Advertising Complaint about Interstitial Ads on Informationweek website

Lose the interstitial ads “click here or wait 20 seconds to see what you wanted to see”… They are too frequent, and really interfere with your site… I got hounded by them when trying to look at some of the links in your email newsletter.

What I see that is so frustrating: Your page completely loads, then as I am starting to read, suddenly I have some unrelated ad in my face, then I have to click, and then I have to wait for the page to load a second time! This is even more of an insult when about half the time your pages aren’t completely loading, and I have to use refresh, and I get hit with the stooped interstitial again! In the back of my house, where my wifi doesn’t reach real reliably, the frustration of repeated attempts to view the pages being interspersed with these interstitials is really frustrated. I hate to think what it’d be like to try to look at your site over a cellular connection (as I frequently need to do when I am out in the field).

Also, you’re probably falsely inflating your hit counts with this nonsense. Your advertisers might not realize this, but savvy visitors could make them aware…

Lose the so frequent interstitials, or I will make sure I am unable to click to your site (the magic of DNS will replace your site on my computers with “You don’t really want to waste time on this site”), remove your newsletters from my email filters, and also start complaining to your advertisers…. It’s one thing to put talking flash ads in your margins, it’s quite another to panhandle me on every page I click on your site….

And no, I’m not an “everything on the internet must be free” idiot. I understand you are trying to get revenue to keep going. I very rarely write an email like this. But these constant interstitials are making you look really desperate and are giving a black eye to your advertisers… Maybe you didn’t realize how bad the effect is, so I thought I’d “take a few moments out of my internet experience” (as the phishers like to say) and let you know my reaction to your website today….. Tone it down, or see the consequences you don’t want of reduced viewers….

- G.