I have the added bonus of the site “jumping around” this morning.
This really needs to be addressed or I expect traffic on this site will decrease considerably.
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Yes, even on my desktop, the video ads are starting to annoy me, the constant motion.
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Agree!! I posted on the IOS titled thread about this problem this morning ……I’m much more of a reader than a poster here , and this crap is making the site almost unusable for me !
Btw, maybe these two threads should be merged???
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It’s especially annoying when you’re trying to moderate a thread. And the site gets jittery, like an earthquake, after posting with an iPhone.
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I got mine to go away — at least for the moment — by closing out of the app, turning my phone off and on, opening up again in safari and rejecting all cookies.
App?? What app? I’ve tried several things. The ads go away for a few minutes. Then they return.
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This site doesn’t have an app. Did you just close out the site…and then do what else you said?
Yes, I meant closing out of the site, sorry.
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The response from @CC_Jon was 10 days ago. In this case, no news is probably bad news.
Between this and the non-responses from CC about hiding flagged posts and edit timeframes, I’m really starting to lose interest in CC.
While my decreased pageviews are no loss to CC, I’m sure, what if moderators start deciding it’s not worth it to be free volunteer labor for CC anymore because of the ads issue? What if students stop coming because of the annoying ads? Students aren’t going to help CC figure out the issues like the parents do - they will just stop coming to CC.
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There are legitimate reasons why sites need to support themselves with advertisements - and I have no problem with that.
However, there are reasonable implementations of ad technology - and exceptionally poor ones, like on CC:
If the site wants to support “slide out” videos, e.g., when someone hovers over an ad, and slide back automatically, that’s fine.
But if there is a banner ad by one advertiser overlaying bottom content, and now video ad by a completely different advertiser overlaying the content from the side - forcing visitors to aim for a tiny “x” twice on each page - then this is self-destructive for a membership site.
Increasing ads on declining visits will not increase revenue!
There are plenty of less-intrusive ad technologies that will occupy (unused) bottom/side margins, so that they don’t force user interaction.
On mobile phones, there are various ways to “inject” ads on a regular basis while scrolling down message threads - that don’t require any more than what the user is already doing: scrolling.
Whoever the web designer is at CC doesn’t seem to have a strong talent in user interface design or knowledge of ad technology – which means those particular design decisions should be handed off to someone with the necessary expertise?
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Wait. I’m not getting paid?!?
I’ve been working on improving the situation internally and we are making a few changes:
- The ads have been moved to the right margin, which avoids cutting off the first few letters of the post you are reading.
- We’re working on not showing the video ad during the same session after the X has been clicked or tapped. (This is still in progress.)
- We’re looking into reports of ads not closing then the X has been selected or ads that hide the X. Unfortunately this can be a bit like whacking moles when advertisers try to cheat the system. It really helps to get a screenshot if at all possible.
Advertising is currently an important source of revenue for us. Unfortunately, video ads perform better than other types of ads. We’re working on signing new advertising partners, including schools, which are a better fit for our topic. You might have noticed the recent UChicago AMA, for instance. These partnership relationships are taking time to build, so ads are helping to cover the revenue gap.
I should also note that we are working with an external team for ads. I’m not throwing them under the bus. It’s more that we have extra communication challenges when it comes to testing ads and verifying they way they will work live on the site. We’re working on a process to avoid miscommunication in the future.
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FWIW for me it is worse than ever today. Video ads keep coming after being closed – one after another after another. It is negatively impacting the time I spend in CC.
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Noted. Item #2 might help.
Hopefully eventually that will help…
but not yet.
Right. But will the student posters stay around to wait for “eventually”? Time will tell. And if posters leave and pageviews decrease, ad revenue will decrease, and that will spell trouble for CC once again.
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@CC_Jon And to add…new posters who seek out this site…if the page is clogged with these ads, some will just choose not to join at all.
I swear, in the previous discussion of this about two years ago, there had been an update and all of us needed to log in just about every time (a pita that was fixed). Before logging in, all of those ads were all over the place on the screen. I clearly remember being told that once you log in, either no or less ads would be present. But I objected even then…because new folks would be discouraged from joining…at all.
@CC_Sorin do you remember having this discussion? I believe you were the one who responded the last time this ad issue was brought up.