I was 8 years old, more or less, when TV advertisers started to seem suspicious to me. I’d ask around, ask some questions of the adults and those who didn’t say something like “you ask too many questions” or “aren’t you the clever one,” instead of answering the question (also Rude) would finally verify my observation that the commercials were making exaggerated claims if not outright lies.
What baffled me most was not that this was allowed by law (though that did baffle me, as I hadn’t yet figured out that the law is easily manipulated by vested interest), but that the adults didn’t seem to care. “Oh, it’s just an ad, forget it!” was the probably most common sentiment.
I didn’t like that answer and I like it even less now. I say these things, whether on TV, in the movie theater or on the internet, are not “just” anything. They occupy your attention, and they take up the most valuable and most limited coin you have: the minutes of your life.
YouTube is very bad for this; interrupting a video, often right in the middle of a word even, to show me something I couldn’t possible care less about just at that moment. (I have another posting around here some place about YouTube and their commercials)
This particular rant is about ads that popup while I’m trying to read the webpage… Rude!
I’m trying to read the content of the page. Maybe I’m looking for the answer to a question I have in which case I’m rapid scanning the text of an article, or maybe I’m looking to buy something, in which case I’m taking in the total display of the catalog listing for the item, and then Bang! This ugly popup shows up right in the middle of what I was intent on… interrupts my attention, interrupts my chain of thinking, whatever I was thinking as I chased down the details of what I was seeing… Bang!
Interruption!
Rude.
I usually leave any website that does that to me. Right then and there, unless there’s really no where else to go for what I’m after.
(When the popup is about the EU’s craziness concerning cookies I really give up on that website totally. The cookies thing is utter nonsense (all websites use cookies, cookies are perfectly safe… deal with it), and to be interrupted over a legalism that doesn’t affect me in any way what so ever? Worse than Ridiculous.)
So there I am looking at a new car to purchase in a new car show room and the salesman walks up to me and starts telling me, in a very loud voice, about a new throw rug that he has for sale, don’t I want a dozen of them right now?
It’s about that stupid.
I wrote a website framework once that included one of those nasty popups (by popular demand, dang it). In the code, the programmer had to use it by calling on the “ReallyPredatoryPopUp()” function. I think I made my point. Of course, the name of the function got changed later on.
Alas and Alack.