Sunstorm Labs Blog

My problem with internet advertising is that during my entire decade or so of browsing, I haven’t once seen an ad for anything that I’ve ever been even remotely interested in. I don’t see it happening any time in the future either, unless ad targeting systems somehow learn to scan my mind for my deepest desires. A lot of this is because I live in a small, obscure, European country (the local websites of which I do not browse), which makes my relevant ad domain a lot smaller.

But the main issue is that ads are the internet equivalent of cold calls. And cold calls are deplorable because they assume that I’m somehow incapable of finding what I want on my own. If I want a product to perform some specific task, then I will search for it. I don’t want to be constantly reminded that there’s an application that can insert gay ass smilies into my emails. I’m not interested, I don’t need your products, and I don’t want to hear about them, because I am not going to buy them, period. When and if I, for some reason, start needing a gay smilie application, then I’ll Google it. I will then commit seppuku to retain my honor.

Then there are ads that insult my intelligence. Things like “You won the internet lottery!”, or “You’re the 1000000th visitor! (for the 10th time today!)”, or “You have 10 new messages from hot babes that want to bang you!”, or “You have 159834 viruses!” piss me off to no end, especially when they try to (badly) disguise themselves as OS windows or alerts. I hate you specifically, CPX Interactive and your “minigame” flash banners that tell you to eat more bananas than the other monkey or do more pushups than the jock to win a ringtone. You think I don’t see that you’re just baiting for clicks? Don’t you think that if I wanted a ringtone, I’d just go to a god damn ringtone website? And yet there it is, moving and jumping around and going “Waaah, you lost, try again!” in my periferic vision. It’s enraging.

I can’t wrap my mind around how can all of these cold-call-like techniques actually work well enough to be a viable marketing approach. Because of all of this, I see ads as a waste of my screen space, and a waste of brain processing cycles.

I do, however, understand the need for banner ads as a way to support free content websites. And this is why I don’t block ads, unless they go out of their way to annoy me. The way I see things, advertisers are paying me for my attention and time that I spend to make note of their product. I am, in turn, automatically donating this money to the website that provided me with the useful content. This is acceptable.

I don’t care about the advertiser. I didn’t ask them about their products, so it’s their fault if they’re spending money on trying to force them on me. I only care about my comfort, and about the comfort of people that offer me useful content or services. An adblock application that loads the banners (and still registers the hits), but doesn’t show them, for me, is the best of both worlds.

This might seem a bit selfish. Some might be quick to argue that if noone actually looks at the banners, then advertisers will see them as ineffective and stop using them, which will then harm the sites which host the ads. Luckily, the way the internet is, being selfish in my position is acceptable, because the internet has an endless supply of people that don’tthink like me. These are the people that don’t have an opinion on advertising, and people that actually click on these things, and people that are absolutely thrilled in being faster at eating bananas than the other monkey. These are also the people that install spyware on their computer, and then pay money to have it removed.

These people vastly outnumber people like me. They are the plankton that everyone else on the internet can feed on. And while we have them, I won’t feel bad about hiding ads.

Some ads I actually like though. These ads are the ones that clearly describe the product, and tell me why I should be interested in it. They are subtle, corteous and don’t boss me around (”Buy this! Drink that! Watch this!”) in an attempt to trigger impulse buys.

The best example of these is the ads on Coding Horror, which are just small, clearly marked, bits of subtly highlighted text at the end of each post. It feels like the advertiser is genuinely trying to get the word out about their product, instead of trying to attract the most number of clicks and attention.

This is what ads should be like, and they’re the ones that work the best in environments where there isn’t as much plankton, such as tech sites.

It’s too bad that an ad like this actually asks for some merit on the advertiser’s part. If one was to ask this from all of the advertisers, there would only be a few that could make up a convincing argument for their product. Most of advertising nowadays is convincing people that something is better than it really is.

In reality, I don’t even hide ads, because I really can’t be bothered. Most of them aren’t that annoying that I actually feel that the effort is justified just for the purpose of not having to look at something. Maybe I just don’t want to give the advertisers the satistfaction of having me waste my energy on blocking their ads.