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thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't

thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending other users to the site by linking to it. I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.

codezero 11y ago
What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it. As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad. I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.
  - borisvvz 11y ago
    That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.
  - codezero 11y ago
    Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying. edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.
abluecloud 11y ago
I know. When this: http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg is what you get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely. If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)
  - Yhippa 11y ago
    IDK. One bad UX experience is enough to turn me off from a site for a long time. There are other places to get content similar to this for sure.
  - electroly 11y ago
    You're arguing against a strawman. We already know what the alternative is -- a standard interstitial ad. Other sites do interstitial ads better than your site does. I appreciate the attempt to innovate but I think you made it worse, rather than better.
  - abluecloud 11y ago
    It may not be a shit deal for some people, but it is for me and I wont be visiting your website again. I'll give you credit for getting around my adblocker though, although that just pissed me off more.
    - borisvvz 11y ago
      I think adblockers will catch up soon enouygh, and that's fine.
- 11y ago
5h 11y ago
That was the most appalling ad I have seen in months, they have a whole page justifying them here http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-tnws-new-canvas-ads/ http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-t... Q: Isn’t this just an interstitital? A: No. We don’t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article. The Canvas ad surrounds the article and the article loads at the same time. All it takes to move the article back in view is to hover over the article. It’s a much more intuitive and smooth process. I pity their developers for putting up with that sort of delusional rhetoric.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at boris@thenextweb.com with anything you've got.
  - Veratyr 11y ago
    It's not intuitive (at least not to me). A bobbing thing on a page that appears to be an ad just looks like another ad to me and hovering is never connected to actions unless it's something I'm accustomed to (like menus). Clicking a link is what takes me to content, not hovering. And your 'c' key isn't intuitive either. Who sees a fullscreen ad and thinks 'Oh, I'll just press the C key, that'll get rid of it, right?'. Getting in the way of content is the reason people use ad blockers. Your audience is aware of them and with intrusive and distracting things like this, usage is going to increase. A 'sexy' interstitial is still an interstitial. At least others like Forbes have clear instructions.
maccard 11y ago
That was an absolutely awful ad - the website renders at sub 10fps on my i7 32GB ram workstation.
rrss1122 11y ago
That ad was terrible. I don't normally visit thenextweb.com, and I for sure will not be going back.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  That would be a shame because we can produce some awesome content because we have an advertising model that works. Also, if you visit TNW through the front page you won't see an ad. ANd if you go to a story directly you only see an ad every now and then. I hope you give us another try. Boris (CEO TNW)
aikah 11y ago
ublock was enough for me, I didn't see the ad in question.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  As far as I know adblockers aren't blocking our Canvas ads yet. I don't mind if they do though. I think it is better to give up trying to make money on people who really hate ads and instead focus on people who don't mind them. Feel free to read our content with an adlocker. I just hope to tweet or like our stuff every now and then. :-)
asd 11y ago
Indeed. I almost thought the link was broken and I was redirected to an alternative article. Once I figured out that I had to mouse-over to the right to present the article, it was broken due to my mostly default Ghostery config. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg
- borisvvz 11y ago
  That looks awful and somethign we should fix. Passed it on to #dev. Boris (CEO TNW)
natch 11y ago
Agree. After seeing this, I am now looking to reinstall AdBlock after having had it disabled for a while. I wonder if people responsible for sites like this even think about how they may hurt their own site by pushing things too far?
- borisvvz 11y ago
  I thought about that a lot of course! I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and worked on the canvas ad with the design & dev team for months. We do know some people absolutely hate ads. No matter how small. And this one is huge! But we figured the upside of having a beautiful ad that more people would like would be worth the downside of losing a few people who hate any ad and probably even use an adblocker. I don't dislike people who use adblockers and think it is fine if they read our site for free and without making us any money. But if you do I also don't think you have mucch right to complain about ads anyway.
- cheshire137 11y ago
  Adblock Plus made it so the ad shows up as a background image behind the article. I never realized it was an ad. When I open a private browsing window where Adblock Plus isn't enabled, the ad is full-page, front and center and you have to move your mouse to the right to reveal the article.
  - borisvvz 11y ago
    Hmm no, thats now how that works. If you browse aroudn the site we don't show the ad. If you visit new from twitter or google or facebook we show yyou the ad once. When you go to a second page we don't show it anymore. So when you open a private window it assumes you are new and shows you the ad.
jsnell 11y ago
> I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, Oh, but if you know the contents of the article, the irony is absolutely delicious. The main complaint there is Chrome's excessive power usage. Which is hard to argue with, to be honest. But that obnoxious ad was increasing my laptop's power usage from 11W to 17W (and the using 50% of a mobile i7). People living in glass houses, etc.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  I agree that's ironic and something we (I'm TNW's CEO and worked closely with the dev them on this) should work on. I also believe we built this for the future and computers will catch up with some of the more innovative stuff we built. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it better and we will. We are improving the code and functionality every day so the canvas ad you might see today (we don't show them on every visit) might be better than the one you've seen yesterday.
  - PJones 11y ago
    "Buy a new computer so you can run our over engineered adverts properly." At the very least adblockers will catch up.
    - borisvvz 11y ago
      As I said in other comments: that's fine. And we will improve our ads even more over time.
gorhill 11y ago
Default-deny works wonder on such site (given the amount of 3rd parties), and I could read the article just fine. Here, local default-deny rules (dynamic filtering) for just that one site (if you don't want default-deny globally): thenextweb.com * 3p block thenextweb.com tnwcdn.com * noop

codezero 11y ago

What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?

at-fates-hands 11y ago
When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it. As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad. I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.
- codezero 11y ago
  Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying. edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.

abluecloud 11y ago

I know. When this: http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg is what you get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.

borisvvz 11y ago
A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely. If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)
- Yhippa 11y ago
  IDK. One bad UX experience is enough to turn me off from a site for a long time. There are other places to get content similar to this for sure.
- electroly 11y ago
  You're arguing against a strawman. We already know what the alternative is -- a standard interstitial ad. Other sites do interstitial ads better than your site does. I appreciate the attempt to innovate but I think you made it worse, rather than better.
- abluecloud 11y ago
  It may not be a shit deal for some people, but it is for me and I wont be visiting your website again. I'll give you credit for getting around my adblocker though, although that just pissed me off more.
  - borisvvz 11y ago
    I think adblockers will catch up soon enouygh, and that's fine.
11y ago

5h 11y ago

That was the most appalling ad I have seen in months, they have a whole page justifying them here http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-tnws-new-canvas-ads/ http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-t... Q: Isn’t this just an interstitital? A: No. We don’t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article. The Canvas ad surrounds the article and the article loads at the same time. All it takes to move the article back in view is to hover over the article. It’s a much more intuitive and smooth process. I pity their developers for putting up with that sort of delusional rhetoric.

borisvvz 11y ago
I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at boris@thenextweb.com with anything you've got.
- Veratyr 11y ago
  It's not intuitive (at least not to me). A bobbing thing on a page that appears to be an ad just looks like another ad to me and hovering is never connected to actions unless it's something I'm accustomed to (like menus). Clicking a link is what takes me to content, not hovering. And your 'c' key isn't intuitive either. Who sees a fullscreen ad and thinks 'Oh, I'll just press the C key, that'll get rid of it, right?'. Getting in the way of content is the reason people use ad blockers. Your audience is aware of them and with intrusive and distracting things like this, usage is going to increase. A 'sexy' interstitial is still an interstitial. At least others like Forbes have clear instructions.

maccard 11y ago

That was an absolutely awful ad - the website renders at sub 10fps on my i7 32GB ram workstation.

rrss1122 11y ago

That ad was terrible. I don't normally visit thenextweb.com, and I for sure will not be going back.

borisvvz 11y ago
That would be a shame because we can produce some awesome content because we have an advertising model that works. Also, if you visit TNW through the front page you won't see an ad. ANd if you go to a story directly you only see an ad every now and then. I hope you give us another try. Boris (CEO TNW)

aikah 11y ago

ublock was enough for me, I didn't see the ad in question.

borisvvz 11y ago
As far as I know adblockers aren't blocking our Canvas ads yet. I don't mind if they do though. I think it is better to give up trying to make money on people who really hate ads and instead focus on people who don't mind them. Feel free to read our content with an adlocker. I just hope to tweet or like our stuff every now and then. :-)

asd 11y ago

Indeed. I almost thought the link was broken and I was redirected to an alternative article. Once I figured out that I had to mouse-over to the right to present the article, it was broken due to my mostly default Ghostery config. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg

borisvvz 11y ago
That looks awful and somethign we should fix. Passed it on to #dev. Boris (CEO TNW)

natch 11y ago

Agree. After seeing this, I am now looking to reinstall AdBlock after having had it disabled for a while. I wonder if people responsible for sites like this even think about how they may hurt their own site by pushing things too far?

borisvvz 11y ago
I thought about that a lot of course! I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and worked on the canvas ad with the design & dev team for months. We do know some people absolutely hate ads. No matter how small. And this one is huge! But we figured the upside of having a beautiful ad that more people would like would be worth the downside of losing a few people who hate any ad and probably even use an adblocker. I don't dislike people who use adblockers and think it is fine if they read our site for free and without making us any money. But if you do I also don't think you have mucch right to complain about ads anyway.
cheshire137 11y ago
Adblock Plus made it so the ad shows up as a background image behind the article. I never realized it was an ad. When I open a private browsing window where Adblock Plus isn't enabled, the ad is full-page, front and center and you have to move your mouse to the right to reveal the article.
- borisvvz 11y ago
  Hmm no, thats now how that works. If you browse aroudn the site we don't show the ad. If you visit new from twitter or google or facebook we show yyou the ad once. When you go to a second page we don't show it anymore. So when you open a private window it assumes you are new and shows you the ad.

jsnell 11y ago

> I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, Oh, but if you know the contents of the article, the irony is absolutely delicious. The main complaint there is Chrome's excessive power usage. Which is hard to argue with, to be honest. But that obnoxious ad was increasing my laptop's power usage from 11W to 17W (and the using 50% of a mobile i7). People living in glass houses, etc.

borisvvz 11y ago
I agree that's ironic and something we (I'm TNW's CEO and worked closely with the dev them on this) should work on. I also believe we built this for the future and computers will catch up with some of the more innovative stuff we built. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it better and we will. We are improving the code and functionality every day so the canvas ad you might see today (we don't show them on every visit) might be better than the one you've seen yesterday.
- PJones 11y ago
  "Buy a new computer so you can run our over engineered adverts properly." At the very least adblockers will catch up.
  - borisvvz 11y ago
    As I said in other comments: that's fine. And we will improve our ads even more over time.

gorhill 11y ago

Default-deny works wonder on such site (given the amount of 3rd parties), and I could read the article just fine. Here, local default-deny rules (dynamic filtering) for just that one site (if you don't want default-deny globally): thenextweb.com * 3p block thenextweb.com tnwcdn.com * noop