Comments on: One Month of Interrupted News

By: admin

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:08:50 +0000

Ah good old p3syf1z – he’s a fountain of truth!

By: Ben Shepherd

Ben Shepherd — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:02:40 +0000

couldn’t have said it any better p3syf1z

By: Charlie

Charlie — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:44:27 +0000

I was getting very annoyed with this too and spoke to a mate who is a serious IT geek about what I could do. He solved it quite simply for me and I hardly get any of these ads anymore. Apparently almost all of this type of advertising (in fact most advertising on the web nowadays) is delivered via the Flash plugin that most users install on their computers. Well if you are using Firefox as your webbrowser there is a wonderful little addon called “Adblock Plus” available here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

And once you install it add the “Easylist” subscription which keeps an updated list of websites to block that are producing these ads in your webbrowser. EasyList available here:
http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
The webpage has a simple oneclick button to add the EasyList to Adblock Plus.

Once that’s done you basically don’t get anymore flash ads on webpages you visit anymore. Which means apart from anything else webpages load faster because their not loading all the advertising and you’re also using less of your monthly internet allowance to view webpages.

I highly recommend trying it as it’s very easy to uninstall through the Firefox tools menu if it doesn’t suit your purposes, but to be honest I’ve now had all my friends install it on their computers and I’m yet to hear of one uninstalling it.

By: Dean Felton

Dean Felton — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:47:36 +0000

Thank you for making this an issue. It is my pet hate. I work in the media and therefore appreciate the commercial pressures – but annoying the customers isn’t the answer. Pop-ups are acknowledged as a major turnoff – that’s why browsers have pop-up blockers – yet advertisers seem to think they’re clever. Ditto for post-it notes stuck to the front page of my morning paper!

By: Damon

Damon — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:38:16 +0000

I don’t really understand the objection with most of them – as long as there is a clear, unambiguous and functional “close” control then all but the most web-unsavvy can click right past them. Even in the reduced-size screen grabs on the slideshow I could immediately identify the close button on most of them – on some of them I couldn’t, and these ads deserve to be condemned.

Maybe I’m missing the point?

By: bruce

bruce — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:56:50 +0000

Isn’t it interesting that it was for this EXACT reason that I clicked away from The Age five minutes ago and came here.

By: Julian Peterson

Julian Peterson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:16:02 +0000

Thanks for collecting those all in one place Nathan, I’m sending this around now.

By: Nathan Bush

Nathan Bush — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:40:17 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys, good to see I’m not alone on this one. I think the general take out is that even if there is increased recognition this is not only offset but taken into negative perception by the intrusion and annoyance factor. While EOFY may have increased the occurrence slightly I’m pretty confident that if I did the same test in three months time we’d have a similar result. Coming from an agency side as well, I totally agree with Zoe and Ben that there is often a chasm between understanding impact and perception.

By: Ben Shepherd

Ben Shepherd — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:47:36 +0000

Simple explanation for this is EOFY … I can say this with some assurity after 7 years agency and publisher side. There is also the reality that 90% of these news businesses are not making money online and need to extract more revenue to pay the bills.

Re “I don’t think anyone stopped to think about the annoyance factor and the negative perception that could develop of the news site and the brand as a result of the interruption.”

Actually, I think *some* do … it just has to be illustrated properly to the client. There is a belief, an incorrect one, that people will tolerate this sort of interruption online. Personally, I don’t think they will. Impact and annoyance are two different things but the agencies role is to demonstrate this to client with more than just anecdotal opinion.

By: Simon A

Simon A — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:13:50 +0000

That car ad on Fairfax was the bane of my existence last week. The worst part? Not even sure what brand/model it was selling. Advertising failure.