I can't believe what I've seen on the New Scientist site.
They have pop-up ads. Pop-up ads. On New Scientist. They pop up within the page so the pop-up blocker can't get them.
You click on an article, settle yourself to read, and some damn advert pops up over the text.
I don't care what it's selling. I don't care if they're advertising something I've been looking for all my life. I'm not going to click on that ad. I'm not going to buy from it, because it's annoyed me.
I expect to see this sort of thing on pander-to-the-masses sites like Yahoo, but New Scientist? I thought that was a serious site.
Pop your ads up all you like, but not right over the text I'm trying to read. That is not going to make a sale. That is going to send me one message, and one message only. Your company is populated with idiots and you are best avoided.
If only those things would pop right out of the top of the monitor. Then, at least, we could have some fun shooting them down.
5 comments:
I've stopped going to sites I loved because I hate those things so much.
I used to while away time on the Dilbert site, before they filled it with pop-up windows. I haven't been back in well over a year.
Are they trying to sell by infuriation? I don't see it working.
Google for Ad-Aware. It's free, and it blocks 99.9% of all that crap on my computer. I no longer know how to live without it. Pop-up ads are infuriating!
We are sorry that our advertising annoys you so much. Obviously that is not something we want. As it happens we don't have any pop-up ads - we have rich-media ads, though I can see that the distinction is slim for you. What I can say is that all our rich-media ads conform to strict rules about the length of time they run and the availability of a close button.
We think this is a reasonable middle ground between serving our users and paying for the creation of our free content.
Damian Carrington
Online Editor
NewScientist.com
I am pleasantly surprised that my rantings have come to the notice of New Scientist, and I thank you for your response. Please be assured that it is the ads that are the target of my rant, and not New Scientist itself. I have not subscribed, since there are three local outlets where the magazine is sold so I am in no danger of missing a copy.
I appreciate that you need to fund your publication with advertising, but is it possible to arrange it so that the ads do not obscure the text?
Maybe the ad placement is at the discretion of the advertisers. I don't know. I should make clear to anyone reading that it is the ads that infuriate me, not the New Scientist site. The site is a valuable source of up-to-date information, written in a way that makes it understandable to the non-specialist.
It's just those ads...
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