Slashdot Mirror
Salon Goes For Annoying Jump-Through Ads
macsforever2001 writes: "It looks like Salon is going to try to ram ads down our throat in a very offensive manner according to this Yahoo article. Now they won't directly link to articles, but instead link to a Web Ad which then links to the article you want. I think Slashdot needs a new category just for Web Advertising." Not as if web ads weren't already becoming more annoying, but the companies that run Web ads are probably as interested in ads that people don't hate as you are in not seeing the awful ones. What can we tell them?
This bothers me less than popups. They have to do something for revenue. I can live with it.
For me, the most effective ads are those that are entertaining/interesting regardless of the product and/or about something I want more info on... this applies to billboards, televison and the web.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I use Netscape and have disabled pop-ups and pop-unders. But how can I disable something like this? I think it's not possible.
I'll just have to keep surfing sites that don't do this kind of stuff. Ads are not for me anyway. I don't buy on impulse and the banner is more than enough to carry the message.
But I do have a question: are more annoying ads more effective? Did people really start buying more of that useless X10 stuff?
This just isn't cool or fair.
Companies that offer content over the web need to make money somehow. You won't pay a subscription for their content... at least not enough of "you."
You see ads in magazines and newspapers and you accept them. Sometimes you paid for the paper/mag and sometimes just the ads float the costs.
First banner ads are annoying, then pop unders, now this. boo fricken hoo. Do you WANT these people to go out of business or what? Banner ads often don't generate enough money since people don't click them anymore. They needed to come up with something new to interest potential advertisers.
When you watch the Simpsons or StarTrek reruns you get ads forced right into your content. You get that content for FREE so you can't complain too much... if they didn't put in those ads you wouldn't get your TV shows.
Maybe when you visit a website it should display nothing but ads for every ~60 seconds out of 15 minutes... like TV only a lower commercial/program ratio.
Don't like that idea? Then visit www.quityourbitchen.com
What really puzzles me is that these intrustive ads clearly do anger readers, and don't seem to work very well...yet this arms race of distracting ads continues unabated.
The reason for this fact should be obvious. The only feedback available from an ad is positive feedback: if you click the link, the advertiser knows it. They don't know why you clicked it-- maybe it was for a product you liked, or maybe it was an accident on your part. But the advertiser knows you clicked it, so another tick mark is added to that ad's score column.
If you don't click on the ad... nothing happens. The advertiser has no way of knowing whether you didn't click because you're behind a filtering proxy, or because you were offended by the ad, or because your browser crashed. There's no negative feedback mechanism here at all.
Maybe if web ads were focus-grouped like TV commercials are, advertising companies might have a better idea of how the public at large is reacting to their ads.
On the other hand, if somebody could somehow demonstrate that pop-under (or whatever) ads actually have a measurable negative impact on company revenues, that'd be another story.
Stop reading salon.com.
Paying them to become a premium member to make the annoyances go away is rewarding them for bad behavior.
Don't get me wrong, I liked salon.com's reporting, it was quite good. But when they shifted to being essentially a pay service, that's when I stopped reading them.
There's a distinctive difference between "it's no longer free, but we'll let you sample some of the articles" and "we're going to irritate the heck out of you until you pay up and make us stop." Unlike most sites, they didn't distinguish between which articles required premium access and which didn't (although I just looked and sometime recently they started doing that). They had many irritating editorials basically accusing their readers of being deadbeats. And all along the attitude was increasing belligerent, "start subscribing or we'll make the ads more annoying."
There are other good news web sites, with better advertising/funding models, like economist.com. They'll get my money if they ask nicely. Salon.com started trying to extort it, so I left.
Either put up with the ads, or skip the site. I don't read NYTimes articles more than once every month or two. I haven't seen anything worth reading from them that doesn't show up on another, less annoying site, sooner or later. The exceptions (for me at NYT) are the articles I really want to read now.
Pity; Salon did have some good stuff on occasion.
No, I don't want Salon to go away--*something* has to remeain to make slashdot look like serious journalism.
Then again, maybe I shouldn't be so harsh--I've never heard any other editor admit that they used a single source, knowing of a prior perjury conviction and an axe to grind against the target of the story, and explain it away on the basis "it's ok because republicans are evil." . . .
[yes, I really did see this in an interview on one of the cable news channels after they ran one of their lap-dog pieces trying to refocus attention during the impeachment.]
So they make you read advertising on the way--the content of an ad is less biased and more truthful, anyway . . .
hawk
It should be interesting to see how this makes search results change for webcrawling spiders and such. When I search for Frito Lay, is it going to list a (possibly defunct) web page advertisement on Salon?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
For sites I hit daily, like that one and this one, I'd gladly fork over money to get rid of the annoying ads! I just hope people don't start abusing (sharing) their login ID/Passwords. I'm sure some simple scripting would ferret out those abusers for appropriate treatment.
Check this out if you think the ad on Salon.com is annoying.
You can always pay up, mooch. Or you can just read the 95% drivel other places in the hopes that you will find the gem amongst the gravel.
I don't know about you, but I value my time enough to see that it is worth paying for some things.
Yesterday most of their stories were subscriber only, "premium" content.
However, many of these stories are available for free at the author's main sites (which usually are not salon.com).
For example, there was an article by Arianna Huffinton which was marked "premium" , but it's freely available at her site.
http://www.ariannaonline.com/
Same goes for Horowitz articles.
http://www.frontpagemag.com
I think if salon is going to charge for premium content, they should at least bother to pay for some type of exclusivity. It doesn't make any sense to pay for something that is legally free elsewhere.
- sigs are for wimps.
People want information to be free because, in most cases, they're providing it for free. If that information costs money, they will usually stray from it. As for advertising, specifically... I go to the web for a combination of information and entertainment, usually together on the same sites. I will not visit a content site that is scaling back its content due to money issues and making my visit incredibly annoying (the opposite entertaining) at the same time.
I think a lot of people aren't so much bitching about advertising, as they're bitching about the fact that that advertising will cause them to never return to a site that they liked, namely Salon.
When you make a Flash file, you get the option to remove the options like 'play' 'loop' from the users right-click menu. Leaving the user no way to stop the animation.
They shouldn't do this. They should always have those options there, as well as a option to fully stop the animation (ticking off 'play' doesn't stop the animation completely), and a mute option.
All the major browsers have a way to stop animated gifs, Macromedia must do the same for flash. They are partly to blame for making adds annoying.
I suggest that people go to their site, and complain about these things, 'cause that's the only way they will change it. They already know that botching up the users interface is a bad thing.
...it's the ridiculously long Flash preload on the front end that will kill traffic to their site. It took 75 seconds this morning to load the Flash for the topmost banner ad over my miserly dialup. That's 75 seconds before the front page even begins to load. Loyal readers (like me) may be willing to tolerate that sort of delay, but most new visitors won't. When a site doesn't give you anything in 10 or 15 seconds, most people move on. That's Web 101, folks. Salon may manage to retain their existing readership, but it's gonna kill the growth of their reader base, and that, in the end, could well kill Salon.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton