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eftychia at 04:34pm on 2009-12-05My computer crashed last night, so I reloaded a bunch of browser tabs I'd had open before the crash. On one LiveJournal entry, when I went to that tab for the first time after the reload, a Best Buy ad showed up blocking my view of 95% of the window (with the rest greyed out), a jingle started playing, and the "close this and continue" button had a message saying I could only close it after it had played at least four seconds.
I was logged in already at the time.
A banner ad here, a margin ad there, I can skip over even if they do annoy me when I notice them. This trend of popping up ads that block my view of the content of the page is something I've been meaning to rant about (it gives me the message, "we really don't want you to read what's on this page," or possibly, "our webmaster fucked up").
Showing ads to other people, on my content, without paying me for doing so, was the reason I stopped posting complete entries on LJ and started posting fake-cut-tags linking to whole entries elsewhere (mostly Dreamwidth, also InsaneJournal and others). Paying LJ not to show my ads to my readers would've been an option if the reason I'd reverted to a free account in the first place hadn't been in protest of other policies I wanted to see changed before I gave them more money. This most recent tactic, if it persists, may finally be enough to chase me away from reading LJ (and reinforces my opinion that taking my content elsewhere was wiser than subjecting my readers to ads LJ serves). Seeing a banner ad before the comments when reading an entry by a user with a 'Plus' account is one thing. Stopping me from even seeing the entry until I've turned off my speakers and waited four seconds (at least in the browser I'm using at the moment, the clock starts ticking when I make that tab current, not as soon as the page finishes loading in the background) goes too far. I realize that the whole point is that banner ads are too easy to ignore, but here's the thing: if you make the ad foreground instead of background, its effectiveness goes from not-as-positive-as-you'd-like, to negative, or at best zero: you don't get me to pay more attention, you convince me to go read something else.
And yes, this ad did piss me off enough to warrant taking the time to write five paragraphs about it and to make an exception to my links-on-LJ-text-goes-elsewhere policy because I want to make sure my friends who only bother to lick those links when they look especially interesting (there must be a few, at least) see this too. But the basic idea is quite simple regardless of temper: make it sufficiently annoying or inconvenient to read, and I'll find something else to read instead. It's a big web; I'll find something else to read.
Read this / comment on it at blurty insanejournal crazylife journalfen livejournal scribbld
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It's still not yet at that point, but this is One More Thing.
Sunflower
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Fox has been getting into preroll ads, but doesn’t have the technical chops to pull it off. You’ll click on the content, be forced to watch an unrelated LOUD ad that’s half the length of the content (a dismal ratio), then the video you wanted doesn’t even show. Yeah, that’ll bring me back. The Windows 7 ads are at least unintentionally amusing: “Windows 7 simplifies Dollhouse by noting pretty faces and boobies and nothing else”. Yep, that’s the sort of simplification I expect from MICROS~1.
Nickelodeon, aside from their host of broken links, has the same problem (I suspect they buy their broken software from the same place). Gotta get the kids accustomed to ad barrage early, I suppose. Me, I’m not accustomed to it, and flee from the blasts of puffery. However, I did discover something useful: if you add
?adfree=trueto the URL of (some) nick.com pages, the ads go away.I tried watching television without the benefit of TiVo a few months ago, and it was astonishingly frustrating. Little bits of content adrift in a sea of bullyragging jingoism. Useful if I had a chronic case of recurrent periodic explosive diahrrea (rather like the broadcasters).
Then there are bizarre malware sites designed to get search engine hits. I tripped over one with the title “infra red christmas tree lights” (an odd concept at best) and wondered why anyone would bother putting up a bunch of randomish vaguely-related text (“Croatian Christmas ornaments” just doesn’t seem like a common search term to me). Further investigation revealed that it was some sort of malware site (I’m glad I have some good anti-malware measures in place).
More and more sites will have ad content that covers up what I’m trying to view. I know it’s canon in the ad industry that annoying = good, but it ain’t true for me. I’ll just blacklist your site. Some people suggest using various ad blocking software (there’s some pretty effective stuff out there too), but I just DNS your entire domain to a black hole (there are also some good tools available for this trick), so you never get another chance to annoy me.
The same goes for any site that makes noise without warning me. Shut up or I’ll shut you up. Permanently.
Some sites have content I value enough to put up with a certain amount of annoyance. SourceForge is one of these. Fortunately, their ad vendor’s software is broken in a different way, so the ads don’t show, just a “From Our Advertisers” banner with nothing under it.
Obviously, there’s a mind-boggling amount of money in advertising. And they’re always trying to squeeze out more. So the quality and variety of ads declines, and the density increases. Apparently while the money spent on advertising continues to rise, it’s spread more and more thinly. The problem is the content providers are (duh) greedy, and want to sell more and more ad space. But the source of advertising revenue (customer’s pocketbooks) isn’t keeping pace, so costs must go down. So they’re selling more and more ad time/space for less and less. The poor consumer gets more and more repetitive drivel, and the promised profits never materialize.
It could work the other way, of course. Content providers could sell less ad space, and charge more for it (and be more selective about what they’ll carry). Customers would spend about the same amount of money, and the overall ad cost would be about parity. But each ad minute would be more effective. Relieved of the burden of filling all those ad minutes with either cheap ads or the same one over and over, advertisers could concentrate on making better ads again. The customers would be attracted by fewer, better ads and abandon the ad-saturated competitors in droves (assuming the content provider comes up with worthwhile content4).
A person could build a wildly-profitable, world-class network in less than a year this way, for under a billion dollars in startup funds.
1 The ”free“ products cost a couple bucks in ”shipping“ so they can get your credit card number. You’ll get charged $85 by one company, $58 by the other, and $10 more from a “nutritional” company they also sell your card info to. These will be recurring charges.
2 Oprah and Rachael Ray must like these clowns, as they aren’t getting sued for misuse of their names. Another interesting wrinkle is the “before” photo was stolen, and the woman whose photo it is is quite unhappy about it.
3 This is the “Google Money Tree” scam. You pay $1 up front (again, so they get your CC number). After your 7 day “free” trial is up, they smack you with a $71.20 charge for “continued use of the software” and $78.64 for their “training program”. Every month. Happily, Google is going after these guys.
4 Middleman, anyone?
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I can install the ad blocking tools for each browser I use, on each machine I surf from ... or I can use my DNS server as a sledgehammer. So far, doing things your way has been easier.