Paying to Remove Advertisements

Media firms sometimes allow consumers to pay to remove advertisements from an advertisement-based product. We formally examine an ad-based monopolist's incentives to introduce this option. When deciding whether to introduce the option to pay, the monopolist compares the potential direct revenues from consumers with lost advertising revenues from not intermediating those consumers to advertisers. If the option is introduced, the media firm increases advertising quantity to make the option to pay more attractive. This hurts consumers, but benefits the media firm and advertisers. Total welfare may increase or decrease. Perhaps surprisingly, more annoying advertisements may lead to an increase in advertising quantity.Advertising; Damaged goods; Media markets; Price discrimination; Two-sided markets; Vertical differentiation

Do Not Advertise: The Current Fight Against Unsolicited Advertisements

Have you ever received a phone call from a telemarketer during dinner? Do e-mails entitled Protect Your Computer Against Viruses for $9.95 or GET A FREE PASS TO THOUSANDS OF XXX SITES annoy you? Are you tired of watching advertisements that continue after the posted start time for a movie? Many Americans are irritated with the amount of daily interruptions caused by the current lack of advertising regulations. In some instances, the advertisers shift their marketing costs to unwilling e-mail users or moviegoers. This article focuses on unsolicited communications and potential solutions to the seemingly endless problem of spam

The Fix Was In: Mitre's "Independent" Review of Free File

In this Special Report, Ventry analyzes Mitre Corp.’s review of the IRS Free File program. He argues that Mitre’s lack of professional distance from the IRS prevented it from delivering an independent report. He discusses how Mitre found a majority of Free File Alliance (FFA) companies hid their Free File websites from eligible Free File users, and lured them to commercial sites. He shows how Mitre reinforced the view that FFA companies participate in Free File for economic gain rather than “philanthropy,” and warned the IRS against challenging the “free-to-fee” model. Mitreʹs warning was unnecessary, Ventry concludes, because the IRS is complicit in the FFAʹs abusive and potentially illegal actions

Survey on remnant data research: the artefacts recovered and the implications in a cyber security conscious world

The prevalence of remnant data in second hand storage media is well documented. Since 2004 there have been ten separate papers released through Edith Cowan University alone. Despite numerous government agencies providing advice on securing personal and corporate information, and news articles highlighting the need for data security, the availability of personal and confidential data on second hand storage devices is continuing, indicating a systemic laissez faire attitude to data security, even in our supposedly cyber security conscious world. The research continues, but there seems to be a lack of correlation of these studies to identify trends or common themes amongst the results. The fact that this type of research continues to be conducted highlights the deficiencies in the methods used to advertise warnings publicised by Government departments and industry experts. Major media organisations seem reluctant to broadcast these warnings, unless there is a bigger story behind the issue. This paper highlights the ongoing issues and provides insight to the factors contributing to this growing trend

The Dark Side of Micro-Task Marketplaces: Characterizing Fiverr and Automatically Detecting Crowdturfing

As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting popular web services such as online social networks and search engines. Recently, these malicious users moved to Fiverr, a fast-growing micro-task marketplace, where workers can post crowdturfing tasks (i.e., astroturfing campaigns run by crowd workers) and malicious customers can purchase those tasks for only $5. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Fiverr. First, we identify the most popular types of crowdturfing tasks found in this marketplace and conduct case studies for these crowdturfing tasks. Then, we build crowdturfing task detection classifiers to filter these tasks and prevent them from becoming active in the marketplace. Our experimental results show that the proposed classification approach effectively detects crowdturfing tasks, achieving 97.35% accuracy. Finally, we analyze the real world impact of crowdturfing tasks by purchasing active Fiverr tasks and quantifying their impact on a target site. As part of this analysis, we show that current security systems inadequately detect crowdsourced manipulation, which confirms the necessity of our proposed crowdturfing task detection approach

Still Wrexham's longest running newspaper - the Wrexham Advertiser

This is the author's PDF version of an article published in the Transcations of the Denbighshire Historical Society ©2012. The article's llustrations are not included.This article discuss the Wrexham Advertiser - a newspaper which ran from 1850 to 1957