Annoying advertising in margins.

Jeff Jones

Jumping in here to hopefully address some issues

1) Emailing developers won't work for a number of reasons - firstly they ignore email or they'd never get anything done (there is a lot to do). Secondly they're not responsible for ads, that's the ads team, who are contactable via the about us page.

2) Ditto for emailing senior management as it will go to their PAs.

Now I have made the case to the ads team that we should be serving relevant ads, especially on the forum. As for the types of ads being annoying, I've made that case as well. The counter argument is that they work very well.

imposter2.0

Jeff Jones wrote:

2) Ditto for emailing senior management as it will go to their PAs.

Even if those addresses do go to PAs (which I don't believe, tbh), any PA that decided against forwarding such material on to their particular director would be grossly failing in their duty, IMO.

arran77

Jeff Jones wrote:

The counter argument is that they work very well.

Really?

The ads are so intrusive to the point where people are installing software and making changes to the DNS settings so that they see no adverts at all!!

I'm sure those that pay to advertise on this site would not be best pleased with this?

I appreciate that the mods can not make these changes so I would have thought that contacting Future Publishing as Imposter suggested would be a far better solution?

_jon_

arran77 wrote:

I appreciate that the mods can not make these changes so I would have thought that contacting Future Publishing as Imposter suggested would be a far better solution?

You would have thought so but I e-mailed Claire Hawkins on Monday asking if she could look into the issue and directed her to this thread. As I suspected, my e-mail has been completely ignored (so far anyway, but I won't be holding my breath).

I don't know if she is the right person to contact but according to this, she looks after advertising for Bikeradar-
http://brands.futureplc.com/brands/bikeradar/

I've blocked the ads now anyway for my iPad (not through changing the DNS but by setting up the site blocking feature on my router to block the sites that the ads are coming from).

_jon_

This is what I sent her-

Dear Claire,

Please could I ask you to reconsider your use of adversing in margins on the BikeRadar forums? Or at least remove this type of advertising when the user is browsing the site on an iPad? It is currently having a very detrimental effect on the user experience, so much so that the site is practically unusable on the iPad.

Please see the following thread on the BikeRadar forum-

viewtopic.php?f=40033&t=12944982

I hope you will take the comments on that thread on-board and make the necessary changes. I understand that sites need to be able to make money from advertising but the way that Future Publishings has gone about it in this instance is far too intrusive and I'm sure it will end up driving many people away from the site.

Regards,
Jonathan

plodder73

I would like to know the solution to this,
there may well be some useful information above.
Unfortunately I can't see it because
I have a betfair casino advert
blocking half the page. So could
someone help but just use half of
the page like this , as that is all I can see on
my ipad. Its a nightmare what is
happening to sort this out.

Monkeypump

Jeff Jones wrote:

Jumping in here to hopefully address some issues

1) Emailing developers won't work for a number of reasons - firstly they ignore email or they'd never get anything done (there is a lot to do). Secondly they're not responsible for ads, that's the ads team, who are contactable via the about us page.

2) Ditto for emailing senior management as it will go to their PAs.

Now I have made the case to the ads team that we should be serving relevant ads, especially on the forum. As for the types of ads being annoying, I've made that case as well. The counter argument is that they work very well.

Just "jumping in" is of little use, if any at all. How about entering into some honest, useful dialogue?

And as for your quoted counter argument, what reliable, robust data is available to support this? How do you define "work very well"? Because if the majority of users are blocking the ads, how can that argument possibly be true?

arran77

I really do think this is out of the hands of the mods, it must be very frustrating for them, after all I suspect they do this voluntarily and they take the flack when when it is Future Publishing who should answer.

Jon, I'm sure that your email has been read and I would like to think that some notice will be taken, after all if its detrimental to Future Publishings business it puts those who employ them at risk of loosing their jobs.

DrLex

Thank you for posting the IP address to add to the DNS; since there seems no point in emailing anyone at Future/BR, I'll just add my admission of advertisement blocking to this thread, should anyone with a degree of control wish to check user reaction to the intrusive nature of the commercials that break useability of the site.

snotty badger

I have stopped using this site as often thank to its shite advertising methods.

The bet fair one obscures the edges of posts making them impossible to read.

Jeff Jones

Plodder73 wrote:

I would like to know the solution to this,
there may well be some useful information above.
Unfortunately I can't see it because
I have a betfair casino advert
blocking half the page. So could
someone help but just use half of
the page like this , as that is all I can see on
my ipad. Its a nightmare what is
happening to sort this out.

In this case please send us a screen grab and we'll try to sort it out

markhewitt1978

Part of the issue could be addressed if they allowed the use of Tapatalk, or had an iOS/Android app for browsing the forums. Remember that you can include adverts in the tapatalk system so it can raise revenue, and you'd probably make more as the forums would actually be usable.

Monkeypump

Jeff Jones wrote:

Plodder73 wrote:

I would like to know the solution to this,
there may well be some useful information above.
Unfortunately I can't see it because
I have a betfair casino advert
blocking half the page. So could
someone help but just use half of
the page like this , as that is all I can see on
my ipad. Its a nightmare what is
happening to sort this out.

In this case please send us a screen grab and we'll try to sort it out

More lazy modding!

You MUST be aware of this problem - plenty of people have raised it, and all you need to do is view the forum pages yourself.

What will it take for any of you to actually address this problem????

herb71

Jeff Jones wrote:

Plodder73 wrote:

I would like to know the solution to this,
there may well be some useful information above.
Unfortunately I can't see it because
I have a betfair casino advert
blocking half the page. So could
someone help but just use half of
the page like this , as that is all I can see on
my ipad. Its a nightmare what is
happening to sort this out.

In this case please send us a screen grab and we'll try to sort it out

I have posted a screen grab already.

maddog 2

+ 1 on all this

As soon as adverts become annoying then you can guarantee I won't be responding to them. Simple.

Jeff Jones

Re: the Betfair ad (and similar) I can now see the problem on ipads and my apologies :oops: for missing the screengrab earlier in this thread (MattC59 posted another here: viewtopic.php?f=40033&t=12950417 )

It's likely either the ad or the big "best bike mags" banner not being responsive enough for smaller screen widths or the betfair ad being served over the top of the banner (which is another ad) instead of underneath it.

I will try to get that sorted asap as we're a couple of months off having a new design for the site that can properly handle different screen widths.

That said, there will always be advertising in margins but clearly it shouldn't stop people from posting.

Jeff Jones

I've been informed that this has just been fixed. Please let us know if not.

tailwindhome

Jeff Jones wrote:

The counter argument is that they work very well.

Out of interest what do you mean by work very well?

One of the most irritating things about these sort of ads is the constant movement. This leads to 'clicking' on the wrong place and opening up ads, which I maybe didn't want to open.*

Is that it 'working very well'






* I be sticking to that defence your honour.

arran77

TailWindHome wrote:

Out of interest what do you mean by work very well?

I asked that a few days ago, no response

markhewitt1978

In this case the click through ratio in terms of clicks per view.

src1

Jeff Jones wrote:

I've been informed that this has just been fixed. Please let us know if not.

Brilliant, it's fine now, thanks very much for getting this fixed.

Sgray

No Betfair ad hiding half of site for me at the moment, cheers for getting it fixed.

Jeff Jones

TailWindHome wrote:

Jeff Jones wrote:

The counter argument is that they work very well.

Out of interest what do you mean by work very well?

One of the most irritating things about these sort of ads is the constant movement. This leads to 'clicking' on the wrong place and opening up ads, which I maybe didn't want to open.*

Is that it 'working very well'

* I be sticking to that defence your honour.

Work well = from a commercial point of view and that's all I can really say on that.

I agree on the movement being a bad user experience. I've made this point to ads as well and you can probably guess the response.

The flipside is that BikeRadar wouldn't be the incredible free resource for gear that it is without the ads, however inconvenient they are at times. It will get a lot better too.