Cool idea, but how does it work against spambots? That's the whole point of CAPTCHA. It's not supposed to be a place to add marketing copy. It's supposed to ensure actual humans are using your service. This seems like it's going to be incredibly simple to hack given that the letters are crisp and easily read. I do see that the example CAPTCHA "ads" differ from company to company, but there are still basically 3-4 plain text words in the graphic. If I were making a spambot, I would need to try submitting it 3-4 times until I find the word that works. Too easy...

If I ever encountered a site that used this, I would probably just leave rather than subject myself to this gimmick. I have no desire to feel like a rat getting its reward of "continuing" in exchange for memorizing the highest bidder's slogan. I'm doing the website a favor by signing up, and if that's the way they are going to start our relationship, it's a signal that I shouldn't want to sign up to begin with.

That's just me, though, the same person that only fills in 1 of the 2 words in a captcha correctly. I tend not to respond well to authority.

Oh goody, combining my two favorite things in the world: Captchas and Advertising!

It's good for the user: They get all the respect of a common parrot!

It's good for the site: They piss off their users!

It's good for the advertisers: They get to associate their brand with the single most irritating part of the modern web next to advertisements!

It's Win/Win/Win!

This is not a new idea. http://adcaptcher.com/ is at least one year old and it's already being used on a couple of sites.

I thought the idea was really cool and appreciated not having to decipher warped text to fill out a CAPTCHA until I saw this example: http://www.solvemedia.com/images/uni.jpg

Your site would have to provide a LOT of value to make me want to watch a video to sign up for it (or, heaven forbid, to just comment anonymously).

The author (title) is right; if Solve Media took over the CAPTCHA market, I would never look at CAPTCHA's again and likely not register with their customer's. I browse without ad-block extensions, but that in turn means I subconsciously ignore ad-like, site elements, which would include Solve Media's CAPTCHA.

I'm curious of Solve Media's affect on their customer's conversion rates.

Hah, brilliant from a business standpoint. It's an ad platform running a captcha service as a front.

I've got to wonder how well it will work, though: at worst, a bot could just OCR and respond with random phrases from the ad, and get what? A 10% success rate? That's astronomical compared to captchas. And to be less annoying, they'll have to be more readable and simpler and essentially hand-made: all of which contributes to easier bot attacks. So we have: hand-made + bot-vulnerable = more-expensive + not-a-solution.

Not that captchas are foolproof. There's quite a large business in human-botnets to break captchas.

That video is quite good, though. I love their captcha example.

I just -love- that video pitch http://vimeo.com/15041038 by Epipheo Studios http://www.epipheostudios.com/

Publishers, I'm guessing, want to avoid SPAM without inconveniencing their customers. This idea seems to be pitching the latter (making it easy for the customer) but says nothing about the former (SPAM!). Apart from the other issue of showing someone else's brand as part of a sites conversion process, I think the fact that it does not talk about the spam issue might be a concern for publisher.

Does anyone know if whether having a 3rd party logo in the middle of a form decreases or increases completion?

Wasn't there a startup doing this with videos? Video + simple question

Very clever.

Absolutely great idea. There can be some technical difficulties, like not enough different ads in case of bigger popularity, but I think they can be overcome.