Lousy Ads Are Ruing the Online Experience

He talked about this in more detail on their Ctrl-Walt-Delete podcast, and it's equally shocking and "well of course, they're dicks" types of reaction for me. I don't know what the solution for online ads are, but in podcasting I do like the way that Reply All has handled most of their ads by interviewing various people in the company and getting a more unique story about the company's brand, as opposed to giving all their podcasts the same ad-copy to read. I think Squarespace has done a decent job infiltrating just about every podcast with slightly different ads and tag lines, too. But I digress because I'm now talking about something different.

What are your ideas about the future of internet advertising? well thought out sponsored content?

 

The main reason I block ads is to prevent malware and browser hijackers. When you have so many different types of ads that totally lock down the browser playing loud alert messages and displaying fake blue screen error messages of course I'm going to block them. Personally I don't think ads are the problem, it's the amount of malicious ads out there that sites can easily display if they don't check the ad networks.

 

I just like clean pages and try and not to pay attention to ads as much as possible. Between the auto videos, the active ads, and the amount of them, it just gets to be encroaching and too much. I still try to avoid clicking on the ad hits in a Google search.

 

Walt is the man.

 

I just hate when I can't even make it through an article i'm reading without an ad hijacking my page and you try to click out of it, only to accidentally not hit the exact right spot and get taken to another page. This happens to me on a daily basis.

 

Any ad that pops up in the middle of the screen and covers whatever article you are trying to read should be banned; it is forcing the ad on us. Ads on the side of the page I can deal with, auto-playing videos I can just about tolerate, but ones that cover the full fucking page (and have the close button on a timer so it doesn't come up for 5 seconds or so) are invasive and incredibly frustrating.

 

Even with adblock there are some sites that try to get around that with pop ups. Sadly Google Chrome doesn't do a good enough anymore with blocking pop ups so I had to install a pop up blocking plug-in for safety concerns.

 

Which one do you use?

 

I'm also curious what you use. I'd add, there are so many webpages that don't even function anymore if they identify you're using adblock - which is a good way to stop me from coming back.

 

Has anyone seen an ad anywhere online that actually interested them in a product enough to follow through? It just seems like a waste of everyone's time and I don't understand the point. Sure a website might make some ad revenue but why shell out money for advertising that does nothing for your company?

 

I work in digital advertising and I can tell you the above 100% happens. Actual webpages/sites don't have much value to advertisers any more. The DATA of each site's userbase is what matters. Once they determine the type of user who visits the site, they can model their targeting to reach that user across the entire web.

On another note, I understand how annoying a lot of these ads are as I see them day in and day out. That being said, the internet has conditioned everyone (myself included) that content should be produced for free and given away for free. That's simply not the reality so unless we're all willing to pay for things we like to get on the web, be prepared for ads to get even more annoying.

 

@KyleK @Michael Schmidt I'll send you guys a PM.

No, not really. Yeah, neither do I. I think if anything (and this is more so for areas like tv/sites similar to youtube and twitch it would be better if the ads worked themselves into the show instead of interrupting the show. Similar to movies where they may have a Coca Cola truck, or even a scene at a Dunkin' Donuts. It keeps you in the action and doesn't annoy you. Honestly, I think the best course of revenue for sites would be to either have merchandise (where you can buy shirt, toys, and other junk to help support the site) or like how this site does it, and have paid incentives to help support this site (like how if you pay, you can get a black background). The traditional ads just don't make sense, especially with jerks out there who thinks it's funny to infect people's computers with dangerous malware, and other downloaded garbage. And if not for the Maleware, then there are advertisers that don't care, and just put up annoying content that distracts from the website (with either loud annoying ads, or stupid pop ups). Companies that do that with annoying ads, I just tend to avoid because of how obnoxious their ads can be.