I was going to talk about this Greenwald piece on media transparency, but now intend to simply rant about the annoying god damned ads at Salon. Do these things actually work? Do people really click on the ads after they block the entire page? I just look for the little x and close area, and half the time I am so pissed off I just leave the website. I think I’m going to make a list of companies that use this type of ad and boycott them. Wankers.
Transparency
by John Cole| 92 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Get off my grass you damned kids
Hunter Gathers
From an advertising standpoint, yes. As long as you see it, it is permanently imprinted in the gray matter inside the noggin. You can’t blindly find the X, now can you?
fucen tarmal
still not as nauseating as the tv commercials for the new york times, “how many sections are you fluent in?”
“the best journalists in the world work for the times, there can be no debating it” which is great, because it means the opinions of times readers have calcified so much, they simply can’t hear anything but something they are pre-disposed to agree with.
Stephen1947
I just came from Steve Benen’s place, and I’m really getting to detest the little lower right creepers that infest his blog. I’ve actually gotten quite good at not focusing on the ad – letting my eyes go slack – as I click the tiny little x.
I detest they way they crawl along as you scroll the page – I detest the way they make scrolling all awkward when you first get there – thank you Mr. Cole for giving me the trigger to my rant!
some other guy
It’s stuff like that which drove me to Adblock Plus and NoScript. I know site admins hate it. I don’t care. I’m fine with small, non-animated images, or text ads, but I’m sick of singing, dancing, popping up, popping under, site redirecting, seizure inducing, computer slowing, virus carrying ads.
Elisabeth
The worst are the ones that follow you around the screen. I leave.
calipygian
I’ve bought plenty of Lexus SUVs after clicking on Greenwald.
All hail Hypnotoad!
gbear
You might as well just sell your computer and stop paying your internet bill right now. Even Steve Benen has them at Washington Monthly.
Roger Moore
Not on me, at least. My habit is to open links in a new tab and continue reading the page I’m on now for a while longer. It’s not my goal, but it has the happy side effect of letting those annoying page-blocking ads time out and close themselves before I ever go to the page they’re blocking.
Mark S.
Bobo, Chunky Bobo, Mustache, Dowd
Shit, I was going to try to debate that, but I really can’t.
M. Bouffant
Don’t know how well a boycott will work.
You’re not really using acai berry, or interested in the “Local Mom makes $3,000,000/hr.” stuff are you?
Resident Firebagger
The ads they’re coming up with on Yahoo, with animations dancing all over the homepage that briefly keep you from moving inside are much worse. In those cases, I have to refresh the page.
With Salon, it’s more of a brief annoyance, and I can’t imagine how their ads could possibly be effective. Usually I have them deleted without ever knowing what they were…
Tonal Crow
Since there hasn’t been a open thread in awhile, and it’s late, and this is about media wankery, here goes:
Now I gotta go barf.
Mark S.
@calipygian:
Ha! That reminds me of my least favorite ad of all time: Lexus December to Remember. Everybody in the family buys each other a Lexus. Even the dog gets one.
I’ve noticed they haven’t been running that one too much since the recession started.
Shell Goddamnit
Actually, I agree that they are anti-advertising – I used to be somewhat suspicious of the Economist, but now I *hate* it. I stopped reading Greenwald because those ads were so annoying.
Tonal Crow
@Resident Firebagger: I highly recommend Adblock Plus. What it does to Yahoo is nothing short of startling.
somethingblue
Would it make you feel better to learn that you’ve just won a $1000 Walmart gift card?
MikeJ
Anybody want to go to the store? I need to get some Lightspeed briefs.
TX Expat
@Hunter Gathers: @some other guy:
I’ll chime in here and say that I don’t even notice what the ad is about. I’m too busy looking for the little (emphasize little) x.
Some Other Guy: thanks for the tip. Just downloaded adblock, went to Greenwald’s place – no ad! Woot!
What’s most annoying to me about those damn ads is that they usually interfere with the streaming music I have going on in the background leading to interruption of listening pleasure.
fucen tarmal
@Mark S.:
that is just the type of open mind they are looking to make fluent in their bullshit so deep it has become its own language.
Tonal Crow
@Mark S.:
To be fair, pundits are not journalists, no matter what they claim.
MikeJ
@TX Expat: Add on noscript too. I like getting a nice beige square where flash content would normally be. If I want to run it, I click it. Otherwise, no flash. The web is much less annoying.
bkny
@Stephen1947:
i hate that fucking rolling ad. i don’t see how they are successful; they certainly piss me off and i just realized i don’t even know what the product was….
YellowJournalism
I almost didn’t watch Chuck because of a very annoying talking ad. After the twentieth time of hearing him introduce himself, I swore that I would never watch that goddamn show. Then I relented because hubby wanted to watch it, and I was hooked. I would hate to think that piece of shit ad was given the credit for my or anyone else’s viewership.
Ailuridae
@Tonal Crow:
+1
Roger Moore
@calipygian:
I loved it. It was much better than Cats. I will see it again and again.
Incertus (Brian)
@MikeJ: So glad Futurama is back on TV now.
The only thing worse than Salon’s ads are the ads which make noise when you open the page. Whoever wrote that bit of script needs to be forced to wear Antonin Scalia’s thong as a facemask.
middlewest
How the hell do people survive without a javascript blocker?
Corner Stone
There’s no reason to fight it. We’re probably only 2 or 3 gen evolutions away from the ads scanning your eyeballs and custom selling stuff specific to you, like in Minority Report.
FlipYrWhig
The fact that Glenn Greenwald hasn’t used the resources at his disposal to stop those ads proves that he supports them. No other conclusion is possible.
UPDATES 1-N: Undeniably.
UPDATES (N+1)-infinity: Dear Leader.
burnspbesq
That sound you just heard, that sounded like thunder? It’s not.
It’s Steve Gilliard, up in heaven, laughing about the fact that the Texas Rangers (yes, the bankrupt, formerly-owned-by-George-Dubya-Bush Texas Rangers) beat out the Yankees and got Cliff Lee from Seattle.
I. Am. Laughing. My. Ass. Off.
Ross Hershberger
I used to read Salon daily but the ads got so thick, insistent and unavoidable that I simply quit. Especially annoying are the ones with moving stuff, which is most of them these days. They must work on most people but I just click away from the distraction, so the page loses a view for the content as well. People say they just ignore ads but I can’t seem to focus when some silhouette is gyrating at the corner of my vision.
HRA
I tried Salon twice, became an ad hostage halfway into reading a piece and never went back.
Wile E. Quixote
@fucen tarmal:
Hmmmm, I’ve heard statements like that before.
You know, you put these statements together along with that ad from the Times and you start to notice a pattern…
*Personally I worry more about the Swabian Illuminati, they’re number two, but they try harder.
Rommie
I really hate the ones that will move the content – ESPN will do this occasionally. You go to click a link, and Annoying Ad pushes it out of the way, and you end up clicking the ad instead.
I also dislike the sites that double-load, so that your back button just reloads the page for cheap hits.
James in WA
I feel the same way about blogs that petulantly demand that I turn off my ad blocker, the GOS being one of the chief offenders.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT I know, but if anyone is interested I brought Samantha home today. I have no idea what will happen.
http://crittersbybritty.blogstream.com
TX Expat
@MikeJ:
Done and done! Thanks again for the links. I’ve taken a cruise around the web and no music interruption/searching for the “x” even at the sites of the worst offenders.
In homage to the awesomeness that is the drive-through frozen margarita I am enjoying at the moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nq6tCN9878
Legal Disclaimer: this poster does not in any way guarantee the musical hipness of this video.
jeffreyw
As a public service:
adblock plus
noscript
Wile E. Quixote
@Incertus (Brian):
They’ll have to pry it off of Samuel Alito before they do.
Mnemosyne
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Aww! FWIW, I think you did the right thing. Make sure she has a place all to herself where she can get her bearings (a spare bathroom, maybe?) without being bugged by the other critters and see what happens.
ellaesther
I am so thoroughly of two minds about internet advertising, in all of its forms. I have a pretty serious filter on my machine, so I don’t see many, and those I do see tend to piss me off — but at the same time, don’t I feel that people who blog or write for outlets with an online presence should actually make a living? Aren’t I constantly going on and on (and, in the privacy of my mind, onandonandonandonandon… and on) about the fact that writers deserve to be paid and it sucks that I’m a writer and no one’s paying writers anymore and my writing career is dead because no one has money to pay writers?
Like, how do I expect this whole Internet doohickey to even make money for fucking anyone if there aren’t ads involved?
So. Yeah. Two minds. At least.
ellaesther
@Tonal Crow: “Startling.” Now there’s a word that doesn’t get used enough.
I over-use “amazing” and “awesome” (and me, a writer! [see # 41]) to a really startling degree. I need to start incorporating startling.
Arclite
@ FlipYrWhig: Heh. Good one.
It used to be that he ‘x’ at Salon didn’t work if your browser was zoomed in, but they have fixed that. Now THAT was annoying. Now, I just close them.
Ads are a small price to pay for “free” content. I think you can buy an ad-free paid subscription to avoid them. And those overlay ads are worth more than sidebar or banner ads, so Salon can get better writers and stay in business. Personally, I’m glad I don’t need paid subscriptions to all the sites I visit.
ellaesther
@Arclite: See? My point — or my problem — exactly.
I suspect that paid subscriptions to avoid ads are the future.
QDC
Does anyone remember when some bidet company bought all the Salon ads, and you were constantly greeted by dozens of naked asses every time you came to the page? That’s when I quit reading
AZrider
Small,slightly annotyin price to pay to read Greenwald…
Albatrossity
AdBlock Plus
Firefox 3.6.6
I don’t see no steenking ads.
Life’s too short to deal with advertising all the time.
eco2geek
@James in WA: There’s another Firefox add-on called “Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper” that will allow you to get rid of that stupid box telling you to SUBSCRIBE! at the top of dKos that you get when it determines you’re using AdBlock. (I’m surprised Kos hasn’t made it blink.)
(As mentioned earlier, with AdBlock enabled, you don’t get the full-page ad at Salon.com.)
Corner Stone
@ellaesther:
You know what else doesn’t get used enough?
That’s right.
“extirpating”
Corner Stone
@Rommie:
I.Mother.Fucking.Hate.That.Shit.
Wile E. Quixote
@QDC:
I quit reading when the company that makes Antonin Scalia’s thongs bought all the Salon ads and I was constantly greeted by dozens of images of Antonin Scalia’s hairy bobbin man-ass.
Zuzu's Petals
I notice this page is currently filled with ads for heartburn pills.
UncommonSense
I feel the same way. I never click through to those hideous ads. I visit Salon often, and before the ad even comes up, I have my cursor over the place where the X is going to be, ready to click on it. I have encountered those ads several times today, and I could not tell you the name of a single sponsor.
The ads are not worth what the companies are paying for them.
Daddy Biggs
@Stephen1947:
Those ads SUCK MY ASS.
Albatrossity
@Wile E. Quixote:
Damn, I’m glad I never saw that!
Seriously, folks, AdBlock Plus and NoScript are free add-ons, and will make the internet tolerable again (well, except when you read wingnut fantasies in the WaPo or wherever). I never know what I’m missing until I use somebody else’s computer and see all that crap popping up everywhere. It would make me crazy if I had to deal with that on a daily basis!
AdBlock Plus.
No Script.
Southern Beale
now intend to simply rant about the annoying god damned ads at Salon. Do these things actually work? Do people really click on the ads after they block the entire page?
Oh my God. This goes so beyond “pet peeve” for me. It’s like I want to BOYCOTT any asshole website that makes it impossible for me to read it’s fucking editorial because I have to dodge dancing ads.
Or the ones that BLARE audio at you as soon as the page loads. Christ on a cracker, ad agencies need to figure out that ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF PEOPLE does not foster a good image of their product.
Geeeez.
Thanks, I feel better now.
The next to last samurai
Read the sites on an elderly cellphone; it’ll be too primitive for the ads to show up. This very phone here is at least 8 years old and i never see an ad when I read Salon on it.
xaneroxane
Might try this website to help with Salon (and similarly cluttered news sites): http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
It doesn’t get rid of the full-page block ad, but it has spared me the weird ads that follow you down the page.
frankdawg
one of the few I get that really pisses me off is on washington monthly. It creeps up from the bottom and you have to wait for it to finish before the x shows up.
Better still, most of the time it is for some union busting effort targeting fire & police unions. Seems like a lib web site would not be fertile ground to plow.
scav
Idiots think if I remember the ad, I’m going to be more likely to buy their shit. ha. I hold grudges. I’ve not only gotten A) really really good at visually ignoring ads but B) for those ads that fight hard for my attention, I figure that all the money is going into the adverts and not into the product itself so why should I buy it? Good wine needs no bush. I can play opposite day really really well.
Doctor Science
Watch as I tie the two topics of this discussion together! *waves hands mystically*
Jakob Nielsen is IMO the guy who knows the most about what people actually do online, and what web designs work. He’s studied banner blindness, and what ads actually work. One of the many things I’ve learned from him is that just because a lot of people are doing it online doesn’t mean it’s really working. Online advertizing is a lot of money chasing they know not what, and people will try *anything* in the random hope that it will work. And it mostly doesn’t.
Another thing I’ve learned by reading Nielsen’s columns over the years relates to the transparency issues Glenn is talking about.
Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience, the most basic principle, is: Users spend most of their time on *other* sites. No website can afford to think of itself as the only place users can get or do *anything* — you’re always embedded in a very big Internet.
Right now, the world’s dominant source of information is Wikipedia. I call it “the source of all half-knowledge”, but I use it as the starting point for finding all kinds of news. There are lots of reasons Wikipedia dominates the Internet’s knowledge landscape, but one of the most important is its utter transparency. Not only is it full of links — so you generally know where the facts are coming from — but the editing process is transparent. You can drill down into the Talk pages and get an idea of whether an article is mostly the work of one or two people, or whether the visible article is just the iceberg-tip to an ongoing struggle.
Because everyone uses Wikipedia to find things out, users start to expect Wikipedia-like functions on other information sites. These days when I read newspaper articles, I keep mumbling Citation needed. I want footnotes, links, full text. I want to know where this is *coming* from.
The news site that makes itself most like Wikipedia in transparency, linkage, and consistency will be the one that beats the competition online. I have seen it in my crystal screen!
Arclite
@ellaesther: Well, I’m not against a paid option, as long as there’s a free option with the same content. But doesn’t that cover it? A paid option for those who hate ads, and a free version for those of us who will put up with them to get the content for “free”. Nothing is totally free. Even a blog like this one where the writers aren’t paid has overhead: bandwidth, server hosting, maintenence, etc. For a pro site like Salon or The Atlantic, they have serious costs that need to be covered. What other option is there?
Bubba Dave
@frankdawg:
If I see an ad like that on a liberal site, I’ll make a point of clicking on it in the hopes that I’ve helped to waste even more of the advertiser’s money. It’s even more fun if I get to try to skew a little poll (Yes, I do support giving homosexuals special rights, and believe one of those rights should include Barney Frank being able to pick out leaders of anti-Homosexual-Lobby groups and order them to be sodomized by horses. Take THAT, Public Advocate!)
Arclite
@eco2geek: Okay, but if you enjoy Kos, you should “pay.” If you’re unwilling to view ads, you should buy a subscription. Kos pays for polling which is unavailable anywhere else (regardless of the fact his pollster cheated), he pays his writers, he pays for 100s of gigabytes of throughput per month. Ads pay for that, but they don’t get counted and he doesn’t get paid if you use adblock.
I guess it will sort itself out. With IPv6, there are so many addresses available (about 3.4×10 to the 38th) that ad companies can use a brand new IP address hourly and maintaining blocking lists will be impossible.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
For Macintosh, try clicktoflash.
Martin
No. Tossing shitty ads for shitty products in front of a not-retarded audience does nothing but piss off the audience.
The best ad network out there is The Deck. One small ad, not pageview driven, advertisers are screened for quality by the agency. I trust the agency based on the quality of the companies in the campaigns that I already know. I’ve bought two products primarily based this. But it’s a small agency, and there aren’t many others like it.
Companies looking to place ads really have nowhere good to go. They have little choice but to hope that Google’s (or almost anyone else’s) ‘fling shit against the wall’ approach works.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
At the suggestion of people on this thread, I installed NoScript and AdBlocker. They’ve made things worse. Articles at the Financial Times won’t load beyond the first two paragraphs. That’s just the worst of them. It’s a disaster.
fucen tarmal
i also hate the sites that randomly play a video ad with no “off”
button in sight, or that give you a flash of the page load, then darken it, while the ad comes up, and the last thing up is the method of clicking it off so you are forced, against your will, to scan the thing….
but ads on tv are the worst, the formula is to say or do, or have an annoying sound to get your attention….the whole off-key singing craze in ads almost made me cancel my cable…
Will
And good luck trying to find that goddamned x on a smartphone. I don’t even bother to visit Salon on surfing on my handheld–I’ll never get through.
Just Some Fuckhead
Unfortunately Salon doesn’t have a vast rightwing funding apparatus to keep them in business.
Just Some Fuckhead
And many folks like me cancelled their Salon subscription when they did a hit piece on every candidate except John Kerry in 2004.
Mnemosyne
I’ve started noticing ads following me from site to site, and it creeps me out that they’re ads for things I actually shop for. Like yarn, and cycling gear.
So at least some of the targeting is working, because I’m a heckuva lot more likely to click on an ad for things I actually buy than for the random advertiser of the day. Micromarketing FTW!
mclaren
Tough talk for a guy whose site features ads for fraudulent magnetic pain relief bracelets, Cole.
Flying Frig
I only read Glenn on iPhone because of just that reason.
Steve Benen’s site’s ads are very annoying, true.
Lastly, I hate Netflix because of their popunder ad preponderance.
My Truth Hurts
Oh John Cole you make me LOL!
I feel the same way!
eco2geek
@Arclite: I can’t afford a subscription to DKos right now and I doubt I’d buy one even if I could afford it. Which is also to say, I’d stop reading his website if it went behind a paywall.
He certainly has a right to stick up ads for Betty Crocker cake mix at the end of every diary. But I don’t have to look at ’em.
Here’s the deal. Ars Technica nicely asked its readers to turn off ad-blocking software. I did. Kos doesn’t ask nicely. He throws up an in-your-face box telling you to SUBSCRIBE! and then gives you a lecture about it if his javascript detects you’re using ad-blocking software. Nope, sorry. I can make that go away, too.
fucen tarmal
@eco2geek:
i stopped reading orange satan when the fund raising efforts became a bit too aggressive…i mean full pagers and they seemed to inhibit one from moving page to page…
BobT
I click on every single conservative ad that pops up….probably 100x if I’m in the mood. Because everytime you click on the ad, the sponsor has to pay up. And that’s less money in their coffers….so click away on your enemy du jour in the political realm. It also gives them a false sense of statistics…. “My gosh! We got 10,000 ad hits! We’re gonna win!!” Meanwhile, they lost a proportional amount in money, without any real voter data.
When it comes to seeing an ad you don’t like, “Click, my friends…click away!”…and often.
FlipYrWhig
@BobT: I don’t do that because I feel like it’s akin to responding to spam with “unsubscribe”: whatever you click on, they cookie you and track you and probably put you on some sucker list somewhere so that it never, ever ends.
Quiddity
@some other guy: Re:
I manage a number of websites and they all treat the visitor with respect. Static ads, no audio, no stay-on-the-screen floaters.
I don’t blame people for blocking the crap ads, but it makes the rest of us lose out. Sort of an Internet version of Gresham’s Law.
asiangrrlMN
I have trained myself not to notice the ads at all. So, on this page, I only notice when other people start commenting on the ads or if it’s aural (I fucking hate those). However, on the sites with the moving ads or the ads blocking the whole page (yeah, I’m looking at you, Salon), it’s not as easy to tune out the ads. I find that I stay away from those, and I hate sites that have butterflies and shit following the cursor, so I stay away from those, too. I dislike the pop-ups at Benen’s place, but I put up with them because I like his content.
@Litlebritdifrnt: Samantha is beautiful. Good on you for taking her in. Let us know how she does.
D-Chance.
Never used Netflix. Never will.
ColeDBiers
clicking on all the right wing ads…genuis
I use mozilla firefox, and when I go to Salon I switch to no page style (in view).
No page style = no ads
Ross Hershberger
I have a particularly bad case of Ad-itis. I quit watching TV in the ’70s because I was too busy. Continued abstaining in the ’80s because I was a snob and can’t bear it now because the advertising infuriates me. 17 minutes out of every hour devoted to irritating and irrelevant material that I’m no longer able to ignore. I just wait for the good shows on DVD (BSG, Dollhouse, Sports Night, The Lost Room, Angel, Buffy, 30 Rock, True Blood, etc.) and rent them. It’s worth the money to be able to watch 4 hours of programming in 3 hours. There’s quality material on TV but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit through commercials to get to it.
bob h
I think I’m going to make a list of companies that use this type of ad and boycott them. Wankers.
Why not, while we are at it, boycott the entire membership of the knee-jerk-brainless Chamber of Commerce? Apple fans won’t be inconvenienced.
ChrisFrenzy
@Tonal Crow: Wait, wasn’t Sarah Palin’s last book written for 9 to 12 year olds? Or written by? Oh, I can’t remember.
Albatrossity
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Sorry if I gave you the impression that everything would be hunky-dory immediately. Like everything else in the world, it’s not a simple fix, and it’s also coevolution in action (ad developers find ways around things that work).
You do have to “train” both Adblock and NoScript to recognize things that you want to show up. In your case I suspect that there is a script on the Financial Times page that you need to run, and NoScript is blocking it. At the bottom right of the browser window is a box labeled “options”. Click on that and “allow” the Financial Times to run scripts, and I suspect your problem will go away. Same for all of the other issues you might see; just “allow” scripts from the site to run, and keep the default “disallow” option for most of the others like clickad, blogads, and google etc. Once you do that (just once) for the sites you regularly visit, you should be set to browse without distractions.
Or keep looking at all that crap on your screen, if this seems like too much work.
Corner Stone
@D-Chance.:
Is this your Feingoldian stance on principle?
Why would someone disavow Netflix?
Florida Cynic
I left the computer on one night with Salon up on a browser window. It refreshed itself at about 2am, and the ad it decided to puke onto the screen was one that featured an audio narration. But I didn’t know that when I was jolted awake, so I ended up creeping through the house with the butt end of a cue stick until I figured out what was going on.
ThresherK
little lower right creepers that infest his blog
You gotta get more specific. That’s not about low-information trolls at WaMo?
Oh, and while we’re complaining: Ads which give themselves to crap all over your page with the tiny, 4-pt instruction, “rollover to expand” or such.
bjkeefe
@TX Expat:
Minor point, but the reason you didn’t see the ad the second time you visited might also be because after you see that page-blocking ad once, you won’t see it again for 24 hours (assuming you allow cookies to be set).
I have found that rather than going drastic with Adblock or Noscript or the like, just installing the Firefox addon Flashblock is sufficient to keep me from being annoyed, at least on Salon and most other sites where I do prolonged reading. The added bonus is that the little X is much easier to find.
I would rather not block all ads, because I would rather not have to pay for good content, which seems to me to be the logical consequence of everyone going the Adblock route. I like to think that if we all used Flashblock instead, advertisers would get the hint and prefer static ads. (There’s a minor problem with animated GIFs, which way back in the Netscape 1.x/2.x days, you could stop via the right-click menu, but that’s another gripe.)
The thing I hate most is the technique of launching an ad when you click anywhere on the page, say, just to scroll to continue reading. So far, only Clownhall and sites like that use this, but I hope that one doesn’t spread. Or, that someone will come up with an elegant addon to defeat it.
Adam
Running Flashblock (or whichever one of its happy-go-lucky cousins works in your browser of choice) has made reading Salon articles a lot less annoying. Sure, I’ve still gotta click the ‘x’, but with no actual flashing, vibrating ad to bother me, my annoyance is a lot less.