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Google Studies How Bad Interstitials Are On Mobile
An anonymous reader writes: A Google study of their own Google+ site and app found that 69% of visitors abandoned the page when presented with the app interstitial. Google said it was getting rid of them and asked others to do the same. TechCrunch reports: "It's worth noting that Google's study was small scale, since the company was only looking at how an interstitial promoting the Google+ social service native app performed (and we don't know how many people it surveyed). It may very well be the case that visitors really didn't want the Google+ app specifically — and that Google+ itself is skewing the data. (Sadly Google is not offering comparative stats with, say, the Gmail app interstitial, so we can but speculate.)"
thats not entirely true. some ads are welcome
I recent got a new car (well new to me) and one of the things i want to do is get fitted seat covers as the interior is an off white and i am....well a slob
so after looking for a few weeks i havent found anything that fits my needs (fitted, not leather or fake leather, and well made)
well I noticed some ads all of a sudden starting to show up for fitted car seats and eventually i found what i was looking for because of google ads
I will admit it is the first time ive found it useful, but when ads are done right, they are not a bad thing
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
For those who don't know WTF an interstitial is, it's basically a pop-up that appears in a web page that blocks access to the rest of the page until you dismiss it. It's not like a traditional pop-up windows that adblockers can block easily these days, but rather integrated inside the page that many blockers don't deal with.
I have a related experience. I'll often look for a product, find what I want in under an hour, and spend a day or two sleeping on it, considering other options, etc. I purchase the product. Over the next few days, I'm bombarded with ads for the product I've already purchased. I find it simultaneously amusing and pathetic, but never useful.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You can usually adblock the greying out. There are two strategies:
A) Try to adblock the overlay, which is usually a named DIV, using element hiding rules. This is usually quite effective.
B) Block the Javascript files that generate the overlay. This can also be done with NoScript of course.
Some sites are wise to (A) now so they add the overlay DIV with Javascript after the page has loaded, so (B) is necessary. Some are now wise to both, but you can still block them with Javascript. At that point though, I think you have to question if it is worth visiting those sites at all.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC