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The Successor To Popunder Ads?
Croaker writes: "So, apparently, boston.com is trying out these new ads called "Shoshkeles" (the marketeer who came up with that name was on crack, no doubt). The result is an incredibly annoying experience of having crap run around the page you are reading, along with sound. And you thought banner ads sucked. The company responsible for the technology, United Virtualities says these are 'browser driven, platform agnostic, sound enabled, free moving forms that marry total creative license to a whole new level of effectiveness.' Effective in annoying, I guess." The site says "the ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser," though. Darn.
But if these ads are as annoying as some people think, then "if you use this browser you won't see the ads" becomes a feature.
Am I the only mozilla user who clicked on the link anyway, and had the page sit there doing nothing until I got bored?
Weather.com has these as well, but they are MUCH more annoying. The one I had filled up the lower half of your screen with water and a broken pipe, and then had someone standing there, and it was an advertisement for insurance.
We responded by pulling our partnership with Weather.com. As we explained to them, banner ads and pop-up ads are one thing, but anything that literally takes over the users computer will not by tolerated.
Random Musings
I work for an advertising and marketing firm in central Arkansas. Let me tell you, it's scary when the account execs (sales people) and creatives get together and start scheming up new ways to bludgen the public with marketing slogans. The worst are when they come to me asking for technical advice. On several occations I've told them the best thing to do is leave 'technology' out, because they'd only screw it up. They don't listen, and they screw up, nearly every time. This Shoshkeles thing is a prefect example. It COULD have been cool, but instead it's annoying and people are going to bitch and moan. Then it's going to go away.
All we need is a simple link at the bottom of the page that says "Lots of neat stuff". And when you click the link, you _actually_ get a page with lots of neat stuff. That would be freaking amazing! (:
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
As much as I would Microsoft to up and go away, well, these ads are not going to kill IE. IE is just too easy to get, runs all the stuff people want, and it comes on their Windows boxes.
However, sites that use these features are likely to lose users. Yeah, they'll keep their techy users who use Mozilla, etc., but their joe-average users will disappear. (Why should I read Boston.com when I can read CNN.com and get none of those crappy ads?)
Case in point is that I almost never visit C|Net or ZDNet anymore. The ads are lousy. The content doesn't justify the annoyance. I use to read Builder.com all the time. Now I just visit Molly.com and see where her latest articles are.
Reality is that advertising is only tolerated as long as it's justified. I click on the ads on Slashdot because they're well targetted. I read BBC News because there are no ads. I used to watch Sci-Fi because there were fewer ads. If it really comes down to it, eventually I'll only visit government sites and my paid subscriptions because like many a business user, I don't have time to wait the 5 seconds on a page while checking to see if an article is worth reading.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Actually, to me these seem a lot less annoying then popups/popunders. At least for the fact they can't spawn all over your desktop resulting in minutes of annoyance. And they disappear on their own, which is a huge bonus.
The sound part is really obnoxious, though.
Also, this isn't the first time something like this has been tried, although it may be the first time the crap appeared on top of the content you're trying to get, yahoo used something similar a while back on their main page.
As for these only working in IE? Well, that's just because the advertising company didn't bother to spend like 5 minutes getting the implementation to work in Moz, having done DHTML in both IE and Moz, I can say that it's can be a pain, and clutter up your code, to get something that will work in both, it's certainly possible. Oh look, boston.com also threw in a pup under, just for fun. Advertising a broken image, apparently.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Y'know, reading the comments here, I had no idea what I'd been missing. You people have been stuck with ads that are literally taking over your computers, and not in the old-fashioned millions-of-onexit-porn-windows sense, either. And all you can say is "well, that's pretty annoying, so I don't go to that site anymore"?? Wake up!
At least now I know that everyone who crows about how IE is such a superior browser have been just blowing smoke for the last few years - using the supposedly "inferior" Netscape browser, all I seem to miss out on are annoying advertisements. Sure, I'll admit that Netscape has problems, but I can honestly say that nothing about using NS 4.7x over the past few years has ever been as annoying as having an ad take over my whole computer screen the way it's described here.
Face it - for all your IE boosterism, you've been using and applauding a superior marketing platform, nothing more. Considering that Microsoft is basically an advertising business, maybe this shouldn't be as much of a surprise to me...
...my god, I'm about to turn into one of those lynx-using elitists. Ack!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That might be a good idea if ads were the only reason to use popups.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I don't think anyone should knock IE for being terrible, because it is a worthy effort, especially since Netscape stopped trying (although that really was MS' fault) and Mozilla doesn't have a usable UI yet. But there are much better alternatives out there. In OnmiWeb I can not only turn off scripting, I can leave it on and set "Scripts can only open new windows: in response to being clicked" or "Scripts can only open new windows: never." In addition to a bunch of other great privacy options such as deleting cookies on quit, running applets only when clicked on, built-in browser masquerading, just to name a few. Also noteworthy is the fact that other browsers don't need this feature because no one else in willing to expose thier users to the security exploits inherent in ActiveX. Even the Mac version of IE ships with ActiveX disabled. IE suffers from the mediocrity that plagues all MS products; that doesn't make it bad, but most people want to go for something better.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Honestly, I think the major problem with web advertising is the fact that advertisers under-estimate its effectiveness.
Think about it, if you were watching a television and an ad for a new car came up, and you had a button on your remote to stop watching your show and get more information about the car, how many people would hit the button? Zero. That's exactly what banner ads are doing.
Impressions are everything, clicking on a banner ad is unsurprisingly a very rare occasion. Just like the ads on TV, when you have a banner ad you're paying for product exposure and awareness, nothing more. Advertisers shouldn't expect a banner ad to turn directly into profit (ie, user clicks on banner ad, goes to site, immediately buys product. See: affiliate programs) since no other ad model expects this (except maybe those Call Now! TV ads.)
I honestly don't have a problem with these flyover ads. They're in there for the right reason: exposure. Banner ads never really did the job as far as exposure goes, simply because they're very easy to completely avoid glancing over for the trained web user.
These new ads are probably clickable, but I would expect that the exposure element is what you're paying for. You don't have to read the site, so you have no right to bitch. I think this model will end up being the most successful (though yes, the most annoying for anal Slashdot anti-ad centric users.)
Too many people here seem to forget that the ads are not target towards Linux running cookie-avoiding anti-Flash/Glitz/graphics geeks. They're targeted towards the people who look at the web like an interactive up to date television, and for those people, this will probably succeed better than the others. You guys are a speck on the radar, and for all the snickering about "haha platform agnostic my ass!" and "I'll just turn off Flash! I am so smart!" they might be the ones laughing all the way to the bank in the end. I guess we'll just have to see.
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