curb inappropriate advertising on usenet newsgroups and via junk e-mail. It works by describing offenders and their offensive behavior, expecting that people who read it will punish the offenders in one way or another. The list is posted regularly to several newsgroups and the most recent version is always available on the WWW as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist.html If you read the non-html version and you don't know what to do with all the links given or what the WWW is, send mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the text "send usenet/news.answers/www/faq/*" in the body of the message. 2. Who gets on the list, and for how long? Everyone who is pointed out to me for sending out unsolicited commercial e-mail or posting inappropriate commercials to usenet newsgroups or mailing lists. I also monitor alt.current-events.net-abuse. With "inappropriate commercials" I basically mean ads posted to unrelated newsgroups or mailing lists or to those which traditionally don't tolerate commercial messages. The number of complaints I receive is also a factor. Everyone on the list gets notified so that they can correct possibly inaccurate information.As a general rule, people are taken off the list after 3 months unless they repeat their behavior. 3. What is the philosophy behind it? In a nutshell: the Internet is probably as close to an anarchy as we can get. This is good. Therefore, punishing of unwelcome behavior should be done by private individuals and hence follow the same grass roots philosophy that governs the rest of the net. Read more about it in http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist_philosophy.html 4. What can I do with it? If you judge that one of the described behaviors is worthy of punishment, you could for example do one of the following. (Note that some of these might be illegal in some jurisdictions. Check the books first and don't blame me.) * Boycott the advertising business. Tell your friends about the boycott and the reasons behind it. * Send them or their sysadmins a message informing them that you disapprove of their behavior. * Put them in your kill file. Everything to know about kill files is in http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/killfile-faq/ faq.html * Filter them out of your mailbox. (If you read mail on a unix host, you might want to use the program procmail for that, which can be gotten via anonymous ftp from ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de as /pub/packages/procmail/procmail.tar.gz. This can be installed and used even if you are not root. Another possibility is filter, which comes with the mail reader elm. A primer about how to use these programs is available as http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/filterin g-faq/faq.html ) * Use procmail and an AI engine like emacs doctor to engage them in a fake mail dialog. * If they operate an automatic mail-back robot, you could test their intelligence by sending them an e-mail with FROM or REPLY-TO header containing their address. * Say individuals A and B are on the list. You can send an e-mail message to B with fake FROM-header A saying "I'm interested in your product/service." In this fashion, the advertisers will end up on each others mailing lists. * Have a look at the shell script fletch, available as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/fletch.txt and reflect about possible uses :-) * If you are a system admin, you could stop forwarding mail or news originating from them. The latter can easily be done with the Usenet Death Penalty, a perl script available as http://www.osf.org:8001/~rsalz/udp (and which, as you might have guessed, can do much more than that!) Or, if the culprit owns their own domain, you can deny them access to your ftp, gopher, telnet, irc, nntp and WWW servers. * If you operate a cancelbot, you could automatically cancel all postings originating from them. See the pointer to the UDP above. * And for the truly perverse: since the unedited texts of all ads are provided, you can use this list as the ultimate Zombie Cyber Mall[tm]. 5. What if I wanted to punish YOU? You can use some of the measures from question 4 against me. The buddies who love to hear about the progress of my work are postmaster@uni-paderborn.de and admin@math.ucsb.edu. If you want to do it right though, you'll have to start a blacklist of blacklist maintainers. Also, please keep the threats of legal action coming - you don't do it in vain: the most amusing ones are published as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/threats.txt while flames go to http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/flames.txt Moreover, all usenet postings concerning the Blacklist will have the word "Blacklist" somewhere in the subject line. Put it in your kill file and you won't have to hear about it ever again. 6. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk? Here are other things you can do, short of having put people on the blacklist: * Send a complaint to them or their sysadmin directly. There's a neat script for doing that painlessly called adcomplain. It is posted on the first of each month to alt.sources and can be gotten from one of the archives, e.g. ftp://ftp.sterling.com/usenet/alt.sources/ * Cancelmoose[tm] cancels all spammers mercilessly. Read the reports posted to alt.current-events.net-abuse. More information about that group in general and Cancelmoose[tm] in particular is in the a.c-e.n-a FAQ, which is available as http://www-sc.ucssc.indiana.edu/~scotty/acena.html * If the offender is from the US, you can run to Mama and whine about things like pyramid schemes or deceptive advertising. Mama in this case is the FTC: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Protection Bureau, Division of Advertising Practices, 6th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20580, (202) 326-3090 * Tell business people about the netiquette, i.e. point them to everything in the news.newusers.questions newsgroup. I also digged up a good article about how to advertise on the net (must be good: has the word "Blacklist" in it): ftp://is.internic.net/pub/net-happenings/messages/3434. Another excellent article explaining the rationale behind the netiquette is http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/netmyths.html 7. What other blacklists are out there? I'm aware of one blacklist operated by Pierre Beyssac which tries to keep the french usenet hierarchy fr clean of commercials and is posted regularly to the groups fr.news.reponses, fr.news.divers and fr.biz.d. 8. How can I help? * If you encounter an instance of offensive advertising on the internet, send me a copy, or, even better, post it to alt.current-events.net-abuse. If you send it directly to me, please make sure to check the latest version of the list first so that I won't get multiple complaints about incidents already covered. The newest version is always available on the WWW as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist.html All contributions will be treated confidentially. * It's especially important to report all instances of unsolicited commercial junk e-mail, since these take up more bandwidth and are less visible than usenet postings. * Feel free to contact me if you find that any information in this document is inaccurate. * Please start your own blacklist, especially if you disagree with some of the rules for getting on and off this list or if you would like to focus on a national hierarchy. Tell me about it and I will include a pointer to it here. * Let me know about any creative suggestions for the answer to question 4. * Distribute this list widely. 9. THE BLACKLIST IN ITSELF I have formatted it in such a way to make automatic processing easy. Every entry can contain some or all of the fields ID, Name, Address, Phone, Email, WWW, Entered, Changed, Behavior, Remarks in this order. A line starting with whitespace is a continuation of the preceding line. Several Names, e-mail or WWW addresses etc. are separated by commas and optional whitespace. Blank lines separate the entries. Every entry has a unique ID so that your program can decide whether it has processed that entry before when a new list arrives. Furthermore, the original offensive article is accessible as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/.txt where the true ID is to be substituted for . ===Blacklist start=== ID: CS941211 Name: L. Canter, M. Siegel Address: 3333 East Camelback Road, Suite 250, Phoenix, AZ 85260, USA Cybersell, P.O.Box 13510, Scottsdale, AZ 85267, USA Phone: (602) 661-3911 Email: lcanter@cyber.sell.com, msiegel@cyber.sell.com, market@cyber.sell.com WWW: http://cyber.sell.com/ Entered: 1994/12/11 Behavior: The famous greencard lawyers. In 1994, they repeatedly sent out a message offering their services in helping to enter the US greencard lottery to almost all usenet newsgroups. (Note in passing: they charged $100 for their service, while participating in the greencard lottery is free and consists merely of sending a letter with your personal information at the right time to the right place.) When the incoming mail bombs forced their access provider to terminate their account, they threatened to sue him until he finally agreed to forward all responses to them. Read all about it with gopher gopher.well.sf.ca.us in Publication/online_zines/ Canter_and_Siegel. They have signed an agreement with their current access provider, PSI, to refrain from sending out junk e-mail or spamming usenet. The text is available over the net as http://www.psi.com/press/Canter-Siegal-6-23.html Nevertheless, they have repeatedly spammed usenet again, although the postings were quickly found and cancelled by the cancelbot CancelMoose[tm]. PSI has cut their USENET access. They have since written a book, "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" and founded an internet advertising company, Cybersell. The book promotes several advertising strategies on the internet including gathering addresses from usenet and sending out junk e-mail, posting commercials to inappropriate newsgroups like they did, advertising on irc and even via talk. They basically contend that all these behaviors are legal and therfore ok. They ridicule the terms "internet culture" and "netiquette" and claim that the internet, once all real-world laws are applied to it, will make a great source of income for attorneys. Remarks: Don't bug the owners of cybersell.com; they were the access providers for C&S during their first spam and acquired the name cybersell immediately - very much in the spirit of creative punishment :-) Advertising of lawyers is illegal in Germany. Does anyone know whether this holds for lawyers trying to advertise from abroad? ...and so on (there's many more, but this one's used as an example) (24-Jul-96/newcynsn/WRD) ______________________________________________________________________________ Copyright 1996 Northwest Nexus Inc. All Rights Reserved. This document may not be reproduced nor redistributed in any form without express permission; contact us at support@halcyon.com with questions.