Battling ads on the Internet
Just now, I was on AOL, paging through stories for New Year’s Day. After a few minutes, I came to an offering about famous women who have aged well. The headline was “Stars Who Look Good After 50” and being in half of that group, I clicked on the opening photo of Barbara Walters.
At 85, she looks great. OK, next page.
But where do I click? The page was surrounded on all sides by green arrows, inviting me to click. The natural choice would be the arrow directly to the right of the photo, but I stopped myself. I’ve done that many times before only to find I’d been stolen away from the content I wanted and onto a page for some product or service I didn’t want.
Had I clicked on that arrow I would have landed on a page about nose jobs, something I may someday need but do not want. Had I clicked on the green arrow at the top of the photo, I would have been directed to a page about Internet speed, which is ironic, considering.
And so, there I sat for a few moments, scanning the many arrows and come-ons encircling Barbara Walters’ head, wondering how the heck I was supposed to get to the next example of a good-looking, aging celebrity. I never did find the right arrow.
I suspect we’ve all noticed this trend on the Internet. Just about every square inch of screen space must now be attached to a way to pay for it. Ads will pop up at the worst possible times, making it impossible to complete a purchase, complete a message, or finish an article you’re reading. It’s maddening.
While reading a piece about the best novels of 2014, I was bombarded with ads for things having nothing to do with writing or reading. Banishing them became a sort of video game of “Find the teensy x and click it away before you forget why you were on this page to begin with.”
Eventually, I killed off the last of the ads. Or I thought I had. Just when I was at a point in the story where I was to learn the best two books of 2014, the sentence stopped cold, right in the middle.
There was an x, a hateful roadblock that said if I wanted to finish the sentence, I had to click and watch a video for a product.
That was the last straw. Refusing to play their venal game, I clicked out of the story and closed my laptop. Ha! Take that you stupid weight-loss breakthrough!
This trend will only get worse in 2015. I will escape the clutter the way I always do, with long bike rides through green spaces and with long sessions in warm, dark yoga studios. The pop ups can’t get me there.
At least not yet. The way things are going, there might come a time when advertisers try to hijack even the bike rides. There’s a challenging hill coming up. You want to climb it? Well, first you’ll have to veer onto this side road, where we’ll have you get off your bike and listen to a sales pitch for a new kind of bike tire. What, you like the tires you have? Well, then you can’t go up that hill.
Let’s hope it never comes to that. It’s my hope for the New Year. Not that the Internet becomes less ad-addled; that will never happen. No, I hope to find peace in 2015 – in places where the ads can’t find me.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.