In the past couple of months, I’ve noticed an alarming increase in the number of intrusive ads on major websites such as Yahoo.com and ESPN.com. Both have always been full of advertisements, of course, and I certainly understand the need for these ads in order to help keep the content free. But in the past, the ads have been standard, static, clickable links that the user could choose to read or ignore.
Now, both sites have extremely annoying ads that the user is forced to engage with in one way or another. On ESPN, they’ve got ads that float out and obscure the article text, forcing you to close them before you can continue reading. On Yahoo, they’ve got video ads that play automatically once an article is loaded. There’s no way to stop the ad, but at least there’s no sound unless you click on the speaker icon. Still, it’s so distracting to me to have the video playing when I’m trying to read that I have to scroll away or wait until the damn thing is done.
This trend totally sucks….!!