Amy Gahran over at Poynter blogs some more on annoying ads and tips on how to get rid of them. She also refers to John Battelle’s suggested alternative to IntelliTXT “to break out keywords for a given article in a separate box, and run that box at the end or to the side of the article? This addresses the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup problem (your advertising peanut butter is in my editorial chocolate….) but retains the power and reader service of the system.”
Good idea. I love good ads, from Amazon’s “you might wanna read this if you read that” and Google’s AdSense (sometimes). So how about leveraging the very cool Sidenotes thing from arco90.com. Very nice, intuitive and so long as there aren’t too many of them (and they’re relevant) something I could live with…
Hi again, Jeremy.
Just noticed that. oddly enough, the Adblock extension for firefox (which I mention int he article you link to above, I believe) is NOT killing the graphic ad that gets displayed at the bottom of your posting here.
Hmmmm, guess I’ll have to continue to tweak my filter. But just thought that was ironic, given the topic of this post.
– Amy Gahran
Amy, thanks for this. Interesting point, and worth a different post. The ad comes from an experiment with Feedburner, who add the ads, so to speak. I guess I feel that since they are at the bottom of the post, don’t flash or intrude, or mislead, they’re acceptable. But where’s the line? Is there even a line?
Well, what I was getting at is not “how dare you have an ad on your site,” but rather I was puzzled why Adblock didn’t nix it.
IMHO, if you want to have ads on your site that’s fine. I just like to be able to nix the graphic ads as much as possible from my browsing experience. Tools like Adblock should allow us both to honor our preferences.
Now that I think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if the ad industry woke up and realized that intrusive advertising is a bad idea all the way around. So any time they invent a new way to deliver ads, they should make public an easy way for people who don’t want to see graphic or in-line ads to nix them.
Ah… they’ll never go for it. They’re more concerned with increasing the total number of eyeballs they invade rather than building constructive relationships. But still, I can dream…
– Amy Gahran