True story:

This happened in my country, on the major/most important newspaper. They changed their mobile version of the news paper to the following:

Each time you clicked on a news article, you started to read the article, as usual. Meanwhile, in the background, an advertisement was being fetched. Then, about 5 seconds later, an advertisement that took the FULL phone screen appeared (mind you, many times this was a video, so it also made noise). There was no way to cancel this until, about 3 seconds later, a "CONTINUE READING" button appeared at the top.

So you press the "continue reading" button, and the dreaded ad dissappears, but you are brought to the top of the article (so you have to find again where you left off).

They have since removed that annoying UI behavior. However, another one is still at place: While you read the article, 15% of the bottom area of the screen was taken by a notification/advertising bar; and 10% of the top area was taken by a navigation bar. So the actual area for reading the article was rather narrow.

See for yourself if you're on a mobile phone: http://www.elcomercio.pe (click on a news article)

Sometimes the close button even tries to make you feel guilty about clicking it, like :

"No, I'm not interested in learning about latest cloud technologies every week [x]"

Or the famous "Not now" meaning "Fine, I will bother you again later anyway"

There's a whole Tumblr for confirm-shaming.

http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/

"Not now" is something even Google does quite frequently.

Like when you go to google.com with a non-google browser.

Made even worse when the close button takes 5 seconds delay to show up.

And on mobile you are actually pretty lucky if the close button is actually somewhere on the screen or if you can at least scroll your way to it...

Or if you go to tap close but at that exact point an image finishes downloading, reflowing the page and moving the close button elsewhere so you end up clicking the ad. Grrr.

I use https://github.com/NicolaeNMV/BehindTheOverlay to remove the more evil ones

Don't forget to make the "x" as small as possible, unclickable by anyone that doesn't have 20/20 eyesight or really good precision with the mouse.

God this bullshit. On ads, they know accidental ad clicks will get them more revenue so they're incentivized to make people's lives difficult.

Fuck the ad industry.

Pretty much gave up on reading wired.com because of this. Too annoying takes forever to load.

I've never seen it on wired.com, because I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. You don't have to put up with that shit either, if you don't want to.

Comment of the year

This is art.

I'm getting this on fucking cable now. Seriously, Verizon Fios pops up these goddamn ads and we pay north of $300/month for their services. That is just obnoxious, and there is no way out. There's not enough of a free market to do anything.

This is what drives people to torrent TV shows.

Assuming some users know how to control a computer (some claim they do e.g. those working in IT), why would they tolerate this annoyance?

It must not be that bad or else they would work around it, using their professed skills in controlling computers.

Or maybe there are other reasons?

How many technical users are complaining about advertising while at the same time assisting advertisers to put their marketing cruft on the web?

> It must not be that bad or else they would work around it, using their professed skills in controlling computers.

They did and do. Where do you think adblockers come from?