A new twist in interruption marketing

This seems like it would be self defeating

[skibum]

CMS Marketwatch is a decent site for financial info but it has always loaded more slowly than anything else worth visiting fairly regularly.

Recently they have some Flash or "rich media" advertiser stuff that loads in place of the entire homepage, which increases the load time on a 56k connection substantially.

Pop-ups and unders are one thing but to do what CBS is doing seems absurd. Do they command big bucks for that kind of placement? Seems like it would cause single access session to shoot up. It's one thing to be forced to watch a "rich media" (Flash, etc...) presentation about the site you are trying to enter but to have to sit through an ad for an entirely different site, well that's just crazy.

[Drastic]

I tried to get the ad, but couldn't. I have seen this before however, a type of interstitial. I think this kind of thing will really drive users away, if the content is available elsewhere.

No doubt very irritating to users on dialup, but even moreso for users paying for access by the minute. Until widely used/accepted, this type of ad can really hurt a site.

[skibum]

Looks like salon has them in place periodically. At the very least they could setup a campaign to show a visitor a series of ads instead of tossing out random ones each time. (and maybe they do) IN any case it is still really annoying.