Sod the users, full screen ads work!

As I was scrolling through my twitter feed, I came across a tweet from CreativeBloq sharing an article, which I thought I'd give a quick glance. After a short delay, my entire browser window was taken over by an ad.

I brought this up in the office and one opinion went down the route of:

...as a strategy, it obviously works otherwise they wouldn't do it. The number of clicks will likely outweigh the number of pissed off users making it worthwhile

I understand this thought from a commercial perspective. A small percentage of clicks on a site with shed loads of traffic amounts to a great deal of revenue.

Prodding someone until they empty their pockets might result in some cash (and some punches to the face and trouble with the law), but just because it's possible, doesn't necessarily mean it should be done.

I object to this based solely on the fact that this strategy pays no attention to the needs of the users. A thoughtful approach to displaying a full screen ad would be triggering it when the reader gets to the bottom of an article. At least that way they've finished what they came to do and if they're interested enough in the ad to click, it's a win/win scenario.

I'm not an ad person. I don't claim to know the best solution to serving ads online, this is simply a suggestion by a frustrated user on how said frustration could be eased in future.

</end rant>