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Ask YC: Sign of the Times - An Advertisement Preloading a Lightbox
2 points by iamdave on Aug 1, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
Is it just me, or is it a horrible sign of the times that when reading an article, I clicked a thumbnail to a software screenshot, only to be greeted by an advevrtisement and the text "please wait while we load your picture"

I had to wait, to see a fullsize screenshot just so the site owner could show me a completely irrelevant advertisement.

Don't get me wrong, I know the power of ads and their place when it comes to supporting your blogs or whatever, but I think this is pushing it. Advertisers still don't seem to have gotten the point of how to market their services without completely ruining user experience.

Thoughts?



What, just because we have a new way to communicate, you think there will no longer be idiots, greedy sons, and people with bad taste? :)

To scale, one usually must decouple components. To scale traditional advertising they decouple the interests of the advertiser, publisher, creator and audience. The most efficient (ie most profitable and easiest to create) advertising regime is one that crams a volume of ads just below the endurance of a large percentage of the audience.

Just below.

The particular coefficients in the formula may be different now that there are more alternatives, but the formula itself has not changed. There may be better regimes but creating them takes above-average smarts and effort.




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