Monday, March 24, 2008

A simple web ad request

Dear web ad makers,

Stop making stupid ass annoying banner ads. You know the ones I'm talking about. Like the one with the busty girl with a giant spider crawling up her blouse - and then she smiles at the viewer when the spider stops moving to tell you about low interest rates.

I get it - you need to capture our attention. Like with an animated referee who looks like he's blowing his whistle while waving his arms at you. You want me to look at your ad. But do you really think that hurting my eyes with your 4 frames of animation are going to make me "stop and take your survey"?

How about the ones where if my mouse drifts over, you expand your ad to block my view of the story so you can tell me about weight loss pills. If you were just at the side, I'd see you. Really I would. You don't have to get in my fucking way. If you were a guy in the theater pulling the same crap, I'd start flicking Junior Mint filling at the back of your head, so when you finally noticed your hair would be covered in minty snot like stuff. But you're just an ad, so I can just click the X or refresh the page and hope you go away.

And remember how much I hate your product. Whatever it is.

I don't install ad block software. I could, but I just haven't. I can usually ignore the "Punch the Monkey" or "Scariest Video" flashing in a way that would put me into a seizure.

Just - stop it. Look at Google. Do they annoy the fuck out of people? No. They don't. And they've made billions. With a B. Because people can look at them and actually go "Huh - diet pill. Sounds interesting."

It's interesting that as soon as Microsoft won the bidding to host ads on Digg, these annoying ass advertisements started. Hm - Microsoft and annoyance. Why am I not surprised?

2 comments:

Matthew Gallant said...

If these Internet banner ads are bothering you I would strongly recommend installing Adblock. It's your monitor, your computer and your time, you have the right to block obnoxious content from being displayed.

Adblock also lets you selectively block ads. You can choose to still display Google ads, or ads on certain websites because you'd like to support them. You can also right click on any ad you don't want to see again and block it permanently.

Web browsing shouldn't be a frustrating experience, that's why nerds came up with Firefox :D

John Hummel said...

@Matthew:

I get where you're coming from. I guess my thing is I don't mind ads around the article, since that's how people pay for content - and I want them to have that.

I just object to stupid ones. But if you can be selective about it, perhaps that's the way to go. Either that, or get a Flash block extension, since 99% of the time it's stupid Flash stuff.