This is totally a non-political rant…but I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore…well maybe I am. [for now]
But to all of the online arms of the print and broadcast media: You are making your websites unusable.
Now I understand that you need ad revenues to keep publishing and broadcasting but you already have a third of your web page covered with ads…or worse those insidious click bait pieces of junk along the bottom row (you’d be wise to reconsider some of those as well). All of your new intrusive games are making your sites unreadable. What do I mean?
Well first, lets start with one of the more recent intrusions. I select an article from your site and while I am about half way through the first paragraph you insert a video ad just below the second graph and it resizes the page…and then when it stops…it closes and…resizes the page. It’s annoying to have to scroll up or down or re-scroll again as the ad opens/closes. Just insert the damn thing when the page loads and leave it there. I can deal with the black rectangle when it’s over…trust me on that.
And if I open an article and I scroll down past the video you have at the top because I would rather read the text…that doesn’t mean I want you to run the video anyway in that little two inch square window you opened at the bottom right hand corner of my browser. I don’t want to see the video, I don’t want to hear the audio, and I don’t enjoy you using up my bandwidth (and it makes your page slow and uneven in its response) while forcing it on me. And if I click on the ‘x’ to close it…that shouldn’t mean you take me back to the top of the page and continue to run the video.
And goodness no, I DON’T want to read ‘your circular’ before I can enter the website.
And a special note to USA Today and their captive subsidiaries (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s JSOnline): Launching the article and then magically sliding it down off the browser screen so you can display a full page ad…sucks. It sucks big time.
No I know advertising pays the bills. But you are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs here. Stop letting the advertising department run the website…hire a bona fide user interface designer!
It is getting to the point where I am starting to avoid certain sites over others as the annoyance level continues to grow.
I don’t disagree with you at all here Ed. I would add though, that my bigger concern is with the MSM you mention and the way it keeps practicing professional stenography verses any actual reporting, and failing every time to fact check GOP political press releases coming from our gerrymandered GOP state, “legislators,” completely unquestioned or analyzed.
GB Press Gazette is even re-running a GOP candidate press release about a week later (Rural Initiative “promises,” if re-elected) by re-dating the article. Local editors appear to be silently endorsing their candidate picks on top of horrible reporting.