Vibrant Media

[Mousesk]

Have any of you guys heard of these wonderful people? Well if you've been to geek.com, or computing.net I'm sure you have seen their handywork. What they do is place ads on words in the webpage you are veiwing. This is so users get a targeted marketing messages presented to them in a completely unobtrusive manner :rolleyes:

C'mon! How can they think anyone would like that? It just reminds me of some piece of spyware (I forget the name now) that did the exact same thing. The only difference is, with the spyware you can potentialy uninstall or remove it. This crap you can't. I did email the company asking how we can 'opt out' of this service being shoved down our throat. We'll see what they say.....

[Reverend]

We were gonna use Vibrant Media here,but because the code they use scans your page content and then has to turn keywords it finds into links,it can have a detrimental effect on page loading.

I think their minimum contract is 12 months,but i could be wrong.

[Mousesk]

:eek: :eek: :eek:
I'm very happy you didn't! I wouldn't have wanted to stop coming here. I'm sorry, but it just reminds me too much of spyware. If I need a product or something I will go find it. I really don't think I need to be informed about more junk to waste my money on.

[Mousesk]

Here's a good article about them.
http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/7043838859548149/

I found something better, here's a way to block a BUNCH of popups/ads/spyware and other 'goodies'. It's actually a hostfile that this site made to make a request to a shady place (vibrant media) go to the local computer and when it doesn't find it displays nothing! So its faster too! You can read about it here too...
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

[Mousesk]

Ah-ha! I finally found a way to get rid of those crappy ads! I use firefox so the hosts file thing didn't work for me, but I did find an 'Adblock' extension for firefox! :-D
First gohere (http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#adblock) to get the extension, then (after you restart firefox) you will get an 'Adblock' icon/word in the bottom right corner of the screen. Then the next time you go to a site with that intellitxt junk, click on the 'Adblock' icon/word and find "http://itxt2.us.intellitxt.com/...." and block it. Or just add "http://itxt2.us.intellitxt.com/*" under 'Tools' -> 'Extensions' -> and find 'Adblock' then click 'Options' (add new filter). Hope this helps anyone else that has been as frustrated with this most annoying form of 'advertising'.
Oh, and I would also recommend emailing the webmaster of the site using intellitxt and tell them (politely) that you won't be visiting thier site because they use vibrant media(even if you still do with this adblock). If enough people tell enough webmasters, then maybe we can make enough of a dent in vibrant media's sales that they go under. That way we won't have to go through all this just to view webpages how we want to. I hope you find this helpful!
Bobby