Thursday, November 16, 2006

Audio Advertisements

I think these bug me more than anything on-line, though expanding ads might be tied with these for annoyance.  Those are particularly aggravating when I'm trying to read a short news article and the expanding ad blocks the entire article!

I understand that advertising is needed to support sites and that if I don't pay for premium service (where offered) I will usually see it.  I don't have a problem with this.  Using Firefox I can block images from common ad servers so a certain number of ads never appear.  Others I simply ignore.  However, it is difficult to ignore an ad that starts playing sound (typically synced to a video).  It is especially annoying though when you've already scrolled past it and must look through the page to turn it off.

Sounds should be off by default.  I avoid sites that play music which you cannot easily turn off by default.  I would rather tell a site that I want to listen to music rather than have to manually turn it off each time I visit.  And of course these ads are worse because periodically they can refresh and a new one that you have to mute will come up.

Unfortunately there must be enough people that actually click on these ads that they stay around.  I only wish this weren't so... :(

~Matt

PS Have I mentioned that I love Firefox 2.0's new features like built-in spell check?  ;-)

--
"A room without books is as a body without a soul." -Cicero

1 comment:

Mark Baker said...

Image how bad those are if they start while you are at work. :)