I was cruising the Internets and saw a link for a potentially useful JavaScript logging technique. Of course, if I would have carefully viewed the url in the status bar before clicking I could have avoided this:


I hope the irony isn't lost on anyone - SysCon, the publishing company behind titles like the ColdFusion Developers Journal has completely destroyed any interest I may have had with their aggressive ads - the piece in question isn't even above the fold - what's under the pop-up ad is another ad, which itself is left to the streaming media 'ad player' which auto-plays for new visitors. That revenue certainly isn't going to the article writers - contributions to the relatively pricey magazine (no industry comps and $90 a year - 17% off the cover price) are on a volunteer basis. I pulled a submission I had for the mag in Q4 last year because of their practices then - somehow its gotten even worse.

Am I being oversensitive? I don't think so. I've seen effective, beautiful advertising that not only accentuates a brand but compels me to view more - compare the above screen cap to the one currently on my Pandora.com screen:

Is Pandora loosing out because they only have one advertiser at a time on their page? I'm not sure - I'd almost guess that because the ad envelops the entire page rather than a 200x400 block (or whatever) that the ad revenues wouldn't be that far off on an clicks-per-thousand-impressions scale. The point, however, is that advertising doesn't suck - piss poor execution does.