Mad As Hell

Moe Freedman, remembering my Websurfer’s Credo, forwarded this interview with internet advertising guru Jason McCabe Calacanis. Read it and weep:

Advertising must be disruptive to be truly valuable to advertisers. The key word in that sentence is “truly”. Sure, the banner has some value, but it has nowhere near the value or power of an interstitial, a popup, a Television ad, a Radio ad, or a Magazine ad. [Emphasis added]

Think that’s bad? It gets worse.

The truth is we should have gone with full-screen, Flash-based interstitials three years ago. Flash is light, fast, and entertaining. It has all the power of TV, combined with the power of online targeting and tracking. If the New York Times made you watch a 20 second Flash commercial every time you visited the site they would have a line of advertisers at their door. I think Martin [Niesenholtz, CEO, New York Times Digital] will do this in the next six months, I mean, they have already been doing pop-unders for X10 – that is sad!

I use Norton to block cookies, kill pop-ups and pop-unders, and hide referrals. Once a day — a day! — I run LavaSoft’s AdAware to remove snooper programs that slip past Norton. And now they want to take over my entire goddamn work screen, just so I have the privilege of seeing that stupid sock pocket in high resolution?

I gladly pay for worthwhile content, when asked to do so. But I will not pay ransom, just to keep ads off the computer I’ve already paid for. I’m not entertained enough by silly kitty vikings to keep Flash installed on this computer, if that’s what I have to do to retain control of my own desktop.

I’m uninstalling Flash — I suggest you do the same.