Ads that block content until you do something
There is a trend in advertising to block content from readers until they actively do something. Usually it involves answering a short survey like the one below, or it could be selecting a preference for a particular type of product. Whatever the specifics, the content only appears after you have responded to the advert.
So the question is, how do you respond in situations like this? Do you leave the page immediately and the article unread? Do you skip the interstitial (that’s the technical term for this sort of advert) and read the article, or do you in fact do what the advert is telling you to do and then read the article?
Forbes does stuff like that all the time now so if I see an article someones link to that goes to them I just don’t even bother anymore, no matter how interesting it looks
I am the same Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith and I suspect the majority of people feel the same way too.
I may answer the survey, but accuracy will be lacking…
That’s a really good point Dave DeBaeremaeker How can advertisers even trust the results?
i sometimes wget the page to see how they do it, for many pages this also gets the text i wanted to read with lynx/w3m, if not i just close & ignore that website
For me, it’s a bit of all, depending on what exactly the article is about.
If I expect the article to contain information that I can also get elsewhere (which, sadly, is most often the case), I will close the page and try a different result in the news reader.
If I expect the content to be unique enough to continue, I might either skip or answer the survey, depending on factors like how “honest” the publication has been with me in the past (have I been click-baited before?), how complicated the process of taking the survey looks like (up to ten questions, as in your example, might be a bit much), and how important I consider it that someone actually makes money with that type of article and writes more like it.
I’ve answered I will skip the survey but the real answer is it depends. If I deem the source to be trustworthy, I’ll skip the survey and read the article (the desire to read the article outweighs the inconvenience), but if it’s a blog by some unknown person, I’ll just return to where I came from (the inconvenience outweighs the desire to read the article).
Masatake Wasa does it give you a negative impression of the website/brand even if you do decide to skip and read the article?
Alan Stainer, not really. I can see it as a commercial necessity, and I’m reasonably confident of the quality. With unknown sites / brands, it creates a negative impression, since that is trying too hard to monetize my visit without showing me the goods first. In that sense interstitial ads between pages on the same site, as happens with AdSense vignette ads, make sense to me. At least that way, I can decide whether it’s a site I’d continue to browse and consider coming back to in the future or not.
Alan Stainer It’s all an attempt at next level 1st party data collection. We saw a lot of this during the previous presidential election. I bounce from the page when presented with a survey wall.
I’m glad Alan is already polling the plebeians in advance to see if they will swallow it
I leave immediately and try to remember what sites do this and never go again. Hate it. It’s bad enough you look at a recipe site and have crap pop up that needs to be ex’ed out of before you can continue. Oh, and the sites that have multiple moving ads? Those that sometimes start playing crap without your permission? Or those that make the page load SOOOO DAMMNNNN SLOWLLYYYY… forget it. Got better things to do with my time.
Eerimen Bzej it’s more a case of building an argument NOT to do this sort of thing and raising awareness about how bad it actually is for a brand to do.
its still polling, and thus serving the same purpose.
It depends, if it’s a short multiple choice then it’s not a problem.