Okay, I admit it. I’m guilty of creating some of the ad banners you see on the Web. But the ads I create don’t blink four hundred times per minute or beckon you to try to click on the dancing monkey. My ads merely let you know there’s a new product or service available and give you the opportunity to check it out.
But this isn’t about any of those ads. It’s more about the way they’re starting to be delivered. The first of these nuisances is the often-hated pop-up ad. Yes, I understand that Web sites need to make a profit somehow, but these ads have become so annoying that we’ve learned to close the window before anything even loads.
Which led to the infamous pop-under ad. These aggravating little shits first pop up and then quickly hop behind your current page before you can even react. For a while, I used to try to use a keyboard command to quickly close the window, but it would almost always result in closing the wrong page, leaving only the ad there to inform me of the world’s smallest video camera.
But now that most of us have found browsers or free software that kills the pop-up ads, Web sites have had to come up with even more devious tricks. The latest I’ve noticed is having the top of the page refresh so that more than one ad can be shown to you as you read the content on the page. The only problem with this is, if you hit the back button after being on the page for about five minutes, you have to go through about twenty ads before you can get to your previous page.
So what’s the solution? Simple. Go back to the good old fashioned ad banners, and stop basing the success of an online ad on clickthroughs. No other form of advertising relies on instant feedback. And there’s a reason: It’s moronic. Ads are supposed to keep your product in the consumers mind, so that when they’re actually in the market for a spy camera, they’ll think of buying yours. That is, unless you piss everyone off with your fucking pop-under ads. Inconsiderate Ads Suck.
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