What's the World Coming to with Web Ads?

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I just read here about how Google is going to add those absolutely nasty interstitials, expanding and floating ads to its Adsense portfolio.

Good God! I avoid any site that has this crap like the plague! How could they possibly expect people to put up with this utter crap and even stay on their site, much less click on one of these doozies! The quote:

"Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page."

This person (whoever it is) is actually reporting this as if it is a "cool thing"! The people who design and promulgate this horrible crap should be taken out, lined up and shot, firing-squad style, IMHO!


Frankly, I wish there were a way to automatically ban these sites from my browsing experience. You know, some kind of a webservice that automatically puts them into your hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1 or something like that! That would do the trick quite nicely.

Does anybody have anything like this?
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:02 PM

    Perhaps it would be possible to write a browser add-on that could detect these? I'm not terribly familiar with how these work, but maybe it would be possible insert fake headers into the request that would trick the webpage into thinking you've already seen the interstitial? Maybe the guys that make AdBlock (for FireFox) can come up with something?

    ReplyDelete

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