In this article by eWeek, Mark Swords, a representative of Eolas whines about Microsoft changing the behavior of IE. Part of his message stuck out in my mind:
the IE modifications spelled out by Microsoft… will reportedly disrupt the way online advertising and streaming media content is delivered over the Internet. [It] is an inconvenience users could do without.
Advertising? I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d love it if Flash ads went the way of the dodo. They’re usually annoying or ugly. Mostly both. Yet, Flash-based ads still account for a good deal of the advertising I see on the larger sites. Since the purpose of an ad is to get the click, you certainly don’t want to give your potential customer a hassle by making them click twice. What does this mean? I think there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing fewer Flash ads soon.
I’m not saying they’ll completely disappear. Obviously, there are fixes available for the Eolas issue. However, everything I’ve seen requires JavaScript. Not everybody likes JavaScript. Some people completely turn it off. Personally, I believe that’s a very small population, but I know that many websites are reluctant to use it thanks to these vocal people.
It all seems kind of murky. Advertisers that provide content in iframes might be least affected since they handle all their code and includes. Yet, even then, their clients may demand zero JavaScript. Will we see more Adsense or other types of text ads? How about simply an increase in animated GIFs? I’m curious to see if there will be a noticeable change.
For what it’s worth, most advertisers already dynamically write the tags into the HTML, due to the three-way nature of sites, the service, and the individual advertisers. (ie, very little advertising markup is embedded within someone else’s webpage anyway.)
Anyway, these folks won’t see much effect, because of the way they already do things… it’s individual, “all-my-own-content” sites which have had their tags inside the markup.
The changes to IE will do NOTHING to stop flash ads. All it does, is require the user to click once on the flash movie before he can INTERACT with it…the flash movie is free to animate, beep, and be obnoxious without you clicking on it.
It just means if you want to click a ‘Mute’ button, there’s an extra click now.
They can avoid the extra click with some simple javascript, and since most advertising (including google adsense) uses JS already, most likely they will incorporate the fix.
I’m aware that many advertisers already use some amount of JavaScript. I have Adsense on my site, afterall. One thing though. Ads don’t necessarily have to be generated dynamically on the client-side. I’d be surprised if I heard that almost no major sites generated ads on the server. Though, it’s possible that I’ve improperly concluded that a lot of sites are wary of Javascript. Obviously, with Web 2.0, things are changing a lot.
I also don’t believe it will do “NOTHING”. An extra click is UNACCEPTABLE. If I click on an ad (which is rare, but it happens), and it doesn’t work, I’m not going to click again. If they’re going to hassle me, they’re not getting my business.
Sorry, I should have clarified: It will do nothing to stop flash ads from being displayed on your screen.
You have a point that it may discourage people from clicking on them, leading to lower revenue from flash ads, leading to less advertisers wanting to use them. So in that way you could say it stops flash ads.
Certainly, they will still be displayed. In some cases, that might be okay. A lot of major companies might accept that to continue to simply have a presence in the public’s mind. Honestly, I looked at it purely from a revenue and clicks perspective.
My post’s title is probably a little too sensational too, but it was mainly to get people here to discuss. 😉
Having JavaScript enabled is pretty common. Only 3% turn it off based on an average of 247 million internet.com readers (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/February/javas.php). Only time of year this is different is for some reason during the summer holidays? At that time, the percentage increases some.
Anyway – most sites use JS detection for ads so it’s not really such a big issue. The issue is rather all the other websites and “Can I bill them for fixing a site I made 2 years ago or will I have to fix it for free?”. If you were the one to push Flash over HTML it can certainly be a tough sell…
J
We’re already implementing changes to handle Flash Ads. It’s a matter of a few weeks before it’s company wide.
And like Mr Dowell said, most ad services already use JavaScript to embed ads.