nascar Archive

Earlier this year Ask.com signed a deal with NASCAR racing to be the “official search partner” for the racing network. It sure seems like these days the “official” notation just means whoever will pay the most. Danny Sullivan has a good recap of the NASCAR search deal.

This weekend I noticed that Ask.com is now partnering with TNA wrestling.  You can see a screenshot of the promo below. Basically the announcer mentioned a trivia question and said you could go to Ask.com and after entering the full question, you will be provided with the correct answer. The concept has some potential although I think it will work better for NASCAR than TNA.

With the NASCAR deal, Ask.com controls the search on the nascar.com website. The official TNA website has a search engine in the middle of the page however it takes you to a site called SwagBucks with a search that is powered by Google and Ask. Even more interesting, the search results don’t seem to match the query very well. For example, a search for one of their current roster of wrestlers, Scott Steiner, brings me to a generic results page with not one result from the TNA website.

Perhaps the new Ask Jeeves character needs a DDT or a Hulkster legdrop to get his mind right about how site search results should work. 

Guhmshoo with yet another great comic showing how bloggers are like Nascar racers by putting ads and sponsorships all over their websites.

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!