Online ad design: It's annoying, not clever!

Ok, hands up. Who here likes online ads? Oh, wonderful. Now out of both of you who raised your hands, who here benefits from ad placements in any way? Ah. Yes, both of you again. Not remotely surprising.

It apparently comes as quite a shock to ad designers, marketing teams, and programmers to learn that ads on a website are universally reviled outside of their realm. It comes as quite a shock to the rest of us that the former group still has yet to figure out a universally meaningful way of advertising online.

I just want to add this here to make it perfectly clear; I do not hate the concept of advertisements. In fact, some companies have made some damn good ads, and I have clicked on the very rare ad link, on purpose, to purchase something. Advertisements do work, I have a wonderful Yu-Gi-Oh Hawaiian shirt to prove it. I respect the hustle, even benefit from it, and fully comprehend ads help pay for site hosting. I have been on design teams that had to confirm that certain ads play, searched the data to confirm clicks to traffic, and all that nonsense. I have lived in this realm. I still hate online ads.

To understand why, let us jump in our time machine, to the dark ages of the Internet. Yes, we are going back to the late 90s. Here in this terrifying realm of table layouts, iframes, and animated gif mouse cursors, we are to witness the birth of the worst invention in all of information technology. Maybe second worst, as most of you thought "spam e-mail". I am of course talking about... POP-UPS!!!

There's an infamous episode of the show Futurama where the main cast get online, only to have to karate kick their way through an army of pop-ups. Martial arts aside, this is actually an incredibly accurate representation of how it was to be online in those days. The Internet wasn't just there, it was out for blood, and to sell you bandages for the injuries it caused you. These were dark times.

Users were forced to protect themselves, in the form of pop-up blockers. The pop-up designers got smarter, and found ways to circumvent this protection. The FTC has had to get involved in predatory practices, as discussed in this article by Richard H. Stern at Stanford University. Things got real over something that on the surface appears to be trivial.

Pop-up ads were probably not intentionally designed with malicious intent. Probably. It pains me to admit that, since I want to feel as if it was. The same goes with spam e-mail, a well intentioned idea that was met with visceral scorn the second it was live.

"You have got to be f***ing kidding me" - Jaye Dee Yaple, getting ads on top of ads

People don't care about intentions, only their impact. The impact of both these horrendous monstrosities has been devastating, pop-ups ads prevent the user from doing what they intended to do. They waste time, they infuriate people, and actually prevent people with accessibility issues from using the greatest tool ever created. Good job guys, really pushing that envelope as it were.

So why bring up the ancient past? Well... pop-ups never died. They simply evolved, spawning pop-overs, pop-ins, and other variants. They have video, and even audio now, wasting even more bandwidth and time. They have been harder to dismiss than ever before, with dismissal buttons so tiny you need Ant-Man to go to the Quantum Realm to click them. Some even intentionally mess with the screens tabbing, so you can't try to cheat them away. Ads even spawn on top of other ads, which is so egregious it is beyond comprehension. Ads will generate before the user has had a chance to view the sites content, begging you to subscribe before you have the chance do anything meaningful.

Let me give everyone a real gem of wisdom. Super duper top secret information. Lean in real close for this one, its mind blowing.

All these "clever" designs annoy people!

Let's take YouTubes ad system. It was changed some time ago to "increase their revenues" or something like that. Nobody actually cares why, they only care about the impact. 75% of surveyed users stated outright YouTube ads are annoying! The sheer number of them, their length, the fact you are forced to endure them, their mere existence. I swear if I have to hear about Dr Squatch one more time...

YouTube noticed that they don't earn enough money, running at a loss for most of its lifespan. Their solution, provide a service to remove ads... for a price. A service that doesn't even work, is not available in all regions, and is too expensive for what it offers. Sure it has other benefits, but nobody knows or cares about them. To "incentivize" users to purchase the premium service, YouTube thought the best idea was to increase number of ads played, both in frequency per ad section and frequency of ad sections.

The result of YouTubes implementation? Free users would rather not pay for a premium service out of sheer spite! Content creators have spoke out, as previously ad free videos were now forced to contain ads. This brilliant idea may have finally allowed YouTube to turn a profit, but at the cost of infuriating literally everyone. The Mafia is more subtle about its approach and more respected. Well done.

I feel bad for the advertisers. They pay the monetary cost of purchasing ad space, only to have to incur all the risk. There is no guarantee by paying for ad space, that a user will see it, or even click on it. Some have been very self aware, by creating very short video ads, or extremely funny ads, respecting the users time and intelligence. Not even being sarcastic this time, thank you for this! You actually know what we go through! We'll even buy your stuff! But these are so few and far between, that it's a novelty. Things should not be this way.

Online ads are not going anywhere. Nor should they, the Internet is finally being used effectively to reach a wider audience. But the practices of how that audience is reached really need to be analyzed. There is a place for it. Just not in place of actual content.

This article brought to you by Lightspeed Briefs.