Here’s an email I just sent to the Sydney Morning Herald online:
Hi,
Just wanted to let you know that the insidious, annoying, inline pop over ads that feature on the front page of smh.com.au have now driven me from using your site any more. I’d much rather use news.com.au and abc.net.au/news rather than putting up with the frustration and distraction of your needlessly obstrusive advertisements.
When will the online media learn that frustrating users does not engender their goodwill toward you or your sponsors and in fact has quite the opposite effect?
Sincerely,
Chris
I just don’t understand the tactic. If this type of thing was possible with printed newspapers would they do it and would their readership put up with it?
Hey mate,
news.com.au don’t seem to be much better, I get the same although not as frequent as smh
Cheers
Never seen them myself, Adblock Plus is a thing of joy.
I was just saying to someone yesterday that I’m fed up with the Herald, and that it’s not worth reading anymore, though that was more about the drop in editorial standards, and the shameless click-chasing of the online version.
Thank goodness for Crikey.
We ran into this a lot when I worked at News (surprise!). The problem is that most of the research shows that such ads have a very high interaction rate. Clients get very excited about high interaction rates – that means somebody paid attention to our ad- yay!
The vast majority of such studies count clicking the ‘close’, ‘skip’, ‘cancel’ buttons etc as “interaction”.
You can see where this is going. Independent research studies have no hope against the swathe of reports funded by those with a stake in the market. And, unfortunately, large impressive reports that use the most up-to-date business jargon and pretty graphs always seem to be of more worth to clients than simple examples drawing back to *their* own experience of hating popups.
Even better, when your entire business model is so comprehensively flawed that you depend on ever decreasing sales of ever cheaper display advertising, there is no way you can afford to drop the highest priced item in your catalogue. It would hasten to the decline by far far too much. Big media are playing a stalling game right now – hoping they can come up with a workable business model before they really do run out of money.
A pop up may seem frustrating and annoying for some but at the same time could prove immensely helpful to others…its not posible to make everyone happy…but hey thats just an opinion.
@steve: While I realise that there are many technologies I can employ to combat this scourge, why should I go to the effort and spend the CPU cycles to stop this behaviour from the content provider themselves?
@SEO Pune: I’m sorry but I don’t see how an advertisement that obscures the critical content of a web page could be immensely helpful to anyone. It’s like arguing that a poke in the eye could be immensely helpful to some people. I guess some people might not like having eyes?
While going through a content, if its more like the content is coming in between the pop ups…definitely not acceptable..but if there are few pop ups while you go through your material…it should not be alarming…it is just a means of conveying information to people about certain products and services…which by the way, many of them are intrested in.
I agree with Christopher – popup ads are incredibly annoying on the web, especially in lightbox style divs which are (I think?) impossible to prevent unless you switch off javascript.
I’m interested in *why* we find them so annoying or why they are more annoying than other forms of advertisement delivered via other media.
It is highly likely that you are more eloquent than I, so apologies in advance for my poor writing.
I think that somewhat intrusive advertisements have been tolerated well enough on TV for years. Sure, now we have TiVo and online TV which (until recently) has eliminated commercials, but free to air television and even some pay/cable TV have ads frequently.
I’m trying to put my finger on why intrusive ads over text – particularly when delivered on the web – are more annoying than on TV or radio. Is it simply the medium itself? Are timed ads, planned and scheduled into a TV show more palatable than the advertisements covering critical content on the web? Is it because when we read on the web, the popup catches us mid sentence and interrupts us? In text at least we can recover, we can re-read to establish our train of thought. I’m sure less time is wasted closing an ad than waiting for a series of commercials to finish on TV and our program to resume.
We have plenty of ads in magazines and newspapers and we turn past entire pages, wading through the junk to find our stories without even thinking, but on the web it seems to evoke much more angst.
Is it because we would traditionally sit with a magazine or a newspaper for a much shorter period than the current generation spends on the web (lets face it, it is a LOT of time). Or are we more vocal? Maybe we care more about our time, those of us in the younger generations that happen to use the web so much. If we read ye olde newspapers more often would we take the time to write a letter of complaint about the number and placement of adverts there? Or the timing and length of TV ads?
Not to dismiss the purpose or value of Christopher’s post at all, but could it even be that the medium for the *complaint* is contributing to the vocalisation of the issue, rather than indicating an increase in severity? It is so easy to, in a moment of frustration, push an email or a blog post out to the world, where the time it takes to write a letter and post it would normally either put one off or see one’s resolve wane enough to toss it in the bin rather than send it.
I have little problem with ads placed down the side of a website (though I find moving ads annoying at times), or even placed as a break in the middle of some stories. But aside from the hijacking of stats as described by Lachlan, I fail to see the need for the popup ads at all.
As I said, I am not very eloquent and I guess I have thrown more questions than answers out there, but hey. I’m in the desert and at altitude and I’m blaming that at the moment 😛
(Also apologies for spelling / punctuation issues, I’m trying to get used to a Spanish keyboard)
Don’t worry, Fairfax won’t be bothering you much longer. As well as screwing their readers, they screw their customers the advertiser.
Have a look at the source of any Fairfax page and notice the refresh every 3 minutes. That means an “impression” of Fairfax is meaningless, because it could just be that someone opened the SMH home page and went to lunch.
Our impression-to-clickthrough ratios on Fairfax were about what you’d expect, given this. We don’t advertise with them any more, because Fairfax doesn’t deliver customers!