Hacker News Reader

Comment by moronicalox | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com