John Battelle, claiming web 2.0 was not a bubble, in 02005

Recall that the demise of Web 1.0 was predicated in large part on the collapse of the Internet advertising business — people were spending millions buying billboard-like ads that, it turns out, nobody was paying attention to.

First new big ad I’ve seen in the wild:

To their credit, I was expecting something like the Flash ‘page curl’ ads. If things are restrained like this, it won’t be as awful as I thought.

The ad has several parts:

• The in-column section is a single large image.
• A Flash movie that overlays the image, for animation.
• (Presumably) CSS/HTML, for the stuff that overlays the actual page.

Doing it this way means that even mobile browsers will see at least some part of the ad.

Dan Frost, for the Los Angeles Times:

They’re bigger, they’re bolder, and soon they’ll be covering up large swaths of some of your favorite Web pages.

The Online Publishers Assn. on Tuesday released several new in-your-face advertising formats designed to be both more obtrusive and interactive.

…

Studies show we ignore banner ads, said Jose Castillo, a new media consultant in Johnson City, Tenn. “Making them bigger and more intrusive won’t work. We will tune those out as well.”

Mandy Brown, two days ago:

Through this premise we find ourselves in a familiar conundrum: it is the reading experience that brings people to the web, thereby making them available to the siren song of the advertisers; but it is the advertisers, who, in their effort to gain purchase over ever more significant corners of our brains, must distract and diminish the reading experience lest they be ignored. The story goes that every so often an advertiser surprises with a particularly innovative method of annoyance, after which a certain amount of time passes and we learn — automatically, involuntarily — to tune them out.

To me, this venture is clearly a terrible idea. Annoying users is a poor choice of business model.