Coming Soon: Video CAPTCHA Ads

Update [Oct 25, 2010]: NuCaptcha has just launched its advertising offering (here's a promo video).

If you liked ads in CAPTCHAs brought to the world by Solve Media (formerly AdCopy), you'll love NUcaptcha, a company that has developed technology to replace the usual squiggles with animations and videos and that is apparently working on an advertising solution.

Recent (Oct 6) updates to the company's downloadable files talk about how "NuCaptcha can push ads right into a Captcha field, providing a new, highly visible ad space." The description for the WordPress plugin describes NUCaptcha as "a multi purpose product which provides industry leading security combined with brand messaging, advertising and unique user engagement."  The image above with the WestJet spec shows up when you browse to the site on an iPad as a replacement for the default Flash sequence.

I'm curious about the patent side of the story. Last March, I wrote about a company in Germany trying to patent video CAPTCHA ads. Microsoft, too, had submitted an application for a patent that describes a CAPTCHA ad system similar to Solve Media's where users type in ad slogans. One of the examples of Solve Media's ads are for Internet Explorer 8; Microsoft's application is illustrated with an ad for Xbox.

Even though CAPTCHA advertising has been a recurring topic on AdLab since 2005, I'm not sure I'm convinced it's a good idea as it may create strong incentives for publishers to opt against the optimum user experience, similar to breaking up articles into multiple pages and slideshows to ramp up page views.

On a related note, I would love to see a reCaptcha-like system used as a foreign language instruction tool, where you are given a word in one language and are asked for a translation in another.

CAPTCHA Advertising

How come it hasn't occured to anyone to require people to type in brand names instead of those mangled verification words, better known as a "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart" (CAPTCHA)?

CAPTCHA Advertising Closer to Reality

Two enterprising dudes from Germany are trying to patent CAPTCHA advertising, with a twist: the CAPTCHA message will be contained in a video ad. "User needs to pay close attention to the advertising video clip in order to gain access to the requested content. This way, the user cannot use advertising blocking programs, close the advertising or ignore the advertising, if the user wants to gain access to the requested content."

They look pretty serious about it, too -- this website must be theirs. Stateside, they will be competing with  adcaptcher.com and adscaptcha.com.  And with Microsoft, for that matter, who has submitted a similar patent application last year.




But ha!  Five years too late, I say. How about some well-documented prior art? Not to mention an existing working WordPress plugin or an actual product?

[And check this out: the website where I found the first patent adds a link to itself to your clipboard as you right-click/copy the text, at least in Chrome. Nifty.]

Turn Your Video Ad Into CAPTCHA

NuCaptcha announced its video CAPTCHA technology for advertisers today; the image above is a replacement gif from under the standard Flash unit so the tech does work on the Flashless iOS browsers.  The press release says the format will come in three IAB sizes, "pricing is either on a video CPM basis ($10 to $25), or a cost-per-engagement basis ($0.10 to $1.00), for larger, longer videos."

Not sure how it works, but "publishers and advertisers can create “instant” NuCaptcha videos by turning existing video advertisements into NuCaptcha Engage advertisements".

I wrote before how CAPTCHA ads in general have a potential to create incentives for publishers to sacrifice user experience for extra monetization opportunities.

Wonder if connected TVs' users are eventually going to have to deal with CAPTCHAs -- entering squiggles using a remote control doesn't sound like a very comfortable experience.

Brand Names as CAPTCHA Words

CAPTCHA advertsing (almost) in action: this Wordpress plug-in installed on some blog just served me a brand name. Do you see a business potential here? Have a CAPTCHA service that sells word placement to businesses, tracks actual usage, and splits revenue with publishers.

Webmasters Share Impressions Of CAPTCHA Ad Programs

Two comments under All Things Digital's write-up about Solve Media left two months after article went live in September:

JDavis:

"I tried this service out and they have *horrible* payout. Around 10 to 20 cents CPM. Except the CPM they refer to is not the amount of captchas served but the amount of captchas solved.

So basically, if you annoy the crap out of 1000 of your visitors with these things, they'll give you, the webmaster, 15 cents on average.

Thats freaking horrible. Normal ad banners have CPMs near that and they dont require visitors to watch a video and type in text."

Michael S:

I am currently using it and experience the same *horrible* payout. When I questioned it I was told that the people typing in the responses where from outside the U.S. and currently they only had advertisers that were targeting U.S. citizens.

Also the payout threshold is a whopping 200 dollars. I am doing the math on what I make and that will take me about three years to reach.

I am still using it with the hopes that things will improve, but looking at my stats over the last thirty days it looks like this.

3,845 Impressions

662 Solved TYPE-INs

$2 Revenue

That's a fair amount of solved Type Ins and so very little in revenue.  And remember that is thirty days of revenue. I make more on two or three adsense clicks. I hope it improves so I am give them a glowing review.

There's also a short but recent thread on a web developer Q&A site with a compilation of thoughts on usability and revenue potential of CAPTCHA ads as well as how they defeat their own purpose by creating an additional incentive for spammers.

Captcha Gone Wild

This Blogger CAPTCHA looks more like a Rorschach ink blot gone wrong. WTF? Any guesses what the characters are? Someone should figure out how to plug brands and slogans into the process.

Y Combinator Ad Innovation Conference: What Stuck

As part of Hill's Beacon initiative, I traveled to the Y Combinator's Ad Innovation Conference earlier this week to watch some 20 YC-funded start-ups present their technologies to a roomful of ad people. AdExchanger already has a nice write-up that explains what each company does, so that's not what I am going to do here. Instead, I will go through my notes trying to answer the question Paul Graham, the YC co-founder (pictured above with the glass), asked after the event: "So, what stuck?"

Here's what stuck.

Letters to the Editor - July 2009

Here are some of the most interesting letters that arrived in my inbox over the past couple of months.




-- Interview with Alex Bogusky by Jeremy Abelson about "long term economic impact of social on traditional media."


-- Reactive advertising is a concept based on "using data and dynamic content as a creative asset, and not only as input for targeting algorithms." Agency Asia runs an interview on the topic (- Richard). Also, a slideshow and an explanation.

-- A shout-out for Underln, a very nicely designed "digg for advertising, design and marketing", now with a toolbar. (- Eric)

-- Hype around real-time search: "TrendsSpotting plotted “investment interest” (i.e. VC/self funding , acquisitions) vs proxies for “consumer interest” (i.e. Google search trends for “twitter search“) to derive an expectation indicator for the hype." (- Apurba)

-- CAPTCHA advertising:  "I'm working for a company that is about to launch this kind of service." (- Roni)


-- Fluent, a report by Razorfish, "dispels some common myths about social media and influencers."

-- "Our agency clips great stats and charts on the marketing industry that might be useful research/supporting data for your posts."  (- Josh)

-- The Last Call was a 100 person, pan-European 24-hour silent-disco dance-off  to promote the splendid new Samsung Beat DJ music phone. (- Paul)

-- "Maybe you're interested to know that you're ranked at #7 on the Advertising blogs top 100 blogs in blogRank."  There's also another ranking of ad blogs at Media Blips ("Out of 500 Adverlab is ranked # 34, nice work!")

-- The best subject line of the month, from an email from the MadMimi newsletter management service:



If you sent me something but didn't hear back: I read every email, but unfortunately can only reply to so many, and I try to reply first to those who ask specific questions or are looking for help.

Mailbag

From the mailbox:

- Matt sent in this variation of a captcha ad where you have to click on the ad for it to reveal the security squiggle.  Why annoy your user once if you can do it twice?

- Buy cheap wooden furniture, not. Or else.

- People using Polyvore put together collections inspired by the royal wedding.

- Jared is hacking advertising.

- These Minis are actual cars.

CAPTCHA Advertising, Part II

Someone has come up with an idea of putting brand names into CAPTCHAs instead of the mumbo-jumbo we are having now. Seth Godin's thought of it, too. But this blog's readers have learned all about captchadvertising a whole year before everyone else!

It's good to be back. Can't believe someone can survive three weeks without a single blog post. Gotta be a Guinness record, or something.