[WikiEN-l] Ads and image licensing

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 1 Jan 2006 at 16:17, Nyenyec N <nyenyec at gmail.com> wrote:

> BTW I wouldn't mind non-obtrusive ads (a'la gmail) if it means that
> the servers are more responsive and the software is more featureful.

But would the ads always stay "non-obtrusive"?  Google has, so far, 
been pretty good at keeping its ads from interfering with its 
content, but they seem to be the rare exception.  All too many sites 
that have gone the "ad-supported" route, even ones that started out 
in a solidly noncommercial way with no ads of any sort, have been 
unable to resist going ever further down the path of intrusiveness, 
including popups, popunders, flashy animations, and all sorts of 
silly tricks with layers and scripts that make the ads jump all over 
the place and get in the way.  Furthermore, the entire design of the 
site starts being made with the ads in mind rather than the users, 
for instance breaking articles up artificially into bite-size chunks 
where you have to keep following "Next" links, in order to serve more 
ads, and using fixed-pixel-width layouts so they always know exactly 
where the ads fit in, and the main content ends up in a narrow bacon-
strip column.

If you've got problems with unresponsive servers on Wikipedia, just 
try using a site that gets ads from various remote servers, and when 
they're running slowly (as happens often) the whole site stalls in 
its loading and rendering until the ad manages to load.  The ads' 
scripting keeps getting more devious all the time in order to try to 
force popups and animations on users with browsers that try to block 
that stuff, and sometimes it even manages to totally crash or hang 
some browsers.

-- 
== Dan ==
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