The Invasion of the Ads
07 25th, 2008 /That could be a good title for a terror movie, as publicity is more and more present in our lifes. But today it stands for a post related to free 2.0 sites and advertising.
I was updating my myspace account and I found an ad of sanitary napkins, a Flash horizontal banner that grows up when you roll over it. It includes a video and some animation to show the offer and links. Also, as you can see in the image, you find another ad in the right column.
Usually I don’t care about that kind of big animated banners, unless they have some noise: then they become irritating, so I always leave the page. But this time, with this napkins advert, I had a little problem. The main admin page of myspace is a place where I spend a lot of time, checking the news of my friends’ profiles. At some point, the big banner expanded and the video begun. And for some strange reason, just in some cases, if you roll out of it, it doesn’t disappear.
I tried to find a “X” to close it, but it doesn’t have one. So I had to reload the page to continue “working”. I suppossed it was caused by an strange behaviour of my browser (Firefox) in some circumstances, but I think that these kind of things should be tested before by the designers. As you see, with the expanded add you almost get a 50% advertising page! If I would have been browsing in other kind of page I would have left it inmediately. They forgot the “close” button!
That makes me think about the ads in my blog. Are they intruders or they actually contribute to enrich the content with interesting links? The ads in my site have another function too: they teach me about internet marketing and advertising. That’s the main reason I have them. But, do users feel disturbed by them till the point they leave my page?… Time to think…
