Yes, I know, I appreciate the irony of an internet marketer who hates ads but it’s true.
I can’t stand them. I’ve had Adblock Plus installed on Firefox for years now and I’d forgotten how offensive ads could be.
I turned adblock off last week because being able to see ads is, after all, useful from a business perspective. I found myself whitelisting sites here and there because I needed to interact with their ads or see how they operated and I though, what the hell, I’ll just turn it off completely.
Big mistake.
Static ads I can just about cope with, except that they take up so much screen real estate I have to scroll around just to find the actual content.
Animated ads though? Jesus Christ. I fail to understand how anyone can be expected to read an article with big red and yellow jangly flashing boxes and banners jumping around in their peripheral vision. And how the fuck am I supposed to watch a video when right next to it is another bloody video playing on continuous loop?
I heard today that 6% of users contribute 40% of banner clicks. Mostly men aged 25-45 with an income of under $40K. And clicks were unrelated to specific products or offline advertising campaigns. The inference is these people are basically bored and wasting time by essentially spanking the monkey.
Figures.