The living nightmare of online advertising

ONLINE ADVERTISING, as annoying as it can be, is what makes free commercial websites possible, including this one. It is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, and most website owners truly do sympathize with readers who write in complaining about this or that ad being too distracting, and most site owners try very hard to strike a balance between lucrative advertising and the desire of readers.

Unfortunately it seems that the advertising industry as a whole doesn't much care what readers do or don't want to see. First we had banners, then pop-ups, then pop-unders. Then someone had the brilliant idea to begin integrating sound and video into banners, pop-ups, and pop-unders, so now your advertisements will sing, dance, and tell witty jokes if you let them. These type of developments have been about forty different flavors of annoying — but compared to what online advertising company Unicast has dreamed up, they all look cute and mild-mannered.

Unicast's new idea (detailed at website Adage.com) is for a type of advertisement that opens over your entire screen and must be manually closed. The advertisement would apply once you clicked to a deeper link in a website. Instead of navigating straight to the page in question, you'd get a face full of advertisement (at 10-15 seconds long) first.

The article only states that the ad in question must be manually closed by the viewer, it does not state whether or not the viewer can close the ad as soon as it appears or not. Even if viewers can shut the ad as soon as it appears, it's not hard to imagine how long that particular feature will last. After all, what good is an advertisement, ultimately, if people don't have to watch it?

Unfortunately for advertisers, research has shown that unlike television, web browsing is not typically a strictly leisurely activity for people. Users don't generally just go surfing the web to see what's out there — they surf with intent, whether doing research, looking for game information, ordering products, or watching the news. This means they usually aren't very happy with advertisers or products that interrupt their work and side-track them into watching an advertisement for a product they don't care about and don't want anyway.

As a writer for a commercial site I have to sympathize with the need for higher-revenue advertising; we've seen far too many sites fail in the last three years because their funds dried up, but ideas like Unicast's are somewhere between terrible and really stupid. If online ads become to intrusive people will simply find other sites to get their information from. Back to the drawing board, Unicast — I don't see this one flying. µ