Link ads – An awful new trend

Thursday, July 14th, 2005

There are a lot of things I hate about the internet: Internet Explorer only pages, pages with lots of animated gifs, sites hosted at geocities, Flash intro’s on webpages, anything Flash in general, websites with 90% bullshit and only 10% of the screen used for real contents, etc. But the thing I hate most of all is obtrusive ads.

It continues to amaze me to what level content-providers will sink in order to make a quick buck. Now, normal ads don’t bother me much, as long as they don’t require Java, play LOUD tunes using flash or cause me to go into epileptic shock with all their blinking. What does annoy me to no end however are three types of ads:

Window Pop-ups
These are annoying because they clutter my desktop and steal my focus from what I was doing. They also often startle me if I’m fully concentrated on reading some or such website. Pop-ups aren’t import anymore though, since pop-up blockers are readily available.

DHTML Pop-ups
DHTML pop-ups are those ads that pop-up in the middle of the browser, but which aren’t a real window. Usually, they’ll come sliding in from the top, immediately stealing your attention. They’ll cover the real contents of the webpage and you won’t be able to close them for, usually, a couple of seconds. These are the most annoying, irritating and intruding advertisements I’ve ever seen, and you can be sure that if your product is featured in one of them, I’ll never buy it in my lifetime, even if my very existence depended on it.

The above mentioned ads are pretty obtrusive and fairly annoying. But they’re nothing compared to:

Link ads
The ultimate low in advertising: trick people into thinking they’re getting some sort of valuable information, and instead shove ads in their face. How does it work? You know the world wide web, don’t you? It’s the thing you’re looking at right this moment. Now, check out the words that are different in color from the rest; the dark-red text. Those are links. Links provide, well, links to more information. Clicking on a link takes you to that information.

The lastest fad is to hide advertisements behind those links. What seems to be a link to more information about a certain topic is in reality nothing more than a lure. When you hover over them with the mouse cursor, a giant ad jumps up in your face. Talk about misleading.

Take for example the colinux wiki. (I won’t link to it here; read on for the reason). Just when you think you’ve gotten a quick referal to the auto-built binaries you need… BAM! AD.. IN.. YOUR.. FACE! Think that’s annoying? At least they make their precious ad-links distinguishable from the real links. OSnews.com does too, but ‘unfortunatelly’ their ad-links display exactelly the same as real links, tricking you even more than the ghastly deeds of the coLinux wiki.

If content-providers believe they can trick and deceive their users like this for a couple of bucks a month, then shame on them. These people are every bit as deceptive and low as con-men. They really disgust me so much, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

From now on, I will ban each and every site that employs such devious ways of squeezing money out of their userbase. Think I need your site and I’ll just have to put up with your crap?! Wrong assholes! Wrong, wrong, wrong! I’ve thrown my television out because of the crap advertising (that includes the ‘shows’ that were on; it’s all one big ad, is what it is), I don’t read magazines anymore because of the 75% ad/25% crap-content and I will gladly banish your site from my life if that’s what it takes to avoid your intrusive ways.

• OSnews.com
• coLinux wiki
• Who’s next?…