Advertising Annoyances
The following is an excerp from an article on PC World:
Interstitials; pop-ups; pop-unders; noisy Flash commercials; strobe-lit banner ads; video ads that load without user action... Just another day on the Web.
The idea of pushing advertising in exchange for free Web services has led to overcommercialization of the Web--a major turn-off for surfers. At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid. On cluttered Web pages, ads jostle against each other and vie for screen real estate with the content that visitors actually came to see. The result? Slower connection speeds, slower page loads, and far less user control over their browser.
Advertisements affect Web content, too. When sites measure the value of content by how many eyeballs it attracts to the ads, unusual, diverse, or niche content can get squeezed out in favor of more-reliably popular middle-of-the-road stuff. "I think in many ways, we have missed the potential of the Web--much like we did with television," says Mike Tinsley, a disappointed Web user in Columbus, Indiana. "When [the Web] was new, it held so much promise to be so useful for education, information, and even entertainment. However, much like TV, the Web has sunk to the lowest common denominator, and I'm not sure we can ever get it back," Tinsley says.
The ad-driven online content industry will continue to devise innovative, eye-catching, and obnoxious advertising formats, so things won't change for the better anytime soon. At the same time, browser makers and other software utility vendors may be able to offer some respite with features designed to restrain advertising annoyances. Browser producers like Microsoft and Mozilla should, by default, block animations or video ads from taking complete control of a Web page and obscuring the content a surfer is trying to view. At the very least, they should provide users an easy way to adjust the settings manually so as to block such intrusive annoyances.
