On a couple of my smallbiz lists, we’ve been discussing petpeeves about websites.
My list: music, scrolling text, excessive use of popups/under, Quicktime (I think I just need to update something and I don’t have time, so I hate that stupid alert), the huge text in lots of different colors, Flash (when they don’t give me an “out”), and the fancy stuff that follows your cursor.
Everyone who is complaining mentions the popups and popunders, which I really don’t mind. Some people claim to never return to a site if there is a popup/under. But these can be really useful, and I want to use one max, maybe even have it close by itself.
The other thing I really don’t mind is ads. (Except for those X-10 and casino ones and the really annoying ones Yahoo did for a bit) I figure that’s part of many sites’ revenue, and if I’m using a service for free and get a lot out of it, that’s the price I’m willing to pay.
So my question for you experts is “What ISthe big deal with one or two popups and some blinking ads?”
Frankly, I’m surprised we don’t see more ads here on Oriented.
quote:Originally posted by Jennifer:
On a couple of my smallbiz lists, we've been discussing petpeeves about websites.
My list: music, scrolling text, excessive use of popups/under, Quicktime (I think I just need to update something and I don’t have time, so I hate that stupid alert), the huge text in lots of different colors, Flash (when they don’t give me an “out”), and the fancy stuff that follows your cursor.
Man, what kind of sites are you going to that has all that in it? The only ones I can recall offhand are personal sites for teenagers. ;-p
quote:
So my question for you experts is "What [b]IS[/b]the big deal with one or two popups and some blinking ads?"
Frankly, I’m surprised we don’t see more ads here on Oriented.
Experts in what? Surfing the web? =) Anyway, the big deal with popups is that as opposed to the regular ads, popups force you to pay attention to them. I’ve long since acclimated myself to tune out ads on a web page. I literally don’t see them. But popups circumvent that because they create a new window that you have to deal with first just to get back to what you were doing. And god forbid you hit one of those sites that think they’re doing you a favor by popping up an ad, and then moving your original window back to the foreground thereby causing you to close your main window instead of the ad when you hit Ctrl-W or Cmd-W on reflex. Thankfully I see a lot less of those these days.
Anyway, a few here and there aren’t too bad but it starts to add up after awhile. And the other problem is that they usually don’t have anything to do with what I’m interested in. But you’ll find that most people who are really annoyed by popups tend to be using the web for a purpose. I know of quite a few people who turn Javascript off on their browers because of this popup stuff. It distracts them from the information that they’re trying to retrieve from the web. If you’re just lolly-gagging about on the web, then you’re not going to care as much since you’re wasting time anyway. =)
As for not seeing more ads on this site, well, I can’t speak completely for the founders but I don’t believe they created this site as a business opportunity. It’s more like they wanted to give something back to the community. That’s why the ads you do see on here are mostly ad swaps with related/relevant sites. The actual business opportunity site is something one of the founders is currently working on.
The BIG deal with pop-ups and animated banners is that they disturb the content you came to the site to view.
A pop-up window will cover the text you want to read so you have to get rid of it. It’s like trying to read a newspaper, and everytime you turn a page someone sitting right next to you throws a advertisement flyer over the page. After a while it gets very, very, annoying.
Animated/blinking banners disturb content as your eyes are attracted to the movement. This is why Yahoo does not permit animated ads that loop for more than 10 seconds. At the same time as I am typing this, the “Instant Graemlins” are animated below this text field. My eyes can’t help but go up and down from this text field to the movement below. Try it yourself.