Simple tips for advertisers

Note that this post does not contain any evidence. It’s all personal experience and opinion. I work for an e-commerce company that uses advertisements to sell products.

I get annoyed by advertisements. Not the message they are trying to put into my brain, absolutely not. They are vital for sustaining business: without advertising, who will know about your product?

No, it’s the way they look, the way they respond, the way they’re always in the way of what I want to see. Here are some tips from me, to advertisers.

1. No moving ads, no ads with sound. They make me want to go to my JavaScript console and type stupidAd.gtfo() because they are distracting me from what I’m there for. I’m probably reading something interesting, or looking at something at your website. Out of principle, I won’t click on them.
2. Don’t use popups or anything else that superimposes itself on top of what I’m watching. I’ll click it away anyway – if I can, some are like little mini-games – so there’s no point in trying to show me something I’m probably not interested in. If you think I am, I guess you don’t know me.
3. Let people pay to hide all ads. I know a few sites that offer hiding all ads for >10 euros per year. It works. It makes me happy to see websites that care for the people who visit. If you don’t offer something like this, you’re forcing people to see *** on your website. You’ll probably convince people to install something like Adblock, which will deprive you off all income from this person.
4. Make the ad look interesting enough to read it, yet without the amount of contrast with the rest of the website that makes me nauseated.

If your advertisements suck, you won’t sell as much. Really, the same thing applies for websites as a whole, but that can’t be helped. There simply are people out there that don’t know how other people think about their website.

So, to conclude: please let me use the internet (or games (like Angry Birds)) without being forced to look at nonsense I didn’t ask for. I know you want to make money, and I respect that. But don’t enforce crappy-looking ads to users – they will hate you for it like I do now.