Evolution of the intrusive advert and Intrusion 2.0

How many of you remember when sites first put banner ads on their site? As I use two very popular sites, ESPN and NASCAR, I find that we have just stumbled onto the next form of intrusive ad. And this one is no better than the rest.

Let's look at the history of intrusive ads (dates are approximate):

• Ads (1995)
• Extreme animation ads (1997)
• Popup ads (1998)
• Popunder ads (1998)
• Malware (2000)
• Download possible (2001)
• Layer ads (2001)
• Interstitials (2003)
• Auto-Start Video Ad With Audio (2006)

And today, we have a new entrant into the "intrusive advert" category. Led by big sites like ESPN and others, this new intrusive category I am calling, "Auto-Start Video Ad With Audio". You visit the homepage and ad advert like the one on the right autostarts. And not only does it autostart, it starts audio. I think this is absolutely horrible and the sites that run these ads should be ashamed of themselves.

We bitched and moaned over all of the other horrible intrusive ads. When will we start to bitch and moan about these ads? I start mine today. It is interesting to me that the bigger sites think they can get away with these types of methods. Weather.com is a great example of this. I have always enjoyed going to weather.com. But before the site becomes of any use in getting the weather I need, I typically have to deal with a popup/under, a layer ad and god knows what else.

And you know what - the fix is super easy. Turn off the audio. Apple is running some of their commercials on sites like CNN and they have a note that you can turn on the audio. Cheers to Apple. Let me (the customer, you do remember that I am the customer right?) choose if I want to hear your advertising messages with audio or not. So hey NASCAR you listening... do the right thing!