The new internet ad fad
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Okay, pop-ups are out. Everybody’s got their blocker installed, courtesy of Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 SP2 (or something). Content-providers Companies are standing around pulling their hair out: Now they can’t torture and agonize their website-visitors anymore! What to do?!
Don’t worry, the new scheme goes like this:
Before allowing access to some half-assed piece of ‘content’ (read: 80% of the screen filled with flashing, moving, beeping, advertising garbage versus 20% of content), they’ll show a full-screen ad with some little ‘Skip ad’-link hidden somewhere on the page! Awesome idea. And as if this wasn’t enough to make me want to puke and leave the site immediately, cookies are required to skip the ad!
Cookies are the spawn of Satan, everybody knows this. Anybody that doesn’t know this fully deserves to have their privacy and anonymity brutally violated. Anyway.. Naturally I’ve got cookies disabled. There’s absolutely NO reason WHATSOEVER why EVERY site out there needs to bombard my browser with all kinds of useless cookies. I’m talking about sites where I don’t even log in to some account! So, I don’t allow cookies. If I want to log into a site, I manually add it to my ‘Can set cookies if it absolutely has to’-list. Now, do you really think I’m going to go through all the trouble of adding a site to this list, just to be able to skip an ad? Maybe if my browser didn’t have a Back button I would. Alas for the ‘Content providers’ (god, I hate that word. HATE. IT), it does. There goes another dissatisfied customer, Mr. Content Provider! See ya!
For some reason content providers like Hollywood, TV stations, papers, magazines and websites actually think their content is so interesting, people put up with the day-in-day-out constant annoyances. I don’t know about you, but not me.
I don’t watch TV. Haven’t done so for years. The shows and movies are crap, the ads are too long and too frequent.
I don’t visit The New-York Times On-line and many other websites. I refuse to give my name, address, phone number, e-mail, DNA, fingerprints, social security number, pin code and first-born child just to read 50 words worth of article riddled with ads and FlashInformation (I just invented that word; FlashInformation is like that bullshit excuse for information you see scrolling at the bottom of the screen during the American ‘news’-shows. Not informative, not catchy, not worthy).
I don’t read magazines. They’re 72% ads, 15% actual content and 13% filler information. (Eight years ago I actually counted all the ad-space in five magazines and that’s what I came up with).
I don’t read newspapers because they all, one: assume I’m an idiot; two: aren’t scannable so I can quickly see what’s useful information to me and what’s not and three: give only, like, a tenth of the available information about a topic and still manage to completely screw up the impression that that information leaves.
Look, we’re still living in the ‘Information age’. Incredible amounts of information are trying to get my attention during each of my waking hours. No matter where I go or at what time I’m going there, there’s always a shit-load of information to process. Cue nature’s most incredible invention to date: The Human Brain! The human brain has (content-providers may want to pay attention here:) FILTERS! You know what triggers those filters? B U L L S H I T! (That and ugly chicks). When bullshit is encountered, it gets filtered out!
Now then. Imagine you’re a content provider (newspaper, TV station, anything). Wait! Don’t kill yourself yet, this is purely hypothetical. Okay, you’re a content provider and your content sucks. Nobody wants to view it. There are two things you can do. One is to just force your content onto the people. Bypass those bullshit-filters and make them view your content! Give them full-screen ads, call them during dinner to offer crappy products, halt them in the streets to get them to sign up for some shitty deal, whatever! Unfortunately, being a content provider, your IQ is only about as high as that shitty little dog down the street from here, so you don’t actually realize that the most annoying thing you can do is bypass the magnificent filters in our brains. It makes people not just not interested in your product, it makes them hate it and you. Too much ads, too much trouble to go through before reaching a meager amount of trivial information, and people look on for other information.
There’s an easier solution, you know… Make your content easily accessible to the people who are actually interested in it. Make your content more interesting. Make your ads appear at a time that makes sense. If Google, of all companies, can get it, why can’t the rest?
I hate mediums. I hate them all. TV, radio, newspapers, the world-wide-web. Hate, hate, HATE! How come I have to pay for shitty quality and STILL have to watch ads?!
And the best thing is, it’s only getting worse. I think I’m gonna live out the rest of my life a hermit.
End-of-rant.
PS: This article was non-informative. Please don’t read it.