Thursday, June 17, 2010

MacJury on Safari Reader

A lot of people think that Apple Reader and other text-cleaning/readability tools are basically enabling people who want to "steal" content.
I think that if a site makes a reader want to reformat so badly that he does something active about it, you have driven the reader to it with over-advertising or other reading-hostile practices.
Also the reader who actively does this, is surely not one who buys anything from ads anyway. (I don't think I have done so even once in the fifteen years I have used the weeb.) And if he never does that, the ad impression is wasted, and a false statistic if it earns money.
If you have a very readable page, and if the ads do not push themselves "on top of" the content and irritate the reader, he does not even get the impulse to reformat to a more readable format.

Also, just... how many ads do you need?! If a reader doesn't click on one or two ads, why would he click on seventeen? Many sites are like Times Square now. It's unbearable to try to read them if you don't at least have ad-suppression software. 
And part of the issue, I guess, is that many ads pay for impression, not for through-clicks.

2 comments:

Gil said...

Do these readers remove what I consider to be one of the most frustrating, rude, and annoying types of advertising on the web: the insertion of a "come-on" link to other articles loosely related to the topic of the current article - right in the body of what you're trying to read?

That drives me bonkers, to use a technical term. You're reading an article on some important topic, and as your eyes naturally flow to the next paragraph, it's not a paragraph at all, but a link promising to whisk you away to "Find out what common household items in your kitchen are likely to kill you tonight while you sleep."

Why would I want to abandon what I'm reading right in the middle? Are most readers today REALLY that easily distractible?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Does sound nasty. I don't recall coming across it though, which sites do that?

(Oh, and I doubt any of these are smart enough to remove such links.)