Enough IntelliTxt already

IntelliTxt is creating something of a buzz around the blogosphere at the moment. In essense, this technology allows marketers to sponsor words or phrases within text published on the web. The idea is good in concept, but sucks in reality.

As Rafe Needleman observes, the system is open to abuse by publishers pestering their editors and reporters to use the most lucrative words - or at the very least calls into question journalistic ethics. Former Industry's Standard leader John Battelle also chimes in reporting that journalists are not happy about the service.

But aside from the industry antics, let's think about this from the online reader's perspective. When I was at InfoWorld, our business development folks launched a service called Knowledge Link (I'm pretty sure that was the name) that basically did the same thing. In essence, an advertiser like Microsoft could buy a link to every word like "server" for example. The trouble was that if a reporter used the word "server," for example, five times in a story you had five identical links.

Now, take this a step further and add two or three advertisers buying different words all within the same story. Suddenly your clean copy is littered with red or blue links. It's messy, annoying, and very soon nobody cares about them. Even worse, readers start clicking off to other sites where they can avoid the visual assault.

InfoWorld wised up to all of this pretty quickly. I'm hoping other favourite sites of mine don't go down the same path.

Comments

[jason]

interesting article. From an advertiser's point of view have you got any views on the issue of bought words/ links that appear in a negative context. The software that trawls the sites isn't sophicated enough to understand the context in which the words are being used. For e.g. if Microsoft servers are said in an article to have security issues MS would not wish for it's links to be embedded within these, this would cuase only bring bad press. However I'm sure that this could happen

[Freddy Moses]

I saw an example of intellitxt in an article about a car today. The article mentioned that the car was a luxury SUV and the word 'Luxury' was underlined, when you hovered over it, it says 'Buy luxury items on ebay'

There is no contextual relevance at all and makes the advertiser look shoddy/desperate. I appreciate that this is not too much of a problem for eBay as we all know what they are about but what if a premium advertiser were to do this? Mercedes or Audi for instance?

[fcoldwell]

IntelliTXT ads can be easily avoided:

1.Install Firefox
2.Use the Adblock extension. http://adblock.mozdev.org/
3.If you ever see an intellitxt link, click the "adblock" button in the bottom-right corner of Firefox.
4.In the "new filter" field, enter "intellitxt.com" . It's category should be "script."
5.Reload the page.