How it works currently- Why the Internet is a Web of Confusion- Mayhem intro

Right about here is where I am expected to seize your attention and convince you to read the rather lengthy text that follows. We will tell and show you HOW the internet has become a place for incredible mayhem. Whose system franchises all of us WHO use it and disenfranchises all of WHAT we are searching for on the web. The web is a place WHERE discovery hides in the wake of nearly insurmountable confusion, inconvenience and also costs. WHY this system became a breeding ground for debauchery, theft, malice and highest bids will knock you off your feet WHEN you learn just how much of your precious TIME is being wasted for the sake of THEIR PROFITS.

There are tens of thousands of explanations and how to guides for each one of the topics dissected below, but here you'll discover what very few have been able to grasp. Whenever we are looking for a retail product, a service professional or an event or activity- we have to chase local merchants all over the web. The irony is that these merchants are just following us to give us the information we are searching for online. This is somewhat like a dog chasing its' very own tail.

The majority of the websites on the internet that are free to use are supported by advertising, which makes them adware. After all, servers cost real money. Developers also cost real money. For every user on a website, there is a real cost to store their personal profile data. Most of us users understand this (in theory), and we expect a fair amount of advertisement's (in practice). And to some extent, we the users appreciate the ideas of convenience that advertisements considered appropriate is being displayed for us.

But it’s the wide-open, murky web of ad networks, ad exchanges and real-time bidding intertwined in the fabric of the web that makes convenience utterly impossible. Our views are being stolen and replaced with irrelevant, inappropriate and distractive content. Time and money embezzled from each of us can never be regained. People should be very, very worried. This ecosystem is practically limitless for scammers.

It's not that we are all turning a blind eye to all this. Unraveling the matrix is mind boggling for most everyone. There are many very smart people and a lot of money going towards creating solutions for each of the concerns listed above. Unfortunately, these resolutions seem to be shades of the same color. As it stands now, merchants have to advertise each product on multiple social networks, in blogs, in classifieds, affiliates, on group deal/ rebate sites and the list goes on and on. The inefficiency is astounding. I won't even speculate on how much time & effort it takes to get announcements up and then maintain them. You better believe that the cost of all this advertising in all these various places is trickling down to the products we are buying. We are all caught up in this chaotic & costly matrix of mayhem.

We are attempting to convey HOW each of these channels works in concert, to create a perpetual conduit to keep distracting US ALL from the realization of the inefficiency, insecurity and that they are not about YOU as a USER of the web, but more accurately- YOU as the object of their revenues!

*Note- 99% of local, small business and neighborhood merchants that advertise or want to promote online don't have the time or inclination to understand any of the information shared on this page. It's up to YOU to show and tell them. Please send them to the AdFor.US Solution.

AdFor.US fixes all the problems above by removing the BS below.

Consumer targeting is the underlying reason for the most critical fault with the modern web preventing local ecommerce from moving forward and functioning in real time. (Read more about the analog web vs. the real- time tacit intranet here) Consumer Targeting- cloaked in a veil of convenience- is the one conclusive reason for the mayhem on the internet. In order to comprehend this, there are a few points of contention to consider.

The first point needed to grasp online marketing mayhem is that the valuation of an internet company is primarily based on the internet companies user base (YOU). Every user (YOU) is worth so many dollars. For instance, The value of a Facebook user is $141 compared to $52 per user at review site like Yelp and compared to a LinkedIn user $85 compared to $125 per user of online messenger service like Twitter. You can also compare to $418 per user value of an Angieslist compared to $748 per user at online advertising firm Google, based on the 540 million users it reported in its latest annual report. Due to its ability to mine personal data on its users and sell that data, Google commands a lofty 36 P-E based on its earnings the past 12 months, which is double that of the stock market and the technology sector1. This system is particularly heinous when you consider that more than 40% of social network users are entirely fake- robotically created by marketers working to bolster their revenues. (See Mayhem - Social Spam)

The second and third points needed to grasp a basic understanding of online marketing mayhem are that there are two kinds of digital display marketing- In a domain or a search. In a domain, marketing is mostly any advertisements that are displayed in your social networks, on blogs and on the majority of the free (adware) websites you visit.

(Second point) In search advertising, aka Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the king of paid online advertising. SEM determines (debatably) where users (YOU) go on the internet if, or rather when- we (YOU) search for something. SEM sets the guidelines for all other advertising channels (described below) to follow because this is where 91% of all internet web traffic (YOU) starts and to date, all other channels have failed to match the performance characteristics of search. Advertisements are being displayed in accordance with an algorithm primarily based on the highest bidders in each of the customer segmentations.

ments for 'sales' on charcoal and gas grills, cookbooks for sale and perhaps even from a hipster dentist advertising his "grill treatment" 3 states away. Sure RTB pushes those highest bid advertisements from 1 or 2 restaurants nearby- which is a far cry from the 50 or so restaurants in your 10 mile proximity.

How much time does it take you to sift through your 'relevant' results? See what Real Relevance in Real Time looks like.

How often are you modifying your search keywords to focus in on what you are looking for? It is easy to get sidetracked. In fact, that is the inherent majesty of RTB. The more disoriented the web user (YOU) are, the more- highest bidder advertisements the publisher gets to display and charge for.

Have you ever noticed that ads follow you across pages and different websites? This is called 'Retargeting.' You can thank RTB for remembering that you, or someone else that may have used your device, might have clicked on an advertisement.

RTB total generated revenue in 2013 was estimated at $30 Billion dollars. More than $7 Billion of those dollars (charged to merchants) were suspected to have been garnered from fraud. (See Botnet, Click Fraud, Below the Fold, Software not supported in the Mayhem text below.)

RTB is extremely lucrative to investors. Billions of dollars are being thrown at tech companies whose products automate and streamline the collection, storage and implementation of YOUR DATA in the RTB web. (See -Behavioral targeting, Data Mining, Big Data, Man in Browser in the Mayhem text below)

Big data is out there. It’s real. Remember the NSA and Reardon last year? Every instance YOU spend on the web is being collected in some repository. TRACKING YOU - for YOUR Convenience. At this time, the private data collected about YOU is somehow lessened because 'being targeted' in some way translates to Convenience. But who is it actually for? Us or Them? Are you comfortable with a highly customized experience, knowing it’s your data that’s making the difference?

In summary real- time bidding is solely for the purpose of maximizing profits for publishers, ad brokers and ad exchangers. While RTB is sold as a saving grace to merchants, it actually increases costs and confusion. Serving the highest bid advertisements actually distracts web users (YOU) from seeing other, more relevant advertisements. Clicking on these less relevant ads increase bottom line costs for the merchant (and you) and time is expended to further investigate appropriateness of the original user intended search. Real- time bidding takes from each of us OUR REAL TIME IN THE REAL WORLD.

The fourth point needed to understand about online marketing is: Search Engine Optimization, aka SEOwhich is widely believed to be the one and only non-pay- FREE - form of getting web traffic (YOU) to a merchant’s websites- also known as 'Organic' results. If a merchant wishes to increase the chance of their content/ announcements/ links being displayed (to YOU) on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) then these merchants must perform and maintain optimization. Optimizing a website consists of many factors and there are an abundance of ideas and techniques that are believed to be useful in getting the Search Engine's algorithm to display links to the website on the coveted 1st results page. Essentially, optimization means that each of the pictures and each of the paragraphs content attributes are specified in the backdrop to 'tell' search engine algorithm's what the website is about and what Content categories the website should be segmented into. While all that sounds somewhat practical, it really isn't and we'll tell you how it really works and how much it really costs all of US below.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING - SEM - The central insurgent.

Advertising in its simplest definition is to make announcements to inform or promote a product, idea or concept. It is a fair assumption that the best place any merchant wanting to get the word out is to try to make that announcement where the largest user base is located.

At the top of the field, Google commanded 87% of the paid search advertising budget share in the Americas in 2013 raking in $120M+ per day. In the year 2000 Google's founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page exclaimed in a dissertation that ads undermine the credibility of search engines: "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."

A more apt quote would be: "Inherently biased towards the Publishers and away from the needs of 99% of everyone else" since the search engines ' priority is to present its' list of advertisements. It behooves the engine to show any advertiser who purchased display space regardless of what their advertisement pertains to or, likewise, no matter how remotely related to what the user is searching for online. Surely their engines could perform the necessary calculations to display only local neighborhood announcements-- but enough of those are not likely to be in their inventory, at least not those that are the highest bids.

Another more apt quote would be: "The difficultly searching & evaluating experts, particularly through a very bias search engine, is insidious." There are so very many digital tools to aid users become capable of using the system. For example, Marketing Groups, Security and Antivirus protection systems, embedded scrapper tools, Analytics configurations, better targeting, extensions, traffic generation, to the distribution automation to and through multi channels or networks, etc. The difficulty of the system creates a matrix where mischief and mayhem incubate. There is a wellspring of new tech companies offering digital aides that in some way help 'work' in the search system, however, very few of these companies are adding any real value to the space. They are just offering different flavors of very similar 'solutions' and all of them are adding bottom line expenses imbibing in the same profitable foray as the behemoth publishing empire.

Though it is very difficult even for the experts to evaluate, their particularly insidious bias hasn't escaped everyone’s attention. Numerous and various attempts Have Been and Are Being made to bridge the gap caused by segmentation. A seemingly endless string of others catapulted into the limelight. Most notable was FatDoor, which pivoted to became Center’d. Center’d organized itself around three major areas: People, Places and Plans and then later became, The DealMap and then sold to Google where it was then was further dissolved, perhaps into one of the many attempts by Google itself. Google has been vigilantly working starting with 'Froggle' and then 'Google Places' and then 'Google Shopping’ and currently ‘Google Offers' which also has unsuccessfully been able to bridge the divide.

Google, Bing, Yahoo & the other Search Engines provide a valuable gateway for all of us to connect with a select few retailers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new to announce. As Publishers that segment their audiences to sell advertising space they are dividing their users, both retailers and consumers alike- poisoning the fruit of their own vine.

In summation, SEM can't work in the local environment as long as it favors only the advertisement's in their RTB inventory pool. As long as the system is setup to allow well financed non local conglomerates to engineer campaigns to overshadow small businesses attempts to overcome barriers to entry- specifically highest bids, there will never be enough local content

(Third point) In domain advertising consists of advertisements that are displayed within a website in or around the text. The advertisements can be individually selected by the website owner, but most likely they are selected by an automated system called RTB.

RTB, aka Real- Time Bidding is the third point that needs to be considered when attempting to understand the online marketing ecosystem. RTB is conceivably intertwined in every click YOU make on the web and therefore, may be equated to the ultimate engine. RTB is the primary algorithmic system that picks advertisements to display to YOU purportedly based on YOUR profile and YOUR preferences that match the highest bidder merchants' requested demographic specification of who should view their announcements. Merchants use keywords and keywords groups or phrases, along with numerous other variables (described below) and set their highest price point that they will pay each time it is viewed or click or further action is taken.

REAL TIME BIDDING - RTB - The target of our infection.

As stated above- Real- time bidding is the algorithm that picks which advertisements and links are displayed in almost every search on every website within a publisher’s network. Merchants hoping to get traffic (YOU) indirectly hire publishers such as Google, Bing or Yahoo through various affiliates such as marketing agencies, ad exchangers or ad brokers. Merchants specify keywords and keywords groups or phrases, along with numerous other variables (described below) which is intended to identify the segmented audience that the merchant suspects will benefit most from the advertisements. Merchants then set their highest price point that they will pay each time the advertisement is viewed or clicked or further action is taken.

The invasion of privacy is certainly a major concern for most of us in the real world, but somehow, is presumably more accepted in the web world. That being said, Convenience is synonymous with consumer targeting, but most of us should agree that we are actually being inconvenienced. At any rate, we aren't getting the digital due that’s been promised over and over again and our web browsing and online interactions haven't become much more personalized. The use of keywords and segmentation is essentially just quantifying and qualifying web users (US). Publishers essentially sell targeted audiences. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia said it best: “We are not their customers: we are their product. We- our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences- are what sells to advertisers.”

Going into more detail allows them to uncover information about you as a buyer that further segments you – and may provide the basis for a social selling approach and increasingly higher bids from advertisers suspecting that you'll buy whatever they are selling. Some collect information you expressly give them, like your credit card and telephone numbers. Others gather your personal data based on how and where you use their services. There are over 1500 data points which might include anything from device and browser versions to geographic information. And they don’t just gather demographic information; some of it gets really specific — think about your last search query or ad click. A read through most online privacy policies is enough to make your stomach acid curdle. They get your job title, personality traits, work problems and pain points, decision drivers and priorities, worldviews and values, technology usage, shopping habits, hobbies, perceptions, etc. It’s all “fair” game. –See Mayhem, terms Data Mining, Big Data, Privacy in the below text.

RTB is considered to be a marvel in web marketing and is hailed as the ultimate solution by publishers and ad brokers. When a web user (YOU) clicks on any indirect link the algorithm qualifies the user (YOU) in as many of the segments listed above as possible, then quantifies what highest bidder advertisements are mostly relevant and then plugs them into the page the user (YOU) are going to. These actions are performed almost instantaneously, so they call it real- time. But really, the advertisements are in a pool waiting to be qualified. Another oxymoron about RTB is that the page the user is trying to get to can't fully load until these highest bid advertisements are selected by the algorithm, which slows down the users (YOUR) browsing. --Hey, they're just milliseconds after all. Well, the selection takes milliseconds; however, loading them may take an extra second or two.

Here is a rare video simplifying Big Data publishing in Real Time Bidding. --- This video is not meant for consumers to watch. RTB for Publishers

Also worth mentioning:

When you are searching for a "grill (city)", RTB calculates that it is lunchtime and your location from your browser cookies, but it still pushes advertisements for 'sales' on charcoal and gas grills, cookbooks for sale and perhaps even from a hipster dentist advertising his "grill treatment" 3 states away. Sure RTB pushes those highest bid advertisements from 1 or 2 restaurants nearby- which is a far cry from the 50 or so restaurants in your 10 mile proximity.

How much time does it take you to sift through your 'relevant' results? See what Real Relevance in Real Time looks like.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - SEO - The masquerade dance of relevance

The notion that SEO allows a website to come up in the search results 'organically' or FREE ADVERTISING- IS ABSURD! Seemingly, the only expense is the time a technician takes for the initial optimization and the time it takes a technician to continuously update the attributes of new content on the site is preposterous.

SEO is just another marketing channel that follows the keyword archetype unabashedly forsaking each of US users. SEO is where highly skilled 'professionals' spend ample amounts of Real Time, costing merchants Real Money, to 'convince' a search engine algorithm (including SEM and RTB) that a websites content is both Relevant and Worthy of being pulled into view on the SERP under all Paid SEM and above every other competitor website in the world.

How these SEO professionals convince 'Worthiness' to the algorithm will astonish you. This is an unmeasurable Multi Billion dollara year industry fueled by tens of thousands of ideas on how to 'best the system' to get to the 1st SERP. The only way to qualify a technique or a vendor promising results is to quantify it, or them- by decrypting the insidious and inherently biased search matrix itself.

Now that you have a wider understanding of the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Real- time Bidding (RTB) from the texts above, you know that the Algorithm is based, at least in part, on keywords. A SEO professional, essentially embeds all the keywords that may indicate both YOU as their audience and the content that is visible to YOU when you visit their website. (Called Meta data and is not usually visible to YOU) These keywords are assessed, quantified and qualified right along with RTB highest bidder inventory.

The algorithm purportedly weighs and assigns a value for each of the following to surmise the optimized websites AUTHORITY:

The ratio of those keywords used in the meta data with the words within the viewable text on the website

For how much traffic the website gets, how long it’s' visitors stay on site, how long the site has been online, etc.

For the quantity of both inbound and outbound external links

For the quality of the external links using the very same qualifications above

The second part of optimization includes the accelerated establishment of Authority. Each of the criteria above can be garnered or manufactured, but both take Real Time and Real Money and these are (hopefully) inversely proportional. The more money spent, the quicker the establishment of authority. (Just a reminder of the note at the beginning of this text- there are tens of thousands of ideas and services on how to optimize a website's authority, so I am offering an educated guess.)

As I stated a moment ago, MONEY is the quickest and easiest way. By simply paying publishers to include advertisements in the SEM and RTB channels, traffic to the website will increase. Of course, the longer visitors stay, the more the visitor’s share the content and link back to the website, etc., etc. - The higher exponential gain of authority. Paid online advertising, though inexpensive in small doses, gets extremely costly in large part because of the disingenuous mayhem caused by SEM & RTB (poising the fruit of their own vine- as explained in the above reading). Typically, Paid Online Advertising (i.e. SEM & RTB) is cost prohibitive.

SEO is Optimization of a client’s content, so a Search Engine can identify content and display ‘appropriate’ content intermingled into the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) with the SEM content. There is a bit of hypocrisy here because SEO is often referred to as ‘Natural’ or ‘Organic’. There are many who still think of SEO as ‘Free’ because Optimization, once performed- should continuously sneak the content into the algorithm for display. SEO can be performed by anyone who has the time and capability to learn how to do it.

This is a misnomer, however, as SEO cannot be pinned down to any specified criteria, so it is impossible to know for a fact how to Optimize. Essentially, SEO is trial and error- based on hundreds of subjective tactics, so there is no way to quantify the real costs of effort and time. – While there is no definitive template for Optimization, there is a consensus that every text block, every picture, every video, etc., – both on and off a merchants’ website- must be marked up with attributes and keywords for Search Engine Robot Indexers to identify.

SEO Professionals worth their salt- charge between $75- $200 per hour or may offer packages for $3,000 - $10,000 for the initial Optimization of an already built merchant website and then charge a $400-$800 monthly maintenance fee. Sure there are less expensive alternatives, but you get what you pay for. And because the Algorithm is constantly being bombarded, tedious analytics and assuming metrics are the constant gauge in the ever mutating algorithm. The Algorithm can change and wipe out all previous optimizations with little or no notice.

Less expensive techniques- such as creating social network profiles, or creating blogs or videos and getting likes and followers that share the posts and visit the website. The time involved with this technique is substantial and there are likely to be costs associated with content creation and automated distribution of that content to each of the channels. And if the time has been taken to create and distribute said content, it may as well be used to push that content through paid advertising.

Buying a specific # of visitors from other websites, or cross sharing links, or purchasing mentions on social networks, or joining a click mine and I'll click yours network, etc. can all be purchased from fiverr, eBay and many other places relatively cheaply. A savvy SEO techie can purchase a 1 paragraph advertorial (an advertisement that doesn't look like an advertisement - i.e. a personal consumer review or comment) and robotically 'Spin' that paragraph into 30 different keyword rich paragraphs and then have those 30 paragraphs robotically rotated and posted on hundreds of sites (creating authoritative backlinks) for less than $50. It can take a few minutes or can be set to disperse them over a period of time. These may be frowned upon and seem dubious, but really- they are no more nefarious as the algorithm that they intend to best. You might even consider that these mechanisms are indeed a logical result of a broken system.

Each of these devices in the preceding paragraph, if assessed, detected and flagged by the algorithm, may detract from authority or even cause the website to be banned altogether. If you are following us up to this point, perhaps you can see the vulnerability this exposes to anyone with minimal skills wishing to exploit a competitor, having malice towards a brand or just to see if they can do it. (See Mayhem, Brandjacking, Spamvertising, Malvertising, Negative SEO below)

In closing

You might've noticed that each of the points above revolve around and are focused in on- YOU the user.

Local, specifically small businesses just cannot afford to compete. Even a basic website can be a great big expense. Not just money, but REAL TIME. They need to be updated often. Businesses can't just contract whoever is available; there are serious security and privacy issues they must protect. Even merchants with their own IT departments sometimes have to wait days or weeks to correct punctuation errors which are less of a priority than performing security patches, backups, scheduled maintenance, etc. At least it should be, but that might not be the case- which increases both the consumers and the merchants’ vulnerabilities.

As I said a moment ago, it is easy to get sidetracked about WHAT is pertinent. Or Where YOU might find merit. WHEN YOU search the internet it is already very difficult to know WHO YOU are listening to, or WHY YOU should heed the content in front of YOU. How often do YOU need to verify WHAT YOU just verified? The same result over and over again, leans us subconsciously towards authority in our minds. It is self-substantiating. Whether it is from multiple parties; different websites, different reviews or different commenters, or from one of the highest bidder advertisers, pushing detrimental competitor adverts- YOU NEVER KNOW.

Obviously there is some benefit to looking online or 97% wouldn't start our information gathering there. These adware websites are self-supporting - they are not relevant to you or the merchants in your neighborhood- they are about profits to their own digital spaces, which means they are concerned with their own digital traffic and to a much, much lesser extent real world foot traffic. But these systems are actually creating a web to capture your attention and put a net around your time. Everybody is paying attention to online traffic, skewing analytics until the sun comes up- but the only relevant metric needed is how many people are coming through the door or a confirmation of order sent.

Furthermore, the matrix is about to get larger and more tangled. This year, the .COM, .NET, .US, .INFO, etc. domain extensions have already started to evolve into 750 new extensions such as: .Miami, .Dance, .News, etc. Perhaps these extensions promise a greater organization of the web. But you can expect that there will be a lot of crossover with similar extensions, such as: .retail, .store, .buy or .contractor, .repair, .build, .fix- Right now, it’s all speculation and a huge 'land grab'. Most of the new extensions that are starting to be released are triple and quadruple the annual fees of what .COM is currently. In fact, as a business owner wanting to secure their company name in all of the extensions currently available across the web (approximately 200) would cost in excess of $30,000 per annum. That is a whole lot of money just to protect your company from search arbitrage. Of course, businesses can get ahead of this game by submitting a request and a bid for their companies own extension, such as: www.example.AdForUS instead of www.AdFor.US/example - Bids are starting at $100,000.

AdFor.US is the perfect user agent- we establish identity and thoroughly protect privacy by enabling a direct real time exchange of communication between consumers and neighborhood merchants for a mere $500 flat fee per year, per merchant location, enabling unlimited announcements that can be filtered by consumers in 5 clicks or less. 'Gaming the system' is no longer profitable as AdFor.US removes SEO, SEM & RTB thereby removing all the duplicitous mayhem and vulnerabilities created by those systems, such as the following in this list of terms and definitions:

How it works currently- Why the Internet is a Web of Confusion- Mayhem intro

The Merchants Burden - The Consumers Confusion