That was the most appalling ad I have seen in months, they have a whole page justifying them here http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-t...

Q: Isn’t this just an interstitital?

A: No. We don’t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article. The Canvas ad surrounds the article and the article loads at the same time. All it takes to move the article back in view is to hover over the article. It’s a much more intuitive and smooth process.

I pity their developers for putting up with that sort of delusional rhetoric.

I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at [email protected] with anything you've got.

It's not intuitive (at least not to me). A bobbing thing on a page that appears to be an ad just looks like another ad to me and hovering is never connected to actions unless it's something I'm accustomed to (like menus). Clicking a link is what takes me to content, not hovering.

And your 'c' key isn't intuitive either. Who sees a fullscreen ad and thinks 'Oh, I'll just press the C key, that'll get rid of it, right?'.

Getting in the way of content is the reason people use ad blockers. Your audience is aware of them and with intrusive and distracting things like this, usage is going to increase.

A 'sexy' interstitial is still an interstitial. At least others like Forbes have clear instructions.

I'll focus on proving more clear instructions for now based on your feedback.

This doesn't bother me that much, but it's sure to infuriate Hacker News readers.

With that said, realizing what's going on, moving my mouse, and waiting for the animation takes significantly more time, and cognitive load, than clicking through an interstitial.

Point taken. We will try to improve/fix both issues.

The 'c' key is not intuitive at all. If anything, it should be the Escape key.

I instinctively tried to scroll down past the ad, then noticed the article was bobbing on the right. I left without reading it. I shouldn't have to do a special action just to get to your content. Scrolling is intuitive, moving the mouse to the right side of the screen and waiting for an animation to move the content into view is not intuitive or user-friendly. I'm sure your advertisers love this though. I'd never heard of your site before today, you just lost a potential new reader because of this style of advertising.

We don't mention the 'c' key anywhere yet and have only implemented it a few days ago after a reader suggested it. We are testing it now and really like it so will make it more clear asap.

Hi Boris,

Props for replying - communicating in the face of adversity isn't fun I know, so thank you for that!

I'll try to put my thoughts together in an email for you, but just incase I don't get around to it here's a seat-of-my-pants synopsis before I get into work.

Make the back-to-article functionality discoverable, tell your uses they need to hover over the article / press c / whatever to close the ad, tell people the content is over ----> there.

Techie audiences like here are more likely to not have their hands on a mouse, If I have to take my hands off the keyboard to click on the ad it's annoying also.

Think of you power users, I open a bunch of tabs then flick through them a bit later - This meant I missed the transition where it goes off to one side. I thought your website was a pop-under type exploit - not so hot! use the windows focus & blur events to activate your ad

Seeing the article for a second, then watching it fuck-off to never-never land is really annoying, It's like someone switching the TV off just after kick-off in a game of football.

All great feedback. Will how much we can implement and how fast.

I'd greatly prefer a standard interstitial ad, like Forbes has, over what you have here. With a regular interstitial, I'm just irritated. With your ad, I'm irritated AND confused. It wasn't clear at all what I had to do to dismiss the ad. Then when I did figure it out, I was further annoyed by the slow animation as the article eases to the left.

Got it. We will try to fix that by providingg clearer instructions and maybe speeding up the animation.

> I would have liked to talk about the actual article here,

Oh, but if you know the contents of the article, the irony is absolutely delicious. The main complaint there is Chrome's excessive power usage. Which is hard to argue with, to be honest. But that obnoxious ad was increasing my laptop's power usage from 11W to 17W (and the using 50% of a mobile i7). People living in glass houses, etc.

I agree that's ironic and something we (I'm TNW's CEO and worked closely with the dev them on this) should work on. I also believe we built this for the future and computers will catch up with some of the more innovative stuff we built. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it better and we will. We are improving the code and functionality every day so the canvas ad you might see today (we don't show them on every visit) might be better than the one you've seen yesterday.

"Buy a new computer so you can run our over engineered adverts properly."

At the very least adblockers will catch up.

As I said in other comments: that's fine. And we will improve our ads even more over time.

I know. When this: http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg is what you get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.

A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely. If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)

You're arguing against a strawman. We already know what the alternative is -- a standard interstitial ad. Other sites do interstitial ads better than your site does. I appreciate the attempt to innovate but I think you made it worse, rather than better.

It may not be a shit deal for some people, but it is for me and I wont be visiting your website again.

I'll give you credit for getting around my adblocker though, although that just pissed me off more.

I think adblockers will catch up soon enouygh, and that's fine.

IDK. One bad UX experience is enough to turn me off from a site for a long time. There are other places to get content similar to this for sure.

Is this what Adblock Plus is saving me from? Awesome!

That ad was terrible. I don't normally visit thenextweb.com, and I for sure will not be going back.

That would be a shame because we can produce some awesome content because we have an advertising model that works. Also, if you visit TNW through the front page you won't see an ad. ANd if you go to a story directly you only see an ad every now and then. I hope you give us another try. Boris (CEO TNW)

That was an absolutely awful ad - the website renders at sub 10fps on my i7 32GB ram workstation.

Indeed. I almost thought the link was broken and I was redirected to an alternative article. Once I figured out that I had to mouse-over to the right to present the article, it was broken due to my mostly default Ghostery config. Here's a screenshot:

http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg

That looks awful and somethign we should fix. Passed it on to #dev. Boris (CEO TNW)

What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?

When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it.

As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad.

I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.

Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying.

edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.

That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.

Agree. After seeing this, I am now looking to reinstall AdBlock after having had it disabled for a while.

I wonder if people responsible for sites like this even think about how they may hurt their own site by pushing things too far?

I thought about that a lot of course! I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and worked on the canvas ad with the design & dev team for months. We do know some people absolutely hate ads. No matter how small. And this one is huge! But we figured the upside of having a beautiful ad that more people would like would be worth the downside of losing a few people who hate any ad and probably even use an adblocker. I don't dislike people who use adblockers and think it is fine if they read our site for free and without making us any money. But if you do I also don't think you have mucch right to complain about ads anyway.

Adblock Plus made it so the ad shows up as a background image behind the article. I never realized it was an ad. When I open a private browsing window where Adblock Plus isn't enabled, the ad is full-page, front and center and you have to move your mouse to the right to reveal the article.

Hmm no, thats now how that works. If you browse aroudn the site we don't show the ad. If you visit new from twitter or google or facebook we show yyou the ad once. When you go to a second page we don't show it anymore. So when you open a private window it assumes you are new and shows you the ad.

Default-deny works wonder on such site (given the amount of 3rd parties), and I could read the article just fine. Here, local default-deny rules (dynamic filtering) for just that one site (if you don't want default-deny globally):

    thenextweb.com * 3p block
    thenextweb.com tnwcdn.com * noop

ublock was enough for me, I didn't see the ad in question.

As far as I know adblockers aren't blocking our Canvas ads yet. I don't mind if they do though. I think it is better to give up trying to make money on people who really hate ads and instead focus on people who don't mind them. Feel free to read our content with an adlocker. I just hope to tweet or like our stuff every now and then. :-)