Every newspaper I read has suddenly started running gigantic banner ads. It's pretty annoying since they occupy about half the screen until you scroll past them. What's going on?
17 thoughts on “Why have ads suddenly gotten huge?”
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i assume newspapers are losing money because traditional ads aren't effective enough for advertisers to generate sufficient revenue. ans yeah, it's very annoying.
I hate the video ads that are often hard to close and block some of the print.
you weren’t playing enough attention to the small ones
Have you tried watching the BBC news lately?
Half the screen is a giant block of red.
It's like they don't want you to see it.
I never watch it anymore because I hate this thing.
That's what Reader Mode is for.
The simple answer is they work better. In the past serving these kind of ads programmatically was not possible my guess is that has been solved.
Also the reason newspapers can't make money comes down to two reasons that almost no one understands. The first is a guy named Craig who single handedly wiped out the entire classified ad industry and replaced tens of thousands of employees with about 20 employees. The second is that we allow everyone to track our every key stroke online and create massive databases of that information. Then we allow four companies to set up ad exchanges that serve you personalized ads based on the database of information they keep on you wherever you are online. That means Joe's Best Hamburgers in Topeka site gets the same rates as the NYT. There is no reason we should have to let companies track our every key stroke. The economy worked just fine before they did.
I haven't worked for advertising-centric firms for a while, but when I did, this was a common dance.
What happens is response rates (usually clickthroughs) decay over time. People develop ad-blindness - you acclimate over time and stop noticing them.
Enter redesigns and new specs for creative. On the local side, every few years you redesign your site to keep up with visual design trends and reshuffle where the ads go. And on the network side, a new ad size will be rolled out. This is slower, because redesigns have to accommodate it. But the combination gooses response rates for a while.
Repeat.
This sounds right, and by "new ad size" can I infer bigger, as in "you're not paying attention anymore so we need to grab even more screen space"? My favorites now are the ones that take up 2/3 of the window and then eventually relent and retract upward. "Favorites" in scare quotes.
I can assure advertisers that on any devices I use, my only click-throughs are from finger slips.
Why aren't you running an ad blocker?
Even if you use an ad blocker, many if not most news sites won't serve you unless you turn your ad blocker off.
Reader mode is your friend, if you have it and it works well (more effective on some browsers than others, and absent from some).
In many cases, you can alleviate that problem by using a pop-up blocker.
I've run ublock origin for years. I come across almost no sites that refuse to serve me, and the odd ones I do are absolutely not interesting news sites.
Scott Galloway broke it all down in this article. Blame/thank Apple.
https://medium.com/@profgalloway/elephants-in-the-room-31e072ea75ae
Their pop-up blockers aren't working?
This is annoying me as well. News orgs which supposedly want me to be grabbed by headlines & top photos block them from view once I've clicked on them.
I'd like to see a usability study showing the percentage of screen real estate sucked up by ads. Especially pernicious are the auto-play videos at the top of a page which devolve into pop-ups at the lower right.
In today's world, a lot of home internet bandwidth is delivered via 5g wireless. Your granny needs to get online to check her gmail? No problem. When the younger grandkids connect with granny's wi-fi over a long weekend, her bill can bump up from $80 to $120. College granddaughter moves into spare bedroom, with intensive bandwidth needs, and the bill spikes to $160 and above.
WTF is this about? Not only do I need to swat away ads and demands to sign up for email updates, not to mention opt-ins for perpetual pop-ups, a lot of the bandwidth suckers are zero-volume videos in the corner of my screen.
My vision is failing. It's fucking with me that websites put light gray text against white backgrounds and that I need to pull the laptop closer to my face to figure out how to swat ads away.
I cannot believe that KD is online without an ad-blocker. That is just batshit crazy. Install an ad-blocker (I recommend ublock origin). Forget all this crap. If your (phone) browser can't (won't) do it, use a different browser (I recommend firefox).
Dude! I mean, seriously.
This is why I have an ad blocker and a Javascript toggle and a cookie blocker. Some websites get broken, but not that many, and Chrome is what I reserve for those.
The thing is I would be happy to allow display ads if they didn't go out of their way to be annoying. I want to support authors as much as the next guy but not at the price of popup videos and beeping, burbling, flashing animations.