
The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques - smacktoward
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/most-hated-advertising-techniques/
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minikomi

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                 |           Don't want to miss out on more great          |
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           be tha|                  comments like this?                    | want to use
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                 |                I hate free stuff [x]                    |
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EZ-E
Sometimes the close button even tries to make you feel guilty about clicking
it, like :

"No, I'm not interested in learning about latest cloud technologies every week
[x]"

Or the famous "Not now" meaning "Fine, I will bother you again later anyway"

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aapusaam
"Not now" is something even Google does quite frequently.

~~~
dhimes
Like when you go to google.com with a non-google browser.

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pbreit
I ran into this dreck yesterday: [https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-
slow-growth-equal...](https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-
equal-slow-death.html)

If anyone can find the actual article, let me know.

~~~
Twisell
This is very funny but at the same time it hurt my butt that I had to provide
them ad revenue by watching this mess...

~~~
whazor
In their defense, many people only read the title anyway.

~~~
bartread
True, but I'm not sure that's a defence when it may be because they can't even
find the article content amongst all the other garbage on the page.

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squarefoot
Most of them don't seem to realize how nagging users scale so badly so that it
gets the opposite results (eg. driving people away). Just think if every page
out there asked the user to signup to some services... this would make the
Internet less usable than using pigeons. Why? because nagging users cannot
scale. An user might accept to click a couple banners every dozen different
servers he/she visits daily, but what if everyone employs the same practice?
And if we agree that it must be kept to a minimum, who decides what site can
nag the users and what cannot? The answer is that the practice must be
abandoned because it does not scale.

~~~
bigbugbag
> The answer is that the practice must be abandoned because it does not scale.

Actually and sadly it's more along the lines of "The answer is that the
practice must be abandoned by others but not us because it does not scale."

My take is that I just disable javascript (though some browser make it harder
to do it) and skip the websites which fail at understanding the concept of a
webpage and require javascript to display content.

~~~
oldboyFX
Perhaps you should just stick to reading newspapers. Zero modals guaranteed!

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visarga
One of my favorites: modal ad, with large "Learn More" button to follow the
ad, and a minuscule "x" button to get to the content, as if seeing the actual
content was an afterthought.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I always wondered why they even put the "x" there.

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bigbugbag
Probably so they can track who clicked the "x" vs who used the esc key vs who
clicked outside.

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erikb
Understanding what people hate about advertising is easy: Getting shoved stuff
in your face that has nothing to do with what you want to do/achieve.

Provide a value and put your product references / affiliate stuff in these.
Make me sign up not because of a trick but because I hope to receive regular
value from you. Don't spam me because I use a reasonable ad blocker.

------
moronicalox
The implementation of the ad examples is interesting. I'm not sure wireframes
would be the most effective way to gauge annoyance. The times I really curse
and want to smash my device is usually less about the design rather than the
functionality of what it's keeping me from doing or interfering with. I'd have
a much less visceral reaction to the same ad design if I was just looking at a
wireframe during a study.

~~~
Macha
Yeah, the two things that really piss me off are:

1\. I scroll down, read the article a bit, move to scroll again, and end up
clicking an ad that has just popped into existence (Cynical reason: The delay
improves their CTR and hence revenue. Less cynical reason: They were too
optimistic in how fast their ad would load on my mobile connection).

2\. I click your page and it starts playing noise. It doesn't even have to be
an ad, a lot of news sites autoplay their videos when I just care about the
article.

Both are less about where the ad is and more about how it behaves

~~~
Coincoin
3\. The modal window is too big which pushes the tiny close button outside the
screen and makes it impossible to close.

~~~
bigbugbag
Try using your escape key, disabling script and reloading page, using
wallabag[1] to read the page, editing the DOM to remove the popup.

[1]: [https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en) and
[https://wallabag.it/en](https://wallabag.it/en)

~~~
Coincoin
No. I Just go away. This happens mostly on my phone anyway.

------
hannob
It is certainly interesting that lately there is more research into what ads
people particularly dislike.

However I must wonder that they seem to skip an elephant in the room:
Malvertising and Fraud. That is: Ads that either try to install malware on
your system or that try to deceive you into buying something that isn't really
what it seems to be. I'm pretty sure nobody likes that, yet both are common
enough.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think most people who end up with malware can't really track it down to a
specific advertisement, or even know that it came from an ad - so it's hard to
measure how much it's hated.

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TheAceOfHearts
I hate instant modal popups with a passion. Whenever I get one of those
obnoxious modals I try my best to boycott the company and promote
alternatives, assuming there's any. When this trend initially started popping
up I'd close the modal and read the article, but I've grown increasingly
intolerant. Now I close the article immediately unless the content is really
important.

~~~
bigbugbag
It's about as annoying as the classic popup, to the point that browsers
include a pop up blocking mechanisms and settings.

Now the popup lives inside the window powered by javascript and the browsers
have yet to do something about it so I'm simply disabling javascript.

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mwexler
BTW, if you aren't familiar with the Nielsen Norman Group, it's worth visiting
their other work. It includes Don Norman (jnd.org, Design of Everyday Things),
Jacob Nielsen of Alertbox UX fame, and Tog (Bruce Tognazzini) who started the
Human Interface Group at Apple and made many of the loved (and hated)
interface choices in Apple products for years. A very impressive team they've
assembled.

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Zikes
One new technique that's notably missing, and egregiously abusable, is browser
notifications. Several times a day now I'll go to a web site that
_immediately_ pops up a browser-native non-modal notification asking for
permission to use the browser's built-in notifications system.

~~~
bigbugbag
What is browser notifications ? What's the use for that ?

Never seen it in any browser I use (firefox, waterfox, pale moon, opera 12,
vivaldi, otter, qupzilla, netsurf, seamonkey, uzbl, and a few more)

~~~
Zikes
[https://developer.chrome.com/apps/richNotifications](https://developer.chrome.com/apps/richNotifications)

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eli
Be interesting to compare with how prevalent the different ad types actually
are, how effective they are, and how much money they typically cost.

Preroll video may be more "annoying" than Related Links ad units, but they
also pay a LOT more and are probably more effective any way you measure it.

~~~
srinathrajaram
Speaking as a developer. You may be paid by the impressions but how much you
are paid depends on the CTRs. Nothing works for CTRs like targeting. The more
data you can share about users, the better it is for you. All this other stuff
probably contributes to user churn as much it does to your bottom line. This
is one of the reasons that a lot of apps ask you for location permissions even
when they don't need it.

~~~
bigbugbag
And hopefully developers / website owner engaging in breaching user privacy
and collecting user data to give away to third party will be accountable
before court.

Or maybe we could sugarface and kneecap them for being satan's little helpers.

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mrweasel
I've started considering if maybe we're reaching "peak-advertising" or if we
will at some point.

TV has become unwatchable in the later years, so here I would expect the
advertising driven model to fail at some point. The Internet has the benefit
of adblocks, but still the content is saturated by ads. It stands to reason
that at some point the users/customers will be pushed too far and there will
be a backlash.

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ungzd
Also, targeting became much worse than 2004, which makes me doubt that all
this "deep learning on big data" even slightly works. Everywhere I see only
ads for mobile games, hollywood movies, consumer loans, cars — and I hate all
of these things.

~~~
dudul
One thing I see quite frequently is ads for items I already bought. Not like
"oh you just bought a T-Shirt, well let's show you another great T-Shirt", no
no, it's "oh you just bought this T-Shirt, well let's show you the exact same
T-Shirt in case you want to buy a second one completely identical".

~~~
kbart
Oh yes, Amazon is the king of this type of annoyance. I've bought a laptop on
it once, so it kept nagging me for buying another one _for few years_! I don't
get such logic -- if I've just bought something, what is the probability that
I need the _same item_? That's more like the exact opposite in my line of
thinking -- if I've just bought something, I definitely don't need another
one, so don't even bother.

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peteretep
Sadly hated != ineffective, so they're here to stay

~~~
vlehto
Yes. If I recall correctly, Kahnemann showed that any emotional response is
likely to cause long term memory. But with adds the memory is going to be so
faint that you forget the nature of the emotion. But when you hear the brand
name, it sounds familiar. People prefer familiar products over unfamiliar
options.

------
Jedd
Not affiliated to the author, but can recommend 'Behind the Curtain' chrome
extension [1] that lets you dispense with overlay popups using a keyboard
shortcut. Saves having to move the mouse around and hunt for the magic [x].

Combined with ublock origin[2] to get rid of the payload of those pop-ups, can
also reduce bandwidth / lag / frustration.

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme)

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-
origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-
origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en)

~~~
bigbugbag
Well chrome is not exactly free of tracking and advertising, let's not forget
that it's a "free" product of the largest online advertising network intended
to help them track users and do more advertising.

~~~
Jedd
Works just as well on chromium.

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slinkyavenger
My most hated at the moment? Those ads that hijack page scrolling and don't
let go until you've scrolled the ad past. Wouldn't be a huge problem if it
didn't totally fuck up my browser's scrolling functionality and lag things
out.

~~~
bigbugbag
Disable scripting, use wallabag to read the content (or a similar readability
service), just leave the site and let them rot or find the contact info and
tell them why you hate them now.

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cm2012
The surprising thing to me was how narrow the band was. Everything hovered
around 5/7 hate.

~~~
bumblebeard
They mention this at one point; 4 is neutral on their scale so an average of
5.23 just means that people have a mild to moderate dislike of advertising in
general. I don't know anybody who _likes_ advertising (well, one person but
they work for a marketing firm) so that makes sense to me.

It would be interesting if they could remove that bias though - it would make
the differences more obvious if nothing else.

~~~
sundvor
I've seen some great IT related ads using the Brave advertising network ads,
on Brave. Really didn't mind them. (Disclaimer: I've only just started using
Brave).

~~~
bumblebeard
I haven't tried Brave but that sounds like a good development. I still don't
really like being advertised to but if it's relevant or at least easy to
ignore then I don't mind either. I guess that puts me at about a 4 on their
scale.

~~~
sundvor
The default setting in Brave is no ads. I actively had to make the change to
get the Brave network ones. I really liked that.

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bashinator
When I hit a page with these kinds of ads, there's a good chance I will
immediately close the tab and never read the content. I hope this shows up in
the site metrics.

~~~
bigbugbag
I usually do the same, except I take extra measure to never appear in any
metrics unmasked.

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gambiting
I always wonder how are participants chosen for surveys like this?

If it's an online survey offering filling it out in exchange for a chance to
win something I will almost never pay any attention to the questions and just
click whatever to finish it quickly.

What's the proper process for conducting a study like this?

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pavel_lishin
I find it interesting that the only video they investigated were pre-rolls. I
automatically close any tab that auto-plays video (and by extension, sound) at
me when I load the page.

But I suppose video content about the article on CNN (as the biggest
annoyance) isn't considered an advertisement.

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jalfresi
Good point about retargeted ads showing the kids what they've got for
christmas!

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bigbugbag
It's not the ads that bothers me the most, it's the tracking.

The ad I hate the most is the one that manage to slip through my adblocker.

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laktak
I do not discriminate. I hate all ads equally.

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amelius
User tracking

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anitadig01
Hated but worth :)

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eevilspock
If you liked this, stay tuned for the rest of the series:

    
    
      *The Most Hated Telemarketing Techniques*
    
      *The Most Hated Pickpocketing Techniques*
    
      *The Most Hated Prostate Exam Techniques*

~~~
bumblebeard
Meh, it's still kind of interesting though. Just because something's unpopular
in general doesn't mean the specifics aren't worth looking at.

