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Follow @DistilledSo I was browsing Wired while on a break (honest Will!) and came up against the following page:
I Was a Neuroscience Guinea Pig: How Scientists Scrambled My Brain
Now – frankly, who ISN’T going to click a link like that? I dare you to read to the bottom of this blog post without clicking that link. I just dare you. However interesting you find SEO, scrambled brains is always more exciting.
So, since I have a pulse and a working mouse I clicked. Only to be presented with this (click for full image):
How on earth am I supposed to be able to read the article with that thing in the way? When visiting the site for real that thing was spinning too.
Adverts like this aren’t that uncommon – they pop up and spin around and generally try really hard to get your attention but the only thing which ever gets my attention is the little cross in the corner to get rid of it so I can find the content I was looking for in the first place. The problem is that this advert didn’t have a cross. There was no way that I can see to get rid of this thing other than to click on it – and who knows where they’re going to take me when I click on it!?
The Second Moral Of This Advertising Nightmare
Turns out that when you do click on this link it takes you to this survey. I mean for crying out loud guys – this is Wired not the BBC news. Your readers are among the most tech savvy online and know their way around the internet pretty well. If you present them with something out of 1999 then they’re just going to click away. If you want to make it mandatory to complete a survey to read the article just say so. Otherwise you’re just making it mandatory for people to click the flashing spinning brightly coloured circle before they read the article. And if you’re going to make me take a survey then at least make the survey look nice and add a Wired logo (assuming of course that the survey is actually for Wired? Who knows what info this page collects or who gets that data once I’ve filled it in). Suffice to say I didn’t go past the first page.
Anyway – exactly how interesting is an article about Neuroscience once you take out the association to guinea pigs and scrambled brains? Since I didn’t read the article who knows.
Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.Follow @tomcritchlow
Tom Critchlow
Dunno – had a “Close X” tag for me – top right (after it had stopped spinning and has the advertising gumpf displayed on it…
The Discovery Channel site is awful about that, too. I got hit with two pop-up ads and one video ad in one blog entry recently. Even worse, the video ad made me think that the actual video I had gone there to watch was an ad, so I almost didn’t see the content I had specifically gone there to find.
Clubbing us over the head is not the answer to banner blindness. It is, however, a good way to lose visitors forever.
I like the post, but I gotta object. That shit is interesting, spinnign thing or no spinnign thing. If you wanna have your brain ‘fried’, come down to CUBRIC in Cardiff and I can hook you up!