Adverts Dilemma
One of my biggest pet peeves is animated advertisements on the web. I'm talking about Flash ads that you can find on almost any popular website. The less annoying ones animate some text or logo upon load and then stop moving. More annoying are the ads that continue to animate as long as the web page is displayed. The most annoying animated ads have rapid movement or flashing animations.
Advertising pays the bills, and I have little problem with it as long as the reader understands that the website has sponsors, and their sponsors can apply editorial pressure on the content. The same can be said of BackingIn.com.
I use Google AdSense advertising service on BackingIn.com in the hopes of one day making a profit. I try to stay true to my opinions when writing posts, but there may come a day when I face a dilemma. For example, in the future, I may have car dealership as a sponsor. I begin to write a post bashing a product that they sell, but before publishing it I wonder if my post will cause me to lose that sponsor. What do I do? Do I push the 'publish' button? I actually hope to face that problem in the future because it will mean that people are visiting my site and it is generating some revenue, but I will burn that bridge when I come to it.
Back to the animated ads dilemma. Google recently pushed an animated ad to BackingIn.com. It wasn't that annoying. It animated once then stopped, but I now produce a product that contains a form of advertising that I despise. What to do? AdSense does not have an option to choose animated vs. static image ads. I could go back to just allowing Google to push text ads to BackingIn, but the image ads pay much more per click.
I am very interested in what others think about advertising on the web. I'm pretty sure we all hate 'pop up' ads and 'fly in' ads (ads that animate over the page that you're reading...you have to find the little 'x' to close it...), but what about the animated ads? Am I the only one that can't stand them?
January 16th, 2010 - 11:53
My brain has adapted to seek out content and block fluffy jibba-jabba. So, really, web ads are useless, for me at least. One can develop an immunity to anything, can we be immune to page clutter or advertising?
January 18th, 2010 - 12:07
I hate that ad with that seriously hair guy or that troubled baby dancing in his car seat! I even found an ad advertising blues clues potty seats! IT DRIVES ME UP THE WALL!!
January 18th, 2010 - 12:37
The worst are the ads with sound, but I just keep my speakers turned off. There is a monkey that likes to jump and down to keep me informed of low interest rates that grinds my gears.