Let me take this opportunity to talk about internet advertising.
First off we all must understand that there would be no Internet without advertising, or radio or television for that matter. Even PBS and NPR have to go with it these days. But it often goes too far.
The worst abuse on the Internet are the mouse over pop up highlight words and pop up mouse over ads of any kind, with now the biggest guy on the block, Adsense, testing it. Next comes the giant arrival pop ups. And finally the forced ads embedded into videos which cannot be defeated, which is why they are being so overused.
With presenting videos as our business we do know a bit about it. Youtube has it mostly right, a 30 or even 60 second ad with an option to skip after a few seconds. That should be the model for all. Funny or Die is okay as most of their videos don’t have ads at all. The Onion which at one time was one of least saturated has recently became one of the worst with forced 30 second ads on everything.
The king of video ad abuse is Viacom with it’s forced 30 second ads on everything all the time, even on a restart or the next video we have to suffer the entire thing again and again. This is the one that most tries our souls here at Kick! as Viacom is Comedy Central with the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.
What can be done? Leave a comment or send an email to those companies or websites that force 30 seconds on you. And really give it to those using mouse overs and never go back to them. In fact sent a blacklist report on them. Though Adsense is now testing mouse over popups, keep in mind that is not the website’s fault, that is Google’s fault. Let Google know you don’t like it. And all this is going to get much worse on smart phones and tablets.
Our best suggestion dealing with embedded video ads is to always use the video mute button and have a few tabs open to play in until the 30 seconds is up.
But defeating ads through software only makes the problem worse with companies using saturation and these bad acts to compensate. Reasonable use of advertising keeps the Internet free, viable and fun.