Ads - Net is fedup with them.

[Brett_Tabke]

Web ads test surfers patience [msnbc.com] (-msnbc).

American consumers are annoyed over the proliferation of advertising all around, but they’re getting especially fed up with the barrage of online ads, a new research study finds.

[europeforvisitors]

MartiniBuster wrote:

For major sites like the NYTimes, how are you going to target? In an ideal world:
Computer ads in the Tech Section
Investment Ads in the Business Section
TRAVEL ADS IN THE TRAVEL SECTION (Where Orbitz belongs) Etc.

Although the front page will probably keep being ruled by Orbitz because that's where the "awareness" campaigns belong.

That's how it works in the print world, too. You'll find ads for major airlines in the newspaper's general news section not only for building awareness, but also because special fares or a "free miles" promotion may stimulate travel purchases by readers who haven't been planning trips. Ditto for computers and investment ads: It may make sense to have ads for servers in the tech section and ads for discount brokerage firms in the business section, but an ad for home PCs or Roth IRAs may work fine in a section of the newspaper that reaches non-technical or non-business readers.

Online, as in print, media purchases should be based on what audience you're trying to reach as well as what you're trying to sell.

[born2drv]

I can't remember which sci-fi movie it was... Maybe some of you remember where they were walking through a mall and holographics ads popped up near them and greeted them by their first name and tried to pitch them a product specically geared towards them?

Something similar online should evolve. Maybe to login in the MSNBC news, have a popup window asking you for general demographics (gender, age, location, personality type, income, computer savviness), and then store this in a cookie on the computer. And from then on only show ads targetted to that specific type of consumer, so everyone who visits MSNBC sees a different series of banners.

[Learning Curve]

Minority Report

[FourDegreez]

People hate the intrusiveness of the ads, yet advertisers respond by making their ads ever-more intrusive. And perhaps the declining click-through ratios that we hear so much about are due to sites putting ten different ads on one page. Text links are by far the most-appreciated by visitors, followed by reasonable banners. I would personally never use pop-ups or pop-unders, banners with sound, or animations that cover the content. These are obnoxious in the extreme, and will definitely turn away visitors. I think we will see a definite migration of visitors away from sites that use these tactics and toward sites that do not. For example, I don't even click on anything with "about.com" in the URL (even though their pages always seem to rank well in Google). It will be to their own detriment for them to continue to annoy the hell out of their visitors. It is also self-defeating when it encourages an increasing number of people to install ad-blocking software. Ads must be kept as targeted, limited, and unobnoxious as possible.

[geekmom]

I don't think people are angry with ads, I think they're angry with those irritating email ads that no one subscribes to and with pop up ads that do not go away. They also do not like ads that are slow.

If webmasters adhere to some basic rules to ads I don't think they're a problem. If you use banner ads:

1. make them small to load quickly
2. make them out of the way
3. make them interesting

If you use pop up ads:

1. show them once and only once.
2. make them SMALL
3. do not pop up one ad after the first one closes.

I don't mind ads, it's the way some people pay for their site.

[gsx]

Yes, it's the way the advert is done that makes it seem acceptable or unacceptable.

For example, pop-ups and pop-unders are hate creators. Flashing, distracting ads are just as annoying. Irrelevant ads that don't fit into the above categories never get clicked on by me.

But for the opposite end of the scale, look at dealtime.com (or .co.uk) or any of their competitors. Every product you see on their site is an advert. The company is paying for it to be there. That is smart advertising (why they have other completely irrelevant adverts such as all the credit card ones is beyond me - maybe it's just common greed).

For news sites, surely they can come up with an advert keyword recognition program to bring the most relevant adverts to the article by using keywords in the article itself and the keyword list for the advert? (Like Google AdWords, but with more text to work with). This is where the advertising step needs to be heading.