The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques | Hacker News Reader

The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

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155 pointssmacktoward91 comments

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Made even worse when the close button takes 5 seconds delay to show up.

And on mobile you are actually pretty lucky if the close button is actually somewhere on the screen or if you can at least scroll your way to it...

Or if you go to tap close but at that exact point an image finishes downloading, reflowing the page and moving the close button elsewhere so you end up clicking the ad. Grrr.

Sometimes the close button even tries to make you feel guilty about clicking it, like :

"No, I'm not interested in learning about latest cloud technologies every week [x]"

Or the famous "Not now" meaning "Fine, I will bother you again later anyway"

"Not now" is something even Google does quite frequently.

Like when you go to google.com with a non-google browser.

There's a whole Tumblr for confirm-shaming.

http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/

Assuming some users know how to control a computer (some claim they do e.g. those working in IT), why would they tolerate this annoyance?

It must not be that bad or else they would work around it, using their professed skills in controlling computers.

Or maybe there are other reasons?

How many technical users are complaining about advertising while at the same time assisting advertisers to put their marketing cruft on the web?

> It must not be that bad or else they would work around it, using their professed skills in controlling computers.

They did and do. Where do you think adblockers come from?

This is art.

Pretty much gave up on reading wired.com because of this. Too annoying takes forever to load.

I've never seen it on wired.com, because I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. You don't have to put up with that shit either, if you don't want to.

I use https://github.com/NicolaeNMV/BehindTheOverlay to remove the more evil ones

Comment of the year

Don't forget to make the "x" as small as possible, unclickable by anyone that doesn't have 20/20 eyesight or really good precision with the mouse.

God this bullshit. On ads, they know accidental ad clicks will get them more revenue so they're incentivized to make people's lives difficult.

Fuck the ad industry.

True story:

This happened in my country, on the major/most important newspaper. They changed their mobile version of the news paper to the following:

Each time you clicked on a news article, you started to read the article, as usual. Meanwhile, in the background, an advertisement was being fetched. Then, about 5 seconds later, an advertisement that took the FULL phone screen appeared (mind you, many times this was a video, so it also made noise). There was no way to cancel this until, about 3 seconds later, a "CONTINUE READING" button appeared at the top.

So you press the "continue reading" button, and the dreaded ad dissappears, but you are brought to the top of the article (so you have to find again where you left off).

They have since removed that annoying UI behavior. However, another one is still at place: While you read the article, 15% of the bottom area of the screen was taken by a notification/advertising bar; and 10% of the top area was taken by a navigation bar. So the actual area for reading the article was rather narrow.

See for yourself if you're on a mobile phone: http://www.elcomercio.pe (click on a news article)

I'm getting this on fucking cable now. Seriously, Verizon Fios pops up these goddamn ads and we pay north of $300/month for their services. That is just obnoxious, and there is no way out. There's not enough of a free market to do anything.

This is what drives people to torrent TV shows.

I ran into this dreck yesterday: https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal...

If anyone can find the actual article, let me know.

This is very funny but at the same time it hurt my butt that I had to provide them ad revenue by watching this mess...

Indeed: inc.com are blocked from my facebook feed and exist on a sort of mental blacklist of sites I ordinarily never visit due to their terrible user experience and vacuous content. Still, a great example in this instance.

In their defense, many people only read the title anyway.

True, but I'm not sure that's a defence when it may be because they can't even find the article content amongst all the other garbage on the page.

http://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectur...

Btw, where's the article, I did my best to solve the puzzle but can't find it.

Indeed: the Joel Spolsky piece just isn't there, but if you scroll about half a mile down you find a piece about James Comey. Disabling uBlock makes no difference so it's clearly not about having an ad-blocker enabled. Terrible website.

Is there an article? I couldn't find it, maybe the page is outdated (2009) and it's a bug?

Me too... maybe the ad blocker blocked it? Not a loss.

I turned off mine, still didn't find it.

<strikethrough>It's there: you just have to scroll down and down and down, far further than any normal human being would possibly think is reasonable.</strikethrough>

Nope, you're right: I actually tried to read it properly and the article content bears no relation to the title at the top of the page, which is just a title. That's with or without ad blocker enabled. Incidentally without uBlock enabled the page is slower than hell to load.

+1 made me click

Most of them don't seem to realize how nagging users scale so badly so that it gets the opposite results (eg. driving people away). Just think if every page out there asked the user to signup to some services... this would make the Internet less usable than using pigeons. Why? because nagging users cannot scale. An user might accept to click a couple banners every dozen different servers he/she visits daily, but what if everyone employs the same practice? And if we agree that it must be kept to a minimum, who decides what site can nag the users and what cannot? The answer is that the practice must be abandoned because it does not scale.

> The answer is that the practice must be abandoned because it does not scale.

Actually and sadly it's more along the lines of "The answer is that the practice must be abandoned by others but not us because it does not scale."

My take is that I just disable javascript (though some browser make it harder to do it) and skip the websites which fail at understanding the concept of a webpage and require javascript to display content.

Perhaps you should just stick to reading newspapers. Zero modals guaranteed!

One of my favorites: modal ad, with large "Learn More" button to follow the ad, and a minuscule "x" button to get to the content, as if seeing the actual content was an afterthought.

I always wondered why they even put the "x" there.

Probably so they can track who clicked the "x" vs who used the esc key vs who clicked outside.

Understanding what people hate about advertising is easy: Getting shoved stuff in your face that has nothing to do with what you want to do/achieve.

Provide a value and put your product references / affiliate stuff in these. Make me sign up not because of a trick but because I hope to receive regular value from you. Don't spam me because I use a reasonable ad blocker.

The implementation of the ad examples is interesting. I'm not sure wireframes would be the most effective way to gauge annoyance. The times I really curse and want to smash my device is usually less about the design rather than the functionality of what it's keeping me from doing or interfering with. I'd have a much less visceral reaction to the same ad design if I was just looking at a wireframe during a study.

Yeah, the two things that really piss me off are:

1. I scroll down, read the article a bit, move to scroll again, and end up clicking an ad that has just popped into existence (Cynical reason: The delay improves their CTR and hence revenue. Less cynical reason: They were too optimistic in how fast their ad would load on my mobile connection).

2. I click your page and it starts playing noise. It doesn't even have to be an ad, a lot of news sites autoplay their videos when I just care about the article.

Both are less about where the ad is and more about how it behaves

Another factor in #1 is advertisers don't want to pay for ad impressions if the ad was never actually viewed (because it's way down the page and the user never scrolled that far).

3. The modal window is too big which pushes the tiny close button outside the screen and makes it impossible to close.

Try using your escape key, disabling script and reloading page, using wallabag[1] to read the page, editing the DOM to remove the popup.

[1]: https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en

No. I Just go away. This happens mostly on my phone anyway.

It is certainly interesting that lately there is more research into what ads people particularly dislike.

However I must wonder that they seem to skip an elephant in the room: Malvertising and Fraud. That is: Ads that either try to install malware on your system or that try to deceive you into buying something that isn't really what it seems to be. I'm pretty sure nobody likes that, yet both are common enough.

I think most people who end up with malware can't really track it down to a specific advertisement, or even know that it came from an ad - so it's hard to measure how much it's hated.

I hate instant modal popups with a passion. Whenever I get one of those obnoxious modals I try my best to boycott the company and promote alternatives, assuming there's any. When this trend initially started popping up I'd close the modal and read the article, but I've grown increasingly intolerant. Now I close the article immediately unless the content is really important.

It's about as annoying as the classic popup, to the point that browsers include a pop up blocking mechanisms and settings.

Now the popup lives inside the window powered by javascript and the browsers have yet to do something about it so I'm simply disabling javascript.

BTW, if you aren't familiar with the Nielsen Norman Group, it's worth visiting their other work. It includes Don Norman (jnd.org, Design of Everyday Things), Jacob Nielsen of Alertbox UX fame, and Tog (Bruce Tognazzini) who started the Human Interface Group at Apple and made many of the loved (and hated) interface choices in Apple products for years. A very impressive team they've assembled.

One new technique that's notably missing, and egregiously abusable, is browser notifications. Several times a day now I'll go to a web site that immediately pops up a browser-native non-modal notification asking for permission to use the browser's built-in notifications system.

I've set the default to "block" for that exact reason. I don't need desktop notifications from any websites, ever.

What is browser notifications ? What's the use for that ?

Never seen it in any browser I use (firefox, waterfox, pale moon, opera 12, vivaldi, otter, qupzilla, netsurf, seamonkey, uzbl, and a few more)

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/richNotifications

Be interesting to compare with how prevalent the different ad types actually are, how effective they are, and how much money they typically cost.

Preroll video may be more "annoying" than Related Links ad units, but they also pay a LOT more and are probably more effective any way you measure it.

That comparison would have been great. Annoying ads is one thing, but how effective are they? Modal ads can be really annoying, but some marketers claim that they are highly effective, especially for building a mailingist. Or do we hate some ad types because they are very effective?

They may be effective to artificially increase mailing list registrations because people who don't know better sign up just to get rid of the ad.

Do you know any very effective ad type ? I don't even know an effective commercial ad (maybe the 30 seconds TV spot?).

Speaking as a developer. You may be paid by the impressions but how much you are paid depends on the CTRs. Nothing works for CTRs like targeting. The more data you can share about users, the better it is for you. All this other stuff probably contributes to user churn as much it does to your bottom line. This is one of the reasons that a lot of apps ask you for location permissions even when they don't need it.

Sure, but the same exact ad running in the right rail will preform vastly differently if it's in a modal popup.

And hopefully developers / website owner engaging in breaching user privacy and collecting user data to give away to third party will be accountable before court.

Or maybe we could sugarface and kneecap them for being satan's little helpers.

Preroll video pays more because it's usually not blocked by adblocker and unskippable, hence more effective than a blocked or skipped video.

I've started considering if maybe we're reaching "peak-advertising" or if we will at some point.

TV has become unwatchable in the later years, so here I would expect the advertising driven model to fail at some point. The Internet has the benefit of adblocks, but still the content is saturated by ads. It stands to reason that at some point the users/customers will be pushed too far and there will be a backlash.

Also, targeting became much worse than 2004, which makes me doubt that all this "deep learning on big data" even slightly works. Everywhere I see only ads for mobile games, hollywood movies, consumer loans, cars — and I hate all of these things.

One thing I see quite frequently is ads for items I already bought. Not like "oh you just bought a T-Shirt, well let's show you another great T-Shirt", no no, it's "oh you just bought this T-Shirt, well let's show you the exact same T-Shirt in case you want to buy a second one completely identical".

Oh yes, Amazon is the king of this type of annoyance. I've bought a laptop on it once, so it kept nagging me for buying another one for few years! I don't get such logic -- if I've just bought something, what is the probability that I need the same item? That's more like the exact opposite in my line of thinking -- if I've just bought something, I definitely don't need another one, so don't even bother.

Sadly hated != ineffective, so they're here to stay

Yes. If I recall correctly, Kahnemann showed that any emotional response is likely to cause long term memory. But with adds the memory is going to be so faint that you forget the nature of the emotion. But when you hear the brand name, it sounds familiar. People prefer familiar products over unfamiliar options.

Advertising, especially online advertising is highly inefficient. Pop-up window ads (and pop under) were hated too and they're gone, not because advertisers chose so but because browser implemented pop-up blocking measures.

Not affiliated to the author, but can recommend 'Behind the Curtain' chrome extension [1] that lets you dispense with overlay popups using a keyboard shortcut. Saves having to move the mouse around and hunt for the magic [x].

Combined with ublock origin[2] to get rid of the payload of those pop-ups, can also reduce bandwidth / lag / frustration.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Well chrome is not exactly free of tracking and advertising, let's not forget that it's a "free" product of the largest online advertising network intended to help them track users and do more advertising.

Works just as well on chromium.

My most hated at the moment? Those ads that hijack page scrolling and don't let go until you've scrolled the ad past. Wouldn't be a huge problem if it didn't totally fuck up my browser's scrolling functionality and lag things out.

Disable scripting, use wallabag to read the content (or a similar readability service), just leave the site and let them rot or find the contact info and tell them why you hate them now.

The surprising thing to me was how narrow the band was. Everything hovered around 5/7 hate.

They mention this at one point; 4 is neutral on their scale so an average of 5.23 just means that people have a mild to moderate dislike of advertising in general. I don't know anybody who likes advertising (well, one person but they work for a marketing firm) so that makes sense to me.

It would be interesting if they could remove that bias though - it would make the differences more obvious if nothing else.

It would be easier to see the difference if they assume no one has a positive impression, so 0 is neutral and 7 is hate. If you adjust their data now for that it's easier to compare - .95 for retargeting, 1.82 for modal - around twice as annoying!

I've seen some great IT related ads using the Brave advertising network ads, on Brave. Really didn't mind them. (Disclaimer: I've only just started using Brave).

I haven't tried Brave but that sounds like a good development. I still don't really like being advertised to but if it's relevant or at least easy to ignore then I don't mind either. I guess that puts me at about a 4 on their scale.

The default setting in Brave is no ads. I actively had to make the change to get the Brave network ones. I really liked that.

When I hit a page with these kinds of ads, there's a good chance I will immediately close the tab and never read the content. I hope this shows up in the site metrics.

I usually do the same, except I take extra measure to never appear in any metrics unmasked.

I always wonder how are participants chosen for surveys like this?

If it's an online survey offering filling it out in exchange for a chance to win something I will almost never pay any attention to the questions and just click whatever to finish it quickly.

What's the proper process for conducting a study like this?

I find it interesting that the only video they investigated were pre-rolls. I automatically close any tab that auto-plays video (and by extension, sound) at me when I load the page.

But I suppose video content about the article on CNN (as the biggest annoyance) isn't considered an advertisement.

Good point about retargeted ads showing the kids what they've got for christmas!

It's not the ads that bothers me the most, it's the tracking.

The ad I hate the most is the one that manage to slip through my adblocker.

I do not discriminate. I hate all ads equally.

User tracking

Hated but worth :)

If you liked this, stay tuned for the rest of the series:

  *The Most Hated Telemarketing Techniques*

  *The Most Hated Pickpocketing Techniques*

  *The Most Hated Prostate Exam Techniques*

Meh, it's still kind of interesting though. Just because something's unpopular in general doesn't mean the specifics aren't worth looking at.

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