Ad Rage | Tragic Comedy

Scott Hardie | June 24, 2010
I'd like to know which kinds of online advertisements drive you crazy. (Except those of you who use ad-blocking software and see almost no ads.) Like most people, I feel some low-level annoyance at most ads, from the flickering colors off to the side while I'm trying to read, to the animated ads that take over the screen and make me hunt for the X, to the ones that push down the whole page and then pull it back up a few seconds later. I can handle those.

But lately, the ones that are really getting under my skin are the ones where if you click on any part of the page, from just some text to the search form to even the blank area off to the side, it suddenly launches an ad in another browser tab or window. You know, I didn't think that completely blank area over there was an ad for an insurance company, and I'm not really interested in insurance. But sure, why not inflate your clickthrough rate with a completely useless visit, and annoy your actively engaged and clicking user by taking over their browser with an ad. This isn't really that much more annoying than the others; I guess the part about it that truly bothers me is its sudden ubiquity. I see it on news sites, I see it on movie sites, I see it on blogs. For all I know, it could be malware in my browser – one kind of ubiquitous advertising turned out to be that when I started seeing ads on my own site and ran a malware scan to remove it – but so far, it just seems to be a bad idea that has taken hold far and wide.