The New York Times talks about floater ads, the ads that are actually in the same window as the content. On the downside they’re harder to block than popups, but the silver lining is that you know which site they came from so you can stop going there.
Whenever I see a link to IGN or Site Point or some other ad-heavy site I get that feeling that I get when I’m about to click on a PDF; I ask myself “Do I really need to deal with the interruption?” Usually the answer is no. Now I can mentally keep track of what sites make money off of annoying me, and give preference to sites that see respect their visitors.
If I were Macromedia I’d be figuring out a way to stop this. Do they really want to be known as the company that brought advertising more annoying than popups? Look at how well it worked for X10.
3 responses to “NYT on Floater Ads”
Hi, that NYT article last week caught my eye too, until I saw that it read “many of these new browser windows then happen to play SWF content” or such.
I’m with you on reducing visits to ad-heavy sites… sometimes I hit ESCAPE after the text loads, because GIF calls to many remote servers typically eat the time.
But do you see a specific connection with the Macromedia Flash Player here, other than how the experience it provides is also desired by many advertisers? Other than that phrasing from the NYT author, what could I do to help…?
Thanks,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support
What I always find myself doing whenever I see a flash banner is hold onto the scroll bar. That stops both GIFs and flash from animating. The pain in my hand is much less annoying than the visual distraction.
John, thanks for taking the time to address this. I don’t have any URLs to provide right now, but I have seen several annoying ads that block the content with full motion video and Flash.
I see them a lot less than I used to because I use the FlashBlock plugin for Firefox, due to a bug in Firefox on OS X.
I’m not sure what, if anything, Macromedia can do about this. If there was a way to prevent Flash content from displaying on top of HTML content, that would probably address the problem. I don’t do any Flash coding though, so I don’t know what wider implications that would have.