Thursday, November 01, 2007

Loud Ads

I thought we were past this. I thought you had realized that if you make ads that make noise, you damage both your own rep and that of the site unfortunate enough to host you.

I also thought we were past the "mouseover is consent" days. As it turns out, I have to mouseover banners over the course of ordinary navigation. When your ad pops up in page-blocking, loud assholery, you not only make me personally boycott your products, but you also usually drive me away from the site I wanted to visit. This is especially true if you're advertising smiley icons and shouting "HELLOOOO!" at me. If I ever meet anyone who says, "Yeah, I'm Bob. I market smileys on the internet," I'm going to kick him someplace where he is delicate. Like the medulla oblongata. I may have to peel away some layers to get there, but it'll be worth it.

Now here's a new kind of irritating ad: I just caught up on the last two weeks of Zero Punctuation, which I love. Except now there are banner ads IN THE MOVIE.

They're not only resurrecting the old dumbass ways of doing things, they're inventing new dumbass ways to do things.

FUCK them.

3 comments:

maltezefalkon said...

Yahtzee is a friggin public service, and the only reason to go anywhere near the Escapist. Mucking it up with ads is just wrong.

Craig Perko said...

I think I may agree. Let me think about it for a while... ;)

Patrick said...

While I'll likely depend on ads to generate revenue in the near future, I do share your criticisms. I think the current model of advertising on the internet is largely obtuse and counter-productive, and instead should be more involved with the interactivity itself, or at least more mellow.