Ok, I am not against advertisement, especailly since it helps pay for hosting. but one thing I hate is the overuse of banner ads. 1-2 is fine, but when you overload a page with 8-9 of them, it becomes too unbearable, especailly when you are trying to read an article, and you are reading it in a narrow colum, ads to the left and right.
It can also take over a page. Especailly these new ones that use flash instead of traditional GIFs. one good example is mapquest.com. thier page now features this one for Mercury, and for some damn reason, it ats like a half page of white area COVERING the entire map input area. you cant click the text fields, as clicking where you know where they are, as that opens the URL embedded in the ad. the only way to get to the sole purpose of the site is to hit the tab key a million times until a text field breaks through.
it's just frustrating.
please, go back to GIFs. they work sooooooo much better, especailly on older OSes and/or machines, as anything flash on older computers slows them down.
[/rant]
-digital 
More and more, Internet advertisers are turning to flash if only for its potential to be noticed, whether we like it or not. A good example are those ads that float (or fly or scurry) across the webpage, usually blocking the content that we're there for. Annoying? Yes. Are they going away?
Don't bet on it.
In marketing, the trick is to get noticed, and nowadays, it seems that companies are more interested in getting noticed than being good netizens; think troubled soul, who resorts to all sorts of misbehavior to be noticed.
Does this work? Of course it does. So far this month, I've had ads for certain computer companies, a movie I'd much rather not see (in fact several movies) and mobile phones thrown at me in this manner.
Will I purchase any of these?
No. I'll remember the names and I won't forget. I think that the "net" effect here is going to ultimately be negative.
Peace,
Rob
ok, this damn ad must be following me around the net or something. one of my favourite weblog/news sites I like to read The UNoficcal Apple Weblog has that same ad at the very top, and this time, the white area covers the search bar (which comes in VERY handy), and the top headline and who wrote it. this is very frustrating, and I cant believe advertisers are stoping to this low a level.
well, at least is's calm on the homefront. I like the few google based text ads we have, and I do click on a few from time to time, to keep this place alive. Note to Mr Owad: DONT add any more, or if you do, keep away from the flash ones. though I am sure Owad is not like that, and that he is trying his best to keep this place older mac frendly. thus the few graphics, and very basic HTML.
-digital
do what i did, turn off plugins in your webbrowser
There are some services that allow cookie sharing, and I think Yahoo! has been one of them. They allow other sites to use your Yahoo! cookie to align you to a set of advertising reqs and send you more targeted ads. Thus, you tend to get several of the same ones over and over from sites that have advertising from the same ad company I know other sites share cookies, and we all know the DoubleClick and AdServer and WebTrends do that by default.