Reaching new levels of advertising obnoxiousness, espn.com now has an ad that starts out taking up the top third of the browser window and then shrinks to a normal sized banner after about five seconds. What this does though, is make it impossible to click the link you’re trying to see as it’s now a moving target. Compounding this, it breaks the page in Mozilla so that even if you do wait out the ad, you can’t click on anything. Listen fuckwits (obligatory profanity), advertising that makes it impossible to browse your site is counterproductive! I almost half expect this to be a industrial espionage thing where sportingnews.com has convinced you to do this.
Why must good sites decide to piss off their patrons?
TVGuide had a BIG fucking American Idol Flash ad over the first half of the listings, replete with obnoxious music. But the worst I’ve seen if FilePlanet. In addition to a stupid animation for something called “Raging Cow”, it makes LOUD, obnoxious “crazed moo” noises. I fucking hate Flash.
I’ve seen one selling Powerade or some drink where the agent from Matrix is speaking…except he keeps on duplicating all over the screen and there’s no apparent way to get rid of him until he decides to go away.
I never came back to that site. It was lousy anyways.
Y’know, I have the same feelings about Flash. But one great thing about it: You can shut it off.
While it’s inconvienent sometimes if I want to play a game or something online, websurfing in general is usually quicker with it off. I need to find some pop-up blocker that can also stop those kind of ads…
The ESPN ad messes up Netscape too. I wonder if they don’t realize it is messing up some browsers, or if they just don’t care. Or, maybe they even are trying to crash non IE browsers (the MSN links at the top of the page lead me to believe that espn.com is somehow affiliated with Microsoft). I usually check out espn.com a lot, but when that ad crashes my browser I’ll only go back with a different browser if there is somethig specific I am looking for.
ESPN.com no longer supports Netscape 4.7 at all (a conscious decision on their part).
They are to be lauded for their redesign to very standard compliant code, but their new ads are driving me away. Fortunately, I deep-link to most of the content I want to see regularly so I rarely see the home page.
The ad’s not the worst thing - that ESPN Motion thing is. If your machine meets their standards, a promo for Motion pops up where the top story should be. This goes one for a few weeks, and then stops. And then comes back. While the Motion thing is loading in, you can’t do a thing.