Incredibly annoying drop-down ad !

[MissChief]

ridds said:

Yeah I don't quite get the ad issues.

I will never click an advert on a website, they are of no interest to me. They're never the best deals and most of the time totally irrelevant to what I want.

Chrome and Adblock. Job done. PH will never get income from me and adverts and they won't spoil my experience. No doubt this will all change with the new "mobile" skin.

I know this doesn't apply to those on locked IT systems but I'd just use my mobile if it bothered me that much.

I certainly wouldn't pay a subscription. I'd be more likely to move to the TVR as I suspect a lot of other TVR owners.

So I would have to ask then, how would you feel if you got an indicator beside your name saying that you have ad's blocked? Why should Haymarket give you a service when they have no option to make any income from you? The more people block the bigger the ads will get. 'Takeover' or full site branding are worth a fair bit of money. Users such as you are little more than leeches to Haymarket's goodwill.

[eldar]

MissChief said:

So I would have to ask then, how would you feel if you got an indicator beside your name saying that you have ad's blocked? Why should Haymarket give you a service when they have no option to make any income from you? The more people block the bigger the ads will get. 'Takeover' or full site branding are worth a fair bit of money. Users such as you are little more than leeches to Haymarket's goodwill.

No problem with ads provided they are reasonable, relevant and unobtrusive. Trouble is, they aren't, recently. So users install adblock, they have the choice.

Haymarket's asset is the users, not the hardware, software or service. A site with no users is worth bugger all.

Thus leeching works both ways.

[ridds]

I couldn't care less Tbh.

PH worked before Haymarket was around, in fact it was better. All that has happened since they have come along us it's been one unwelcome modification after another without any real improvement.

Search function?

[Rs2oo]

MissChief said:

So I would have to ask then, how would you feel if you got an indicator beside your name saying that you have ad's blocked? Why should Haymarket give you a service when they have no option to make any income from you? The more people block the bigger the ads will get. 'Takeover' or full site branding are worth a fair bit of money. Users such as you are little more than leeches to Haymarket's goodwill.

MissChief, the problem is not advertising, its the way they drop down to cover the entire screen. This happened again this morning when I was logging in. Santander dropped down and stopped me typing, filling the whole screen. This type of advertising is intrusive to the extreme and puts me off the company because its so bloody annoying. Santander should have ads at the top or side of the page and should stay there not cover the screen !

[elms]

Agree with the above.

It cheapens the whole classifieds section, the site has gone from being the best (easiest) classified site to use to being the worst in 12mnths

[monthefish]

Rs2oo said:

Santander just dropped down and filled my entire screen as I was trying to log on !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GET THE fk RID OF THEM - NO MORE DROP DOWN ADS COME ON !!!!!!

^^This.

I understand that advertising revenue is important, however if I'm interested in the product, I'm perfectly capable of clicking on said advert.

This sneaky 'expand-by-mouseover' tactic just pisses me off, and makes me want to never deal with that company, and will drive away readership from the website.

Sort it out, PH, for everyone's sake (mine, theirs, yours)

[TheJimi]

I'm not a marketing professional, but surely good marketing stems from knowing what makes people respond positively?

That being so, what imbecile came up with the idea of the Santander advert? Yeah, let's make the advert drop the page down *just* when the user is attempting to do something - ie login.

There's some staggering muppetry being displayed here, both from Santander's marketing department, and from those who run PH.

PH management: Tell me I'm wrong.

Edited by TheJimi on Thursday 27th March 13:53

[porridge]

TheJimi said:

I'm not a marketing professional, but surely good marketing stems from knowing what makes people respond positively?

That being so, what imbecile came up with the idea of the Santander advert? Yeah, let's make the advert drop the page down *just* when the user is attempting to do something - ie login.

There's some staggering muppetry being displayed here, both from Santander's marketing department, and from those who run PH.

Haymarket is undergoing restructuring, Heseltine this week took full control of it again buying the last of the other owners.

It's a bit of a mess at the moment from the FT piece I read and redundancies have been significant- the employees seem to be panicking and doing crap like this and taboola ads to justify their existence.

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=heseltine+haymarket&am...

[TonyRPH]

MissChief said:

Was anyone really expecting anything different? Websites and staff to run them are expensive compared to ad income that hardly anyone clicks on. <snip>

PH seems to be permanently in beta (or under development if you prefer).

There are other (purely forum) sites out there, that are run by a single person (often with the help of a group of volunteer moderators) that do not incur the costs of running a site like PH.

This site could have switched to one of the mainstream forum applications like PHPBB / Vbulletin etc. and almost immediately the development costs incurred by running this site as it stands would have fallen away.

Ok, so the classifieds is also custom application, but this could have been contracted out of house, and developed without using the PH users as a platform for testing on a live system.

But Haymarket plough on, employing a team of developers to maintain what appears to be flaky software (sorry Ted) - but I do think the sheer size of the forum has outgrown the software it's running on.

The aforementioned forum software works properly (e.g. multple blocks of code quotes amongst other things) and has many different plugins for advertising etc.

But Haymarket and it's team of developers continue to re-invent the wheel, with about 80% success.

Oh, and hosting and bandwidth is so cheap these days, that you can't even use that argument any more.

[maffski]

Pah, you call that a drop-down ad? This is a drop-down ad:



It seems (on IE at least) if you press your back button when the ad is expanded it doesn't do quite what you would expect.

[cavebloke]

Congratulations PH - you converted me into another Ad Blocker. Now I won't see any of your advertising. You should have listened to the feedback and I wouldn't have bothered.

[Kiltie]

Looked at PH on a PC at work briefly on Friday.

All of a sudden ...



I won't be doing that again.

I'll continue to use my own laptop at work with Adblock Plus.

It really surprises me that PH / Haymarket apparently couldn't care less.

Edited by Kiltie on Saturday 29th March 23:31

[Rs2oo]

This intrusion actually puts me OFF the advertisers.........

[monthefish]

So intrusive it's actually offensive.

[Pistachio]

Santander GO AWAY FFS!!!!
I dont like your bank Go Away

Pistonheads if you dont stop this I will not look on this site any more. A simple header advert is great but this is like a guy popping up in front of you as you read the newspaper.

[SV8Predator]

Note that in the Unauthorised advertising and naming and shaming thread a moderator responded with 35 minutes?

[MattDell]

SV8Predator said:

Note that in the Unauthorised advertising and naming and shaming thread a moderator responded with 35 minutes?

Moderators don't make ad policies. And nor do I for that matter.

[surveyor]

But no-one who does looks at this site. Garlick seems to be rarely around - I'm guessing he's now got other additional Haymarket duties, and Stuart's replacement shows no public head. and it seems awfully like they have decided to milk the site for all it's worth, regardless of the effect of the user experience, and whether they get to keep the users...

[eybic]

Can anyone please confirm whether you have seen this ad more than twice? I am led to believe it is frequency capped so you see it no more than twice, if cookies are deleted it can mean you will see it again as it doesn't know you've already seen it.

[mickk]

Only seen it the once when I first logged on and that's it.