Keith Dsouza wrote over at Blogging Tips about the types of advertisements users don’t like to see on blogs. The types of advertisements he mentioned were popup ads, pop under ads, and full page adverts.

Several readers here have weighed in on this topic previously, so I would like to add on to his post and point out three more types of advertisements that readers don’t like to see.

In-text Advertisements

In-text advertisements are unfortunately still found on many blogs. These are the ads that look like hyperlinks with a double underline underneath. When you intentionally mouseover the ad, a pop-up bubble shows an advertisement.

Another example of in-text advertisements is having Google AdSense embedded within the post content. Sometimes this pushes the real content below the fold, which can impact the usability and readability of a page.

And of course we are all familiar with the regular advertisements that show up in the post content just begging for our attention. These are the types of ads that spell out, “Content continues below.”

Talking Advertisements

It wasn’t until I published my post on annoying design decisions that I started to really notice advertisements that stated I had won something cool.

I could be surfing a legitimate site at home or at work, and all of the sudden my speakers are spouting out obscene garbage. Since I open most of my websites in new tabs, it’s basically hunt and destroy at that point.

The quickest way to kill a talking advertisement is to kill the page it’s being loaded on. So much for reading the content.

Affiliate Links or Paid Posts Without Disclosure

Doing paid posts (or having affiliate links) is a good point for debate, but I tend to avoid them like any other advertisement. Sometimes they advertise something I’m interested in. Other times I just skip over them.

Paid posts are obvious to some readers, and if a review is too positive (whether paid or not), some readers will call a blogger out on it. I’ve seen comments to the effect of, “This sounds like a paid review. At least list some drawbacks.”

I’ve seen other bloggers caught in the act of writing a paid review without disclosing the financial conflict of interest. Readers were smart and quick to out the blogger. The blogger’s credibility took a hit and he stopped doing paid reviews.

I’ve seen a blogger post product recommendations, with all of them being affiliate links. When a reader called him out on it, he admitted, “Yes, they are affiliate links.” In this case it didn’t hurt the blogger since he was helping out his readers; he just happened to have affiliate ilnks with the products he recommended.

Conclusion

Within this post I listed three types of advertisements readers don’t like to see. They were in-line advertisements, talking advertisements, and affiliate links or paid posts without disclosure.

Are there any other forms of advertisements you would prefer to avoid?

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