Annoying Your Customers is Bad Business
By Brandon Dawson on Mar 14, 2007 in Business, Internet, Marketing
Annoying your customers is bad business.
When you’re dealing in emergency information, such as The Weather Channel does, it’s even worse.
It being springtime here in Ohio, a storm just rolled through that literally had my house swaying from the winds.Since I don’t live on a fault line, a swaying house freaks me out. So, I go weather.com, to get a quick glimpse at the radar map. Obviously, I want to know whether it’s time to bundle the woman and child down to the cellar to take shelter.
It’s a good thing that there wasn’t an actual emergency taking place, because my user-experience at weather.com was hijacked, for about fifteen seconds, by one of the annoying flash-flyover ads that have lately been becoming so popular.
I know, of course, why these ads have become popular. It’s not because they convey information better than traditional ads. It’s simply because they work. The click-through rates are higher on these ads.
A lot of the time, it’s because the user is trapped into clicking, or accidentally clicks the ad trying to shut it down. I also notice that these ads, which used to universally contain “CLOSE” buttons to shrink them back to their sidebar, are now most commonly omitting that basic courtesy.
A lot of websites, and not just weather.com, need to strongly consider the addiction of ad money when compared against interfering with the user experience. It’s absolutely true that without ad revenue, most of the internet would not exist. It’s equally true that without individual users, there would be no market for ads. Supply does not create its own demand.
And for sites like weather.com, uncluttered presentation of information can literally be a matter of life and death.
