The crisis is making web companies to struggle and they seem to be doing whatever they can to get more revenue (thing that I totally understand). These are particularly hard times for companies living on advertisement, like online magazines, newspapers and others. In the last months I have seen an increase in pop-ups, videos and other forms of excessive online advertisement around the world.
In the picture below, showing the website of an important German newspaper, you can see how two ads are competing for the user’s attention. This is embarrassing for the website and advertisers, and very disturbing for users.
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As this is bad for usability reasons, the whole perception and user experience of the website gets affected:
- Users have to close ads before getting to the content (the most important of an online newspaper).
- They might click on the ads while trying to close them. The website gets the money… and an irritated user too!
- This kind of advertisement could be really bad and cruel for people with disabilities and difficulties to move the mouse with precission.
Whenever you can, try to avoid abusive advertisement as much as possible, it’s not only about usability, it’s going to affect your credibility and might make users to flee to another website.
[...] On a similar note, over in Europe, popover ads are overlapping as the ads compete with each other on the website of a major German newspaper. [...]