SmartTags make return on blogs?
I'm seeing more and more advertising like on jk's blog here (see the double-underlined words? They pop up as ads).
I don't mind this as much as I minded SmartTags when Microsoft was attempting to do them (before I was an employee I argued voiciferously against them, along with many other people in the community because we didn't want anyone to be able to use our own words for doing this style of advertising). Choosing to do it on your own blog only gets rid of most of my objection. I still don't like these kinds of ads, though, cause for someone who doesn't know the Web very well you can't tell these are ads at first.
I do wonder, though, whether these kinds of ads pay off for bloggers more than the AdSense style ads?
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May 20th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Ya, these kind of advertisements make me close the site immediately and never return. I’ve always refused to put them on any of my sites.
May 20th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
hmmm, trackback doesn’t seem to be working (or it got caught up in moderation somewhere). Oh well, consider this a manual trackback:
http://www.symphonious.net/2006/05/21/return-of-the-killer-smart-tags/
May 20th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
I can’t agree with you more about those double-underlined ads. They are the most annoying things since Pop-up window ads! Whenever I see one on a blog, I automatically think that the purpose of this blog is to make money for its writer than be a legitimate outlet of information. It definitely brings my opinion of the writer down a few pegs.
May 20th, 2006 at 9:58 pm
[...] SmartTags make return on blogs? SmartTags make return on blogs? I’m seeing more and more advertising like on jk’s blog here (see the double-underlined words? They pop up as ads). I… [...]
May 21st, 2006 at 12:36 am
One simple rule, as Ben mentions: if they’re on a site, then I’ll not visit the site again. This type advertising is too invasive and it disrupts the purpose and usability of the sites that the advertisements appear on.
I’m dreading the day we get in-line advertisements in RSS feeds too.
May 21st, 2006 at 7:50 am
Yeah, there’s a company called IntelliTXT that delivers these types of ads. Luckily, the Adblock extension for Firefox seems to remove them.
May 21st, 2006 at 8:47 am
From a usability perspective they make reading difficult and undermine a blog’s effectiveness.
We are conditioned to view underlined text as links. Since most of what we do online is follow links, we tend to fixate on links when reading web content.
Problem is that the highlighted words are often irrelevant to the content’s message. So if you’re skimming the post and picking up the underlined text only, you probably have no idea what the post is about. Was the post you linked to about Sharepoint? That’s all I remember.
From a trust perspective, they’re problematic because they could be interpreted as deception. It depends on the implementation. If regular links and the ad links are similar, users will quickly arrive at the conclusion that they cannot trust any links on the blog.
The same thing happens when people link to PDFs and other content without telling users. Soon they stop trusting the links on the site.
May 21st, 2006 at 10:33 am
No script deals with this perfectly. someone needs to create the IE equivalent if it does not exist already.
May 21st, 2006 at 10:51 am
Agreed. Those double-underlines are very annoying & distracting. Doesn’t mean, of course, that the ads on a page shouldn’t be tied to the content. See FreshAds for one approach.
May 21st, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Yes - after skimming stories recently and accidentally clicking on two of these ad links, I’ll definitely be adjusting what I read as this is just annoying and distracts from the purpose of the blogs.
May 21st, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Horrible
They make a site look like a cheap scammer’s site. They also insult the reader buy interrupting them at every second word.
Shame to ruin a perfectly good site like that.
-dg
June 12th, 2006 at 10:02 am
[...] It’s not just Google that’s getting into the video advertising space: VibrantMedia, the makers of IntelliTXT, expanded the service today by launching IntelliTXT Video. IntelliTXT, you might remember, creates those extremely annoying, double-underlined green words that are easy to confuse for hyperlinks. These are very similar to Microsoft’s failed SmartTags idea. On this weight loss page, for instance, you can see the video ad when you hover over the word “overweight”. [...]
September 19th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Hi,
Stumbled on your post, well what can I say? Nice one. Smart Tags can be very annoying & distracting I must say.
October 1st, 2006 at 8:10 pm
It’s good to see that others do as I do, close the site. It’s cheap and tacky. Advertisers are like paparazzi, as long as the law supports it they will infiltrate your mind at any given opportunity; loathsome creatures.
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Foxnews.com has those asinine IntelliTXT popups too. I’ve emailed them a number of times to get rid of them because the disrupt the reading of the news - (if you can call it that since it’s all so Ad revenue focused that who can believe any news agency anymore).
I’m reading fox less and less because of those ad popups