Adam Douglass
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1:04 am on June 12, 2007 | # |
Online advertising is getting a great deal of attention days with players like Google, Double Click, Yahoo, just to name a few.
But with almost any advertising, there’s a movement to circumvent it.
.. TV vs DVR, time shifting, fast-forward.
.. FM radio vs Satellite radio, paid subscriptions, commercial free.Remember the first years of pop-up advertising on websites? ISPs started offering “Pop-up Blocker” software free to their members. It was such a demand that most browsers now implement pop-up blocking as a standard feature.
Advertising is a balancing act. Google has been hugely successful with their text/banner-style AdWords – I believe because they’re not aggressive with their impact. Until this evening, I tolerated, sometimes enjoyed, viewing advertising. I felt like it educated me. A good advertisement might teach me of a new product I hadn’t heard of, a service I might use or recommend. Those AT&T commercials where
two people are talking on mobile phones, and one is dropped… hilarious!Until tonight, when I went to read
this article on Wired.com.
Covering 50% of the first few paragraphs is an AT&T advertising overlay. I gave the ad 3 minutes to go away. I tried every key combo, tried following the link of the ad… nothing. The article is unreadable in Firefox. Same result in IE.
The Irony is: the article is about
Safari 3 and how “Safari sucks.” Care to guess how the page looks in Safari? flawless. No content-blocking AT&T advertisement.UPDATE:
Wired apologizes for the ad.
Campfire » Blog Archive » Wired apologizes for obnoxiously defective ad 10:01 pm on June 12, 2007 | #
[...] blocked the site’s content for 8 hours and generated hundred of complaints. Check out this screenshot of the defective AT&T monstrosity in [...]
ChrisM 5:24 pm on June 22, 2007 | #
I had a similar experience trying to publish a blog entry in myspace. A large ad for Telus, a Canadian cellphone provider would block out the subject field of the blog area and about half of the type-able area. When it came time to submit the blog it would be rejected as you hadn’t specified a subject line. But you couldn’t enter a subject as the field was blocked by the ad. The only solution was to cancel out of the screen and then re-enter hoping that the same ad didn’t appear again.
Andy Stratton 1:07 am on June 24, 2007 | #
This is horrible, I don’t think applications/plug-ins such as flash should have the capability to extend beyond their HTML object/element bounds EVER.
This is something that affected my user experience on MySpace (which is already a bad experience to begin with) when a T-Mobile SideKick advertisement shot 20 spinning SideKick phones all over the browser viewport, causing the clickable area for the add to be nearly the entire screen, meaning anything I tried to click pushed me to T-Mobile’s website for the SideKick…
If anything this made me #1 hate T-Mobile and #2 dislike MySpace even more.
Erin 1:05 am on July 17, 2008 | #
And this is why the Firefox NoScript add-on is so very helpful (and perhaps why I still put up with MySpace)