The Commercials Commerce

Distracting, flashing, blinking animated ads make it nearly impossible to read the content that attracts one to a site. If advertisers and site creators want people to turn off their ad blockers -- the first thing they need to do is stop making obnoxious stroboscopic ads.

I've been amazed that micropayments haven't become common before now. I would gladly pay PS a few cents for reading this article, as long as monthly charges from any and all micropayments did not rack up more than about what I pay for cable TV.

There are zero sites that I would micropay to visit. And, I can't stand the over-the-top ads, either. I do hit the contribution links at my favorite blogs.

If a site owner would simply put a link in the body of the article or essay and respectfully request that readers click through to visit a sponsor's ad, then that I would do. Hardsell? I'm impossible to hardsell.

Look at refdesk dot com as a site that 'gets it'.

Running: Firefox with adblock and NoScript. There. are. no. ads.

Salon.com's method is that you can view one Flash ad for one day's access. I find that tolerable. However, that may be because I only visit Salon rarely.

In extending this model, smaller sites would be aggregated in some way so that viewing one Flash ad would get you to all the sites. Maybe each site that you wound up visiting could get some individual monetary credit.

There are some sites I visit for extended times that I'd be willing to watch one ad a day for.

The ad-supported business model might not work for everyone. That's fine, there are plenty of other possibilities -- subscriptions, micropayments, tipjars, daypasses, you name it. It's not obvious that any one business model will work for all sites, or even that any one site needs to stick to a single business model. It's the Cambrian Explosion all over again! The outcome is probably unimaginable right now, and when it's over we'll have all kinds of weird dead fauna to look at. The last thing you want to do is stick to a single model because it worked in the dead-tree era -- that way lies extinction for sure. Press on!

I wouldn't have a huge problem with clicking on ads (or giving my business to the companies involved) if the ads weren't such god-awful pieces of crap.

Something like 99.9% of all online advertisements are astonishingly stupid, and of the remaining 0.01%, maybe 5% of those are relevant to my interests.

There's a tip that most sites can take from Google (and the like). Simple text, or even clean graphical ads on a site don't offend me. Pop ups, pop unders, shoshkeles, etc. are offensive and stupid. Any business or website that uses these kind of ads *deserves* to go out of business (and they should be kicked in the balls for good measure).

I'll quit blocking ads when the sites quit using offensive ads.

That'll probably take quite some time.

The trick to advertising is to get content providers to embed the product ad into the content. Instapundit.com does this from time to time and can almost single handedly move a book into the top 10 on Amazon.

It is true, when instapundit say he liked the gillette fusion razor I gave it a try but mostly I block ads with Firefox, adblock plus and filterset g updater firefox ad-ons, also noscript. No script is becoming more useful as java script ads hang up page loading and are starting to have malware embeded in the banner ads. For users of google and gmail I recommend the firefox ad-on called customize google, this lets you block the ads on google, gmail etc and do other very useful things.

where do you go these things?

firefox

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

adblockplus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

filterset g updater

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136

noscript

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

customize google

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

Let me tell you --after using firefox with these ad-ons my web browsing experience is a much calmer experience and when I am forced to us internet explorer I feel assaulted on the web and it is quite unpleasant

I am pretty ad and interruption (interruptions are the worst for me) intolerant and watch recorded tv on comcast DVR and skip ads.

when I have to watch tv with ads (rarely, thankfully) i want to tear my eyes out as it is so boring and annoying and insulting and continuity breaking. After a year of no ads on tv and no interruptions, regular commercial tv is almost unwatchable.

sorry guys but I am part of the reason the ads are appearing in the right corner and bottom of the screen during the show.

The engineers at motorola and tivo left the 30 skip button hidden as an "easter egg" inside the remote after they were asked to remove it and you can replace it by following the instructions below. Once you go to the 30 skip button you will never go back to fast forward. my favorite show NYPD blue has 4 4minute ad interruptions... but not for me....8 clicks and the show resumes. it takes me 42 minutes to watch the hour show.

here is the motorola code to remap an unused button to do 30 second skip. I use the B button but you will want to choose one that you don't use.

http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/technology-articles/comcast-remote-30-second-skip-commercials-motorola-dct3412/

you can also do it on tivo

http://bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html

I know that ads support the media but I just don't want to watch them, the really good ads I catch online or see on a best of show, some of them are quite good and the best ones have improved over the 2 years we have been doing this.

cheers and happy surfing,

this letter brought to you by air, breathe it everyday.

From my long career in advertising I learned that, contrary to popular wisdom, people don't hate advertising. They just hate *bad* advertising.

Unfortunately a huge percentage of advertising is bad. I DVR my favorite shows and skip past the commercials too. But I do like the innovative approaches by some companies - American Idol with Coca Cola, iTunes and Ford comes to mind.

Coke sponsors in-show interviews with Coke logo backgrounds, iTunes puts the songs up for download and Ford makes music-vid vignettes with the show's stars doing goofy things involving a Ford car. All of this advertising is entertaining and most importantly enhances the experience of watching the show.

What sets it apart is the recognition and respect of why the audience is there in the first place. The ads, well, *add* to the show rather than detract from it. Other advertisers would do well to understand this if they want to succeed in a choice-empowered-consumer world.

On the other hand, when great shows like the CBS comedy Big Bang Theory are produced, I'd be more than happy to pay for them outright and skip the advertising aspect altogether.

I'm all for text-based or funny, unobtrusive ads, and click on them every once in a while on sites that make me happy (like leaving a tip!). On the other hand, I use adblock on anything that annoys me too much or bogs down the page-loading. And Firefox automatically does a pretty good job on pop-ups and -unders.

I'm surprised that I've never seen a site nefariously try and get me to turn off my pop-up blocker or anything. For example, if doubleclick.net hosted useful images as well as annoying ads, I'd have to adjust my adblock settings and maybe let some of their ads through.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that. What horrors have I unleashed?!

Anyway, great article! This is the first popsci article that I've dugg.

Remember we are still stuck in a greedy and primitive state of economic turmoil.
Until we as a society can over-come short minded selfishness we will always have to deal with petty issues such as this.

dwr50 say:
Greed is the CAUSE...
Advertising is the EFFECT...
Open Source is the ANSWER... Amen.

I don't mind static ads, but if they wink or blink they're history. AdBlock Plus , Firefox, Linux are my weapons of choice.

I agree with some of the other folks in that most of the ads I see on web sites arent the types of things i'm interested in. Plus you see a saturation of ads that pay the most, which are: Insurance, Refinance/Banking and Car sales

The would around me is completely painted with ads of those three subjects. I'm so tired of seeing Geico commercials that I wouldnt use that insurance company even if they gave me better rates and coverage than what I have. As for the rest of it, I only need a new car every few years and have all my banking needs taken care of. So to hear about the same thing over and over again, actually pisses me off and makes me not want to even listen to other commercials or look at ads.

I couldnt be the only one that is sick to death of Network TV and their watermarks and animated ads on the bottom of every TV show. I'm sitting there to watch a show I like, I dont need to be reminded that "The Closer" is on or that Progressive offers insurance 20 times throughout the course of a program. To add insult, they play 3 minutes of show and 2 minutes of commercials.

If I want something, i search for it.

I also agree 100% on the Music CD example given. It costs pennies to create a CD, a Buck to market it, and they give the artist pennies. The rest of it goes to the greedy music company. Trent Reznor has come up with a great system in my opinion. Its tiered so that fans of all degrees can get their fill and he still has a chance at making money. The biggest loser? Record Companies, and they can cry me a river because they should have reasonably priced music for the last 20 years that CD's have been out.

Whats the fix? They need to do a better job targeting ads or not put them up at all. I think the best advertising possible is embedded ads. Like Sports players wearing Rebook or Nike, a Ford Mustang in a car chase. Actor drinking Coke or Bud Light. Course Budweiser does have great commercials that are sometimes more enjoyable to watch than whatever show is on. But they have to be very careful on not plugging too hard, because they will degrade the quality of the show.

Dont put a summers eve ad in the middle of an article about how to rebuild a carburator. Web sites tend to just chuck up any old ad regardless of how it relates to the content. That is what turns everyone else in the world off of even looking.

If the trend of blocking everything but flat out HTML continues, web content will suffer too. There are some good things that can be done in Flash, in fact some people write their entire site in it. I'm not one to agree thats the best way to market a site, but there are some neat things done in it. Advertising has really hurt the promotion of Flash a great deal. Every action has a consequence, ads hurt legitimate content sites by forcing people to use blockers and blockers restrict or prohibit some good content.

I find myself judging a website by the quality of it's ads. For example, if I'm shopping online and trying to decide if I should purchase something from a site I'm not familiar with, if the pop-ups and other ads, scroll, make noise, sell sex or try to entice me with $10,000 if I enter the code, and my name and phone number; I know not to buy from them.

However, I find that sites like the New York Times and others, run ads that tell me about new products I don't know about. In fact, I got a chuckle out of an ad on NYTimes site for job recruitment at the CIA. I clicked on it to see if it was for real and it was.

There is a Shakespeare site a frequent that had an ad for Dead Poet finger puppets. I bought a set. they turned out to be a big hit last Christmas. At the same site that sold the puppets they offer any Shakespeare quote you want put on a T-shirt and done a tasteful (or not) design. I ordered four. I would never have known about this small company if it had not been for the ad the Shakespeare site. This is a great example of ad content enhancing (adding to) the site.

I'm on Mac and use mostly Safari which I don't think has a pop-up blocker. I've never turned it on if it does and don't find my self bombarded by pop-ups. May it's the websites you visit?

I feel like google ads are like a plague of locus infecting the internet since everybody and his brother can add them to their site (I refuse) and do so with out a lot of thought to the people visiting their site. Isn't it worth it to put an ad on your site because it goes with (adds to) your site and not because it will bring in $3 per click. This is a real problem. I used to work for a social networking company that as standard policy had its employees create content around keywords that would trigger the high dollar per click google adds (insurance, debt reduction, cars) to appear more often. Google does tell you how to do this, but I don't think it was their intent it be used the way it is being used. I usually don't return sites that do this I NEVER click on the ads. Not even when they are strategically placed close to other buttons on the site so as to pick up accidental clicks. (I could write a lot more about Google Adsense abuses.) I go to another site not set-up to trick me.

I also don't like drug company ads in Magazine ads like National Geographic. This gives what they are selling a little more credibility then maybe they should receive. Are there really that many people out there not sleeping that well? If so, is medication the only answer? But, if that's what allows Steve Winter ot go out and shot photos of snow leopards, then heck, put in a few more!

Oh, and it costs more then a few cents per CD to produce quality musical content. That may be the material cost, but look at the cost of studio time. Technicians are not cheap.

Just my two cents. Great article.

@sooty...

Click 'Safari' in the menu bar next to File and read the fourth option down.

Also ... Safari supports user defined style sheets too so you can kill all ads with the style sheet from this website: http://www.floppymoose.com/. You can go ahead and mess with it to block only the google ads if you like.

I still don't know how I feel about ads in general. I hate billboards driving down the roads but I'm a sucker for those stupid boxing ads where you beat up Osama or George Bush--I just wish there was one where you box Obama.