A pet peeve of mine

[News Is Broken]

Station websites.

WTF?

Who is the MORON that decided that a news website should be so completely clustered with flash ads, pop ups, pop unders, rollover ads, etc? I've seen less logos on a NASCAR racer than what appears on most news websites.

Are any of them well done? Or are they all clustered jumbles of ad laced confusion?

[wxgeek]

The worst are the animated "window-shade" style ads that expand down from the top and cover whatever you're trying to read. Whoever came up with those needs to be shot, along with any GM who allows them on their station site.

[wx or not]

I'm sorry. I just spent the last half hour trying to worm my way up from a pile of popups. Did I miss anything?

[east coast producer]

I like the new NBC O&O web sites, such as nbcphiladelphia.com. It's clean, easy to read and everything's not cluttered and squished together. There's one unobtrusive, tasteful ad. If you're using Firefox with Adblock Plus, you don't see any at all.

[News Is Broken]

I like the new NBC O&O web sites, such as nbcphiladelphia.com. It's clean, easy to read and everything's not cluttered and squished together. There's one unobtrusive, tasteful ad. If you're using Firefox with Adblock Plus, you don't see any at all.

Yes, I like that site. Much better.

Here's the Phoenix NBC affiliate's site for comparison.

http://www.azcentral.com/

Not too bad (yeah it's a little "ad-y" but someone's gotta pay the bills, and Gannett not only has to pay a TV station's bills but a newspaper's bills too, so I'll cut them a little slack.

But here's what drives me batty. See the searchbox at the top? If you go to plop your mouse up there so you can type a search, unless you do it r-e-a-l-l-y carefully, WHAM! The whole top of your screen turns into an obnoxious banner for the Health & Wealth Raffle (which they seem to hold like MONTHLY). WTH?

BAH!!! :frustrated: ANNOYING! STOP IT! Who designed this? I hate you, whoever you are! You suck almost as bad as the assclown that thought up those talking popunders that say "Congratulations, if you can hear my voice you're probably ready to blow your brains out, blah blah, blah" AUGH!!!!

OK, rant over. I feel better now. ;)

[east coast producer]

Nibby, you should try out Firefox and use the Adblock Plus add-on. I don't see a single ad on your azcentral site. (Or on Medialine shh!! :whistle:)

[FrontierMan]

Station websites.

WTF?

Who is the MORON that decided that a news website should be so completely clustered with flash ads, pop ups, pop unders, rollover ads, etc? I've seen less logos on a NASCAR racer than what appears on most news websites.

Are any of them well done? Or are they all clustered jumbles of ad laced confusion?

Those ads make up your paycheck. NDs and management hate a lot of the ads too, but they have to accept it when the checks come in. It's all about the money.

[News Is Broken]

Nibby, you should try out Firefox and use the Adblock Plus add-on. I don't see a single ad on your azcentral site. (Or on Medialine shh!! :whistle:)

Have that at home. Works great! Unfortunately here at work, we are limited in what we are allowed to have installed on our work PC. :mad:

[Gil]

Those ads make up your paycheck. NDs and management hate a lot of the ads too, but they have to accept it when the checks come in. It's all about the money.

We have a winner!

I hate our station website for all the ads and clutter. I constantly lobby with our web coordinator to reduce it. However, she has a pretty aggressive revenue goal to make, and she will sell everything she can to get there.

[adam & doctor drew]

any company with those annoying popups is only ensuring that I'll NEVER EVER EVER buy its product.

[Clever Login Name]

Another point to consider is that many of the ads are horribly inappropriate when they appear next to stories of death, murder and mayhem ... my old station's site is particularly bad -- you click on a link to the story and it comes up, but not with a video freeze frame that you can click on to watch the story, but an ad for LASIK surgery or something else. It really gives the appearance (or maybe just confirms the reader's suspicion) that the station is only all about squeezing ads in everywhere they can to earn a few pennies, rather than actually ... you know ... being a credible news source.

[Sigonfile]

Remember when "Video killed the radio show"? Well now it"s "Web killed the video show":confused:

[News Is Broken]

Those ads make up your paycheck. NDs and management hate a lot of the ads too, but they have to accept it when the checks come in. It's all about the money.

They don't make up MY paycheck. I got the hell out of this f'd up business long ago.

But yeah, you do have a point. Someone's gotta pay the bills. I'm all for that, especially in this economic climate. But someone's seriously got to sit the advertisers down and explain to them what a turn-off most of that crap really is. And a talking popunder? Good God, what the hell is wrong with you people? Seriously. Annoying people isn't going to get them to buy your product - it will only serve to make them buy someone elses. I thought that was pretty basic, common knowledge, but apparently not.

Hulu is a company that has the right idea. They put ads in the shows they present online, but not ad after ad after ad after FREAKING AD at each break. It's ONE ad that lasts 30 seconds at most and then you go back to what you were watching. I love it. It's brilliant. News websites could take a cue from this.

[Diggin' Bear]

This thread brought to you by:

[Spike]

As for ads and popups:

I use Firefox with Adblock Pro. It doesn't get all of them, but it takes care of enough to make browsing a lot less irritating. And when I see an annoying ad that ABP doesn't get, I right click and zap it forever, so that it won't show up on subsequent visits.

[Nanook of the North]

I'm a fan of the "Hugh Downs Reports" ads on worldnow sites. He was great on 20/20
:p

[Roy Hobbs]

she will sell everything she can to get there.

http://alankalter.net/typo3temp/pics/af5da2953c.jpg

So what do you say Baby Doll? Big Red's got the Friday paycheck cash to heat up your spread sheet on a cold mid-Wisconsin night!

[Spike]

For a time, I had to switch to using IE at work.

Some of the systems we use at work are web-based and require IE. If you try to access them using Firefox, you get a nasty little message on screen telling you that access is denied for any browser other than IE.

I fixed that problem by installing the IE Tab plugin. It runs the IE engine inside the Firefox window, so the app sees IE when I try to access it but I see the page in Firefox. The buttons for those restricted sites on my Bookmark Toolbar are set up to automatically load the page in IE Tab when I click them.

That way I can use my preferred browser on most sites and switch to IE almost seamlessly, without having to switch browsers. After I got IE Tab I haven't had any need to launch IE by itself since.