While we are a media site ourselves and don’t claim to be perfect, there are several trends emerging from the Irish media scene that’s bugging the hell out of us. You’ve probably spotted them already, but please allow us to rant on your behalf.
Click bait sponsored content
There is an awful smell of desperation and lack of journalistic pride in sites that have sponsored click bait content at the bottom of their articles. The headlines are engineered to make you click them where you’ll time-travel to old style websites with large red font’s telling you how a Dublin man broke a world record losing weight. You’ll eventually be brought to some awful and more than likely unregulated diet pill website; just to add the the levels of evil that this content offers.
Joe.ie have put a very special and particularly horrible twist on this type of content. You’ll find this kind of content on a lot of big time websites, including Sky Sports and Independent.ie, but they title the section “Promoted Articles”. Joe.ie try to pass these god awful click baited traps as other news “From around the World” or “Popular Elsewhere”. Of course, these goes for SportsJoe and Her.ie too, obviously from the same modern day online red top equivalent of news outlets. Below is an amazing example of the junk you’ll find on Her.ie.
Just look at that transgender article. You just can’t resist click it can you. You can feel it deep in your gut…you want to click it, don’t you…go on just a little click…
Interstitial advertising
Seriously, if you have anything to do with interstitial ads I can only assume you also support Donald Trump and pull into yellow boxes, blocking up entire junctions. Guess what, Joe.ie and the rest of their stable are top of the pile when it comes to these ads, with reputable news sources such as Independent.ie also sacrificing the experience of their readers for such ads. The reason is unfortunately obvious. There is usually a slight delay between your page loading and the ad coming on, so naturally, as you being to scroll the ad pops up and you hit it. The websites makes a few cents, you get annoyed and the company paying for the ad thinks they’re great for getting loads of traffic, even though they’re really just annoying people.
But at least they have that little “x” to close it right? Wrong. You have more chance of winning a fluffy bear from those crane vending machines than successfully closing one of these ads. Don’t get us wrong, we have ads on our site, but they are around the periphery so as not to annoy or interfere with readers.
Video pre-rolls
This is a specific one that needs some explaining. We can live with YouTube ads as they don’t happen too often and you can generally skip them after five seconds. Hell, sometimes they’re even entertaining. On the other hand, take the likes of Sky Sports. After you’re team wins or loses, it would be nice to catch that one minute interview the manager gives right? Wrong! Sky Sports want you to sit through a 30 second video before every single clip you watch. Want to watch five videos? Prep yourself for five thirty second ads.
Sites with auto-play ads
This one is self explanatory. If I land on a website, I only want to hear video if I click something. None of your autoplay stuff please thanks.
Slideshow websites
Top ten ways to tone your arse. Top seven ways to get that guy in the office to notice you. Top eight ways to annoy people who visit your website. We’ve seen them all and we’re sure you have too. These are the sites that seem to have something really interesting for you, but then you get there and have to click through a slideshow-eqsue presentation thing and ads in between to boot.
These sites come about so the people behind it can boast low bounce rate (that’s people leaving after just one page view) and used to be a way to make their site look better in Google search rankings. All about the money! Understandable, but at the same time, makes websites look like gutters and ruins the user experience.
These are the main ones that make me die a little inside on a daily basis. If we missed anything, drop us a message or if we do anything god awful, please tell us.
Update:
We’ve just caught up on some South Park we’ve recorded and wouldn’t you know it. Nail meet head.
