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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.)"
Wikipedia tells me that interstitial is short for Interstitial cystitis or bladder pain syndrome.
That too would get me to abandon the website.
The same thing could likely be said of all obtrusive advertising: it is a nuisance not a benefit.
Are Google still pushing that really annoying full screen promo image to some people when you try to log into Gmail ?
BTW, as a public service I should point out that Gmail's HTML only interface (which you are offered when Javascript is disabled) is far quicker to use on low bandwidth/high latency connections than the Javascript laden junk they normally throw at you.
Perhaps it has something to do with the continue position, if I don't spot how to get to the content I clicked through to right away I immediately ditch.
It is truly an epic fail to believe that some random visitor to your website is going to want to install your app just to read a piece of content—particularly if that user got there through a Google search. Yet for some reason, just about every forum out there pops up one of these idiotic app interstitials when I try to view some random post on their site. I didn't go there because I want to be a regular visitor to the site, which means I sure as h*** don't want to install their app just to read the tiny piece of content that may or may not even contain the information I need to do whatever I'm trying to get done.
The right time to ask a user to install an app is when the user creates an account on the site. Up until that point, the user is probably an infrequent visitor and is unlikely to want to install the app. Even at that point, the user may not want to install the app, but at least there's some nonzero possibility that he or she might.
Of course, the real train wreck is that there's no standard for making websites' contents available for app use, which would allow a user to install one reader that can read content on any of the dozen sites that he or she might be interested in. There's really no chance of me installing an app that only lets me read content from one website, because A. it is unlikely to be much better than viewing the website (because probably the same people designed it), and B. I already have more apps than I can deal with anyway. But if every website I visit standardized on a feed scheme, along with a common authentication system and a common reply system, I could see myself installing a single app that worked with all of them.
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I'm one of those people who instantly turn off whenever I get an Interstitial. If I dont get taken directly to the page I wanted I'll mash the back button.
The main reason is that if I'm going to a site, I want a specific page and when you dismiss an interstitial 9 times out of 10 instead of taking me to the content I want to view, it drops me on the sites main/landing page.
Its the same with popup/popover ads. On mobile these are a pain in the arse to close and they interfere with the content I'm trying to view, so again I'll just mash the back button until its gone.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Bugging me to install the app and interrupting me for a survey or chat less than a second after visiting are all amazing ways to piss me off. I see most of this on sites where I'm already looking to be a customer. Don't interfere with me giving you business.
...that it was Google+, not that something was promoted through an interstice. The topic should be revisited when there's data on something else as well.
I had to look it up also.
An "interstitial" pops up before the page you want, or a few seconds after.
It's a speed-bump in reading the website: stop, grab the mouse, find the close mark, get rid of the thing, and continue.
It's basically adding mosquitoes to your browsing experience.
(Some of them don't even have the "X" corner icon. You have to choose one of the presented links to close.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
A $5 word that a Google intern pulled out of his ass to impress his peers, who still haven't figured that the real world uses $1 words.
I *never* want the App. Native client = buggy memory hog that can introduce vulnerabilities and violate my privacy in even bigger ways.
Besides that, I don't want a separate app for each site or forum I visit, that's overkill. I'll get too many notifications and have to download a ton of client updates constantly. I'd rather just visit a site when I choose to (and not be bugged by notifications) and have it work properly and be working with the most up to date version right away.,
These useless apps are what people wish weren't included with their desktops, why would they want them on mobile?
Twinstiq, game news
Whether it happens on a computer or in person. Only a marketing dick, an MBA or a CEO would be dumb enough to miss the fact that it passes people off enough to drive people away from a Web site.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It'd be nice if Google could detect and downrank these sites. They should probably also do that for any site that gives you a significantly different page if it detects the google webcrawler versus any other agent. And as long as I'm asking, also pages that require Javascript to render. Downrank the lot because clicking on them is just a waste of my time anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One common thing they do is grey out the background so the box draws your attention. Can we stop that somehow?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Seriously, never heard this word before in my life.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
Well, it should mean something like "between the walls", but in context I've no idea...except that other people seem to be implying that it means you need to install a program to read the content of a web site. Truly a bad idea. So I guess that, say, Flash is an interstitial.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I hate the stupid "hey we have an app!" block that takes up real estate at the top of the screen every freaking time I chance upon any one of a million stupid sites. No, I don't want the dedicated app for your website - I view it maybe twice a year! No, I don't want to install an app to participate on your forum! Nor do I want your website sending me push notifications on OS X, for that matter.
I understand that you can't figure out how to make a living from your website... but that's your problem, not mine. Maybe you need to get a real job like the rest of us.
#DeleteChrome
I wonder how many of these 69% abandonment were due to user error in trying to get rid of the damn thing. Especially on mobile platforms where the ad can take up the entire browser screen and the back button has no effect on it. When something unexpected happens and you end up on an unexpected page the logical thing to do is hit back. Unfortunately for this stupid advertising the back button has the result of leaving the page altogether to go to the previous one.
I'm quite bad at that. It takes a conscious effort on my part to make it past these popups the first time without accidentally leaving the page. I hope their statistics took that into account.
Actually I don't, I hope their numbers are over inflated and this stupid practice crashes and burns.
I don't want your flash enabled or video/audio streamed content shoved down my throat.
Fuck.. so much of the time I just want to load up Lynx to mandate a better S/N ratio
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There are a number of websites that try to push interstitials to the desktop. When I get those blank pages with AdBlock Plus installed, I just close the browser tab. The story or photos are NEVER interesting enough to put up with that kind of shit.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
After years of abuse, I just instantly close a website now if it decides an interstitial ad is needed. Regardless of where I am browsing.
No content is worth the suffering, no video can have enough cats to justify the anguish.
I have no idea if my own droopy matters at all, but I like to think window closure after interstitial presentation is a metric tracked and at least I am increasing it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That word isn't in my vocabulary, but is that some kind of marketing wank's "web 2.0" shit?
what the benefit of this popup stuff is and who pays/earns something here? Developers must get paid somehow. Seems some idiotic pipe dream. I get this crap - desktop, try a page reload if it comes up again, tab close an if the "do you really want to do this" - or similar, I get really pissed. What are those idiots programming this shit thinking? Poerverts! If I get this on mobile, I get so pissed that I do something else, no mobilem
The last time I heard it was in high school biology. That was ... quite a few years ago.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't really even understand the app ecosystem.
It used to be we'd need to run a word-processor program to edit text.
A spreadsheet to manage numeric data.
An encyclopedia program to see images and text together.
Hell we even needed a 'website editor' to do that.
Now, ostensibly, we have a single browser on which I can do basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet work through google docs, edit websites, play fairly sophisticated games....all through the same browser.
Yet, on my phone I have 150 different goddamned apps, each for some teeny little function that someone feels they can 'deliver' better to me than the good old browser (yes, I'm looking at you BBC and NPR apps, for example).
Isn't the POINT of the internet browser and HTML concept a sort of 'Swiss Army Knife' of applications, meaning that it's the website's job to deliver content to the browser so that we don't need a separate "program" for every single stupid thing we're trying to do online? Wouldn't this seem to be a natural point of efficiency that would be especially useful in the power/resource constrained environment of a smartphone?
-Styopa
Tapatalk is one of the most common, and seems to me to prove this point:
The mobile app you are being offered doesn't improve your experience as much as it does the app publisher's revenue. Apps will capture your data, contacts, and history on your mobile when better than your browser.
Apps will act as gateways for other apps, eventually leading to downloading something nasty without your knowledge, or masquerading as something benign.
Apps will force you into a mobile view, like it or not. Good for the site, bad when your mobile is a 10" tablet that shows you a fabulous desktop render.
I abandon them 100% of the time, so far.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I didn't realize that "shit modal window that I have to close to read what I actually came to this web page for" had a name.
I knew all those years of reading slashdot would pay off eventually.
Try it : it can get rid of overlay shit, including ribbons (top AND bottom) that halve your viewing space if you're on a short display.
That's on desktop though (Firefox). On mobile, if it exists, I don't know how you're supposed to right click on an element.
There's even one website that says "your mercy period has ended" (or whatever) after reading one article, and I'm supposed to log in. But the article is there under a pile of overlays, including a "greys out" one.
If you can't stay in business without irritating your readers, then fuck you: you should go out of business.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
because it's copypasta spam.
Thank you, come again. Or better yet, don't.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
oh fuck off already.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Install NoScript, and a lot of Blogspot blogs (such as the featured article) will just show the spinning gears GIF forever until you whitelist the site, at which point the crap returns.
We have one: it's basically a pop-up.
It behaves like one in every way, just the mechanics of how it's displayed is different...so maybe browsers need to dust off their 'pop-up blocker' option code and update it to block these damn things too?
The difference in mechanics makes all the difference. Pop-up blockers could define a pop-up as a call to window.open without a click event below it in the call stack. Showing an in-page pop-up is just changing the visibility of an HTML element, and there are plenty of legit reasons to do that. To work around that, you'd have to put JavaScript on a whitelist; good luck managing such a whitelist on a 4" screen.
(Some of them don't even have the "X" corner icon. You have to choose one of the presented links to close.)
Such as Pinterest ("There's more to see..."), Chicago Tribune, and any site using CPALead ("Please complete a survey to unlock this page") or Google Consumer Surveys ("Answer a question to continue reading this page"). Unfortunately, Google Search hasn't been good at demoting sites using these.
A 1024x600 pixel netbook's screen is still physically larger than those phones. To actually read text on those without changing the layout, you'd need a magnifying glass. This is why the web browsers on these devices tend to interpret CSS 1px as 1.5, 2, or 3 actual pixels.
Start using my cell phone's data plan to download content for offline access when, because it's a cell phone, offline is 'rare'
How is the time between when you have used up the 2 GB quota and the end of the billing month "rare"?
Yes, and how many of those apps ask for a copy of your address book ? I don't mind sharing if needed for a function, web privacy being a lost cause, but if you want to d/l my 5000 plus contact professional contact list, uh, NO.
Some people want to use a function that requires location; others don't. Some people want to use a function that requires the address book; others don't. If there are seven different permissions that can be used by an optional function, do you expect the developer to make 2^7 = 128 different apps, one for each specific combination of optional functions?
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I've never dropped a mod point, whatever that is, in my life. This is my only account. So get yourself a fucking UID so I can block your arse.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If the latter part is true then you would not need to post it. The reality is that people do not care - some even profess to like ads. I, personally, have enough compute power to block them and many interests so I needn't deal with obtrusive sites. Most people just do not care. The minority does not rule the masses and this, the internet, is one place where that holds true.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Isn't the POINT of the internet browser and HTML concept a sort of 'Swiss Army Knife' of applications, meaning that it's the website's job to deliver content to the browser so that we don't need a separate "program" for every single stupid thing we're trying to do online?
In theory, that's the point. In practice, the web browser included with Windows (Internet Explorer), OS X (Safari), and iOS (Safari) has tended to lack support for key web standards. For example, the latest version of Internet Explorer for the oldest supported version of Windows didn't support most HTML5 features until April 2014, when support for Windows XP was ended, and it won't support WebGL until April 2017, when Microsoft plans to end support for Windows Vista. Safari for iOS didn't support photo and video uploads through the browser prior to iOS 6 nor WebGL prior to iOS 8. A lot of browsers still lack support for, say, plugged-in USB joysticks. For anything that the user's browser doesn't support and which cannot be polyfilled efficiently if at all, the user will need to install a native app.