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Salon Goes For Annoying Jump-Through Ads

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nyeah-nyeah dept.

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?

7 of 464 comments (clear)

  1. Better than some alternatives by peter+hoffman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This bothers me less than popups. They have to do something for revenue. I can live with it.

  2. Avoiding Ads by nano-second · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If I find the ads on a site truly annoying (popups are bad, but so are ads that I can't filter when I turn on junkbuster) I will stop going to that site. The less intrusive/annoying the ads on a site are, the more likely I am to click on one when it interests me. Some days though, I just don't feel like seeing ads at all and I want to be able to turn on junkbuster and have an ad-free experience. Since these ads at salon.com involve an extra page, that doesn't sound like it would be possible.

    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.
  3. There's another way to avoid the ads... by kaszeta · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There's another way to avoid the ads...

    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.

  4. But *Salon*? by hawk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Who really cares? The easy solution here is to continue not reading it.


    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

  5. You gets what you pays for. by Gumber · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. You can get a lot of salon content for free. by Augusto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  7. Re:Quit Bitching by DarkZero · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I think you forget that a large group of Slashdotters, possibly the majority by a narrow margin, are providing content for free on the internet, be it through a web site, open source code, collaboration on a free project, or by just sharing their specific expertise (law, economics, history, what have you) in Talkbacks and such when needed.

    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.