Ads Getting More Intrusive
from the you'll-wish-for-popups dept
Now that everyone is getting used to pop up ads and have figured out how to get rid of them, online advertisers are getting even more annoying and intrusive in trying to shove their ads into your daily surfing life. The latest is the increasing trend to run these ads that take over your browser window before you can actually view the content you came for. I don’t get it. Do these ads actually help in any way? As far as I’m concerned, they just piss me off and make me think negative thoughts about the company. The article does quote the remaining source of online sanity these days, Google, saying that they don’t see how these ads help the user have a better experience – and they will be sticking with their text ads.
Comments on “Ads Getting More Intrusive”
an example
Yahoo has recently added a new kind of advertising annoyance, the “please explicitly recognize our ad” interstitial web page. Click on a message in one of their Yahoo groups and on occasion — not every time, roughly every third time — the next page served has a HUGE ad box in the middle and a link above that reads “this is an advertising-supported site, please click here to continue”. You then click the link to go to your intended destination.
Just tell me, Yahooligans, how much you would like for me to pay you to NOT get any advertising as I surf the areas of your site I love to use (finance, mail, news, groups, games). Name the price and I’ll at least consider it. In the meantime, my eyeballs are feeling a little bit over-prostituted….
Who's fault
The first thing that comes to mind is that I have to wonder if this is a behavior that can be stopped by the local browser? I doubt we’ll ever see a company such as MicroSoft allow a user to filter such behavior, after all, MicroSoft must keep it’s browser functionality high for it’s other, corporate users.
Perhaps there is another browser out there that could learn the patterns advertisers are using, allowing us to choose what sort of “techniques” we want filtered out.
Yeuh
Re: Who's fault
Not a browser, but an addition thereto. Assuming you’re a Windows slave (last I knew, there weren’t versions for anything else), wander over to:
http://www.adsubtract.com
The mouse in this game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and those of us who just can’t take the constant barrage. Works as promised with IE and Netscape, but I can attest that as not promised, it works with Opera too. (You’re on your own a bit with the latter when it comes to tweaking settings, but if you know enough to use Opera, you can probably figure out the tweaks.)