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The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

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Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#71

Post by flavio81 »

minikomi wrote: post #14

+---------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | Don't want to miss out on more great | I thin| |olution must be tha| comments like this? | want to use .. Per| |cro payments aren't| +----------------------------------------------+ | one day become| | | | -- we can only h| | SIGN UP FOR OUR GREAT EMAIL DIGEST! | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | I hat…

True story:

This happened in my country, on the major/most important newspaper. They changed their mobile version of the news paper to the following:

Each time you clicked on a news article, you started to read the article, as usual. Meanwhile, in the background, an advertisement was being fetched. Then, about 5 seconds later, an advertisement that took the FULL phone screen appeared (mind you, many times this was a video, so it also made noise). There was no way to cancel this until, about 3 seconds later, a "CONTINUE READING" button appeared at the top.

So you press the "continue reading" button, and the dreaded ad dissappears, but you are brought to the top of the article (so you have to find again where you left off).

They have since removed that annoying UI behavior. However, another one is still at place: While you read the article, 15% of the bottom area of the screen was taken by a notification/advertising bar; and 10% of the top area was taken by a navigation bar. So the actual area for reading the article was rather narrow.

See for yourself if you're on a mobile phone: http://www.elcomercio.pe (click on a news article)

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#72

Post by cynoclast »

flavio81 wrote: post #70
minikomi wrote: post #14

+---------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | Don't want to miss out on more great | I thin| |olution must be tha| comments like this? | want to use .. Per| |cro payments aren't| +----------------------------------------------+ | one day become| | | | -- we can only h| | SIGN UP FOR OUR GREAT EMAIL DIGEST! | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | I hat…

Don't forget to make the "x" as small as possible, unclickable by anyone that doesn't have 20/20 eyesight or really good precision with the mouse.

God this bullshit. On ads, they know accidental ad clicks will get them more revenue so they're incentivized to make people's lives difficult.

Fuck the ad industry.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#74

Post by dhimes »

minikomi wrote: post #14

+---------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | Don't want to miss out on more great | I thin| |olution must be tha| comments like this? | want to use .. Per| |cro payments aren't| +----------------------------------------------+ | one day become| | | | -- we can only h| | SIGN UP FOR OUR GREAT EMAIL DIGEST! | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | I hat…

I'm getting this on fucking cable now. Seriously, Verizon Fios pops up these goddamn ads and we pay north of $300/month for their services. That is just obnoxious, and there is no way out. There's not enough of a free market to do anything.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#75

Post by e40 »

dhimes wrote: post #74
minikomi wrote: post #14

+---------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | Don't want to miss out on more great | I thin| |olution must be tha| comments like this? | want to use .. Per| |cro payments aren't| +----------------------------------------------+ | one day become| | | | -- we can only h| | SIGN UP FOR OUR GREAT EMAIL DIGEST! | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | I hat…

I'm getting this on fucking cable now. Seriously, Verizon Fios pops up these goddamn ads and we pay north of $300/month for their services. That is just obnoxious, and there is no way out. There's not enough of a free market to do anything.

This is what drives people to torrent TV shows.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#76

Post by sundvor »

bumblebeard wrote: post #17
sundvor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some great IT related ads using the Brave advertising network ads, on Brave. Really didn't mind them. (Disclaimer: I've only just started using Brave).

I haven't tried Brave but that sounds like a good development. I still don't really like being advertised to but if it's relevant or at least easy to ignore then I don't mind either. I guess that puts me at about a 4 on their scale.

The default setting in Brave is no ads. I actively had to make the change to get the Brave network ones. I really liked that.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#77

Post by bigbugbag »

squarefoot wrote: post #60

Most of them don't seem to realize how nagging users scale so badly so that it gets the opposite results (eg. driving people away). Just think if every page out there asked the user to signup to some services... this would make the Internet less usable than using pigeons. Why? because nagging users cannot scale. An user might accept to click a couple banners every dozen different servers he/she visits daily, but what…

> The answer is that the practice must be abandoned because it does not scale.

Actually and sadly it's more along the lines of "The answer is that the practice must be abandoned by others but not us because it does not scale."

My take is that I just disable javascript (though some browser make it harder to do it) and skip the websites which fail at understanding the concept of a webpage and require javascript to display content.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#78

Post by bigbugbag »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #59
visarga wrote: post #13

One of my favorites: modal ad, with large "Learn More" button to follow the ad, and a minuscule "x" button to get to the content, as if seeing the actual content was an afterthought.

I always wondered why they even put the "x" there.

Probably so they can track who clicked the "x" vs who used the esc key vs who clicked outside.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#79

Post by bigbugbag »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #18

I hate instant modal popups with a passion. Whenever I get one of those obnoxious modals I try my best to boycott the company and promote alternatives, assuming there's any. When this trend initially started popping up I'd close the modal and read the article, but I've grown increasingly intolerant. Now I close the article immediately unless the content is really important.

It's about as annoying as the classic popup, to the point that browsers include a pop up blocking mechanisms and settings.

Now the popup lives inside the window powered by javascript and the browsers have yet to do something about it so I'm simply disabling javascript.

Re: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

#80

Post by bigbugbag »

Coincoin wrote: post #10
Macha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the two things that really piss me off are: 1. I scroll down, read the article a bit, move to scroll again, and end up clicking an ad that has just popped into existence (Cynical reason: The delay improves their CTR and hence revenue. Less cynical reason: They were too optimistic in how fast their ad would load on my mobile connection). 2. I click your page and it starts playing noise. It doesn't even have to b…

3. The modal window is too big which pushes the tiny close button outside the screen and makes it impossible to close.

Try using your escape key, disabling script and reloading page, using wallabag[1] to read the page, editing the DOM to remove the popup.

[1]: https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en

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