Paul at Wizbang complains about the distracting animated ads that are atop my sidebars.
The ad on the left was animated to begin with and I just didn’t notice it. The one in the right sidebar wasn’t animated until this morning. I’ve written the advertiser and asked them to revert it to its original format, which is within my rights, but it’s not an immediate fix. If it were especially egregious, I would just remove the adstrip until they restored it but they had no way of knowing that I’d care.
This is clearly something BlogAds needs to address. They give the site owner approval authority over the design of the ad but once the ad is running, the advertiser can change it to whatever they want within the rather broad technical parameters of BlogAds–even advertising for a completely different product.
Unfortunately, the ads are getting uglier over time. Until a month or so ago, most of them used a smallish logo and very spare text, putting the main advertising message on the click-through page. Look at the RoadRunner, Lamutt for Congress, and Vastly Important Notes ads on the left adstrip. All are quite tasteful and certainly the revenue generated by them outweighs whatever small aesthetic impact they have on the site. Now, many advertisers are taking advantage of flaws in the ad limitations (which are based on displayed characters rather than actual ad dimension) and putting more junk in there in an attempt to stand out.
Update: The proprietor of the Bush Playing Cards site has graciously agreed to restore the old image when he can get to his home office later today. He wasn’t getting many click-throughs with the static format so was trying something else. Click the man’s ads, people!
