I am at the point where I’m ready to give up on reading my local online newpaper, because of proliferation of maddening, intrusive ads that greet me every time I visit the site. Here’s a screenshot of today’s front page – except that you can only see a small bit of it at the bottom right because a huge black ad pops up to cover most of the left side and then a “page curl” ad obscures the top right. Sometimes these ads have “close” buttons and sometimes you just have to sit there and wait for them to do their thing and go away.
I understand very well that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and I don’t mind GOOD web ads – in fact, I even sometimes click on them and actually read about the products or services they’re hawking. A good ad is one that gets my attention by having a compelling picture or intriguing headline – not one that does it by getting in my face and preventing me from seeing the content I came there to read.
