Ads have come a long way over the past few year, but still have a lot of work to do to reach a common ground between advertisers and user experience.
I've had a good amount lately, so what are some of your AX horror stories?
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Oldest comments (12)
The Web get a lot of attention for bad ads because of how accessible it is, but I recently downloaded some native mobile games and the ad experience there is worse than I've ever experienced on the web.
Double fullscreen ads that lag the game, moving the "X" button, and playing one or two every other playthrough of a level. 😬😬
Watching television. My parents pulled the plug on TV when I was around 8, and as an adult I stream everything, so I never really got inoculated for TV. Watching a show with ads every 7 minutes, that feel like they last for 7 minutes, puts me into an instant rage fugue. Nothing on the internet is that bad.
I encountered a 25 minute unskippable ad on youtube. It was a full episode of a home improvement show sponsored by Lowes. Youtube has been experimenting with making ads more annoying to force people to buy Red.
I agree that ads within ("free") mobile games can be especially annoying. The interstitial sometimes deliberately hides the
XorSkipbutton to try and trick you into clicking.I've always thought that sports streaming websites have some of the most nefarious tricks. Pop-unders, false
Playbuttons, erroneous countdown timers, etc. I suppose it comes with the territory of running one of those services.I recently went to a website which literally hit me with 8 popovers all at once. How could that possibly be effective?
I run an adblocker, so the most annoying ad experience I've ever had is on sites which detect adblockers and lock the page down. Fortunately, the next stage of this particular arms race has been reached and it's possible to detect and block adblock detectors.
The other most annoying ad experience is what I get any time I use someone's device or a browser which doesn't have an adblocker. How does anyone even cope?!
Video ads that autoplay with SOUND when you visit a site!!!
Ads in form of a popup window that opens up when you click on a CTA button. Then you have to close that ad first and click on CTA again. Those are the worst for me. At times, even add adblockers can't help in that case.
Running an adblocker, I don't encounter much. But I saw a website that noticed I used an adblocker, and then informed me that they were mining crpytocurrency through my browser to make up for it, which literally crippled Chrome.
That's the worst thing.
I'll disable an adblocker on your site if your ads weren't all over the place and blocking your own content.
I kind of hate having to block everything since I know most sites depend on advertising. However, I feel like I have to in order to defend myself against malware.
The worst are redirect ads where you get sent from the page that you want to see to bogus virus alerts or "you won a gift card" pages. These are even worse if they autoplay audio/video. At least Google has finally gotten around to preventing these ads.
A big part of the problem so far as mobile is concerned is that Google and Apple don't give users enough control to block malware ads on devices. On my PC's I use a regularly updated hosts file to block ad servers. I can't do that on mobile, at least not in a way that would create other problems.