Dry Lips and I, on the Whitedot forum, have been having a bit of a discussion on the topic of moving blog ads.
A study published in “Communication Research” found the following:
“This study investigated the effects of pop-up windows and animation on online users’ orienting response and memory for Web advertisements… The results fully supported the proposition that pop-up ads elicit orienting responses.”
Here are my brainwave study results comparing the following:
1. Read: reading a novel
2. Blog: www.salon.com (no moving ads – with subscription)
3. Ad: www.cbc.ca (few moving ads)
4. Ads: http://movies.msn.com (lots of moving ads)
5. guitar: Playing the guitar
Reading a novel
Reading a novel
www.salon.com (no moving ads)
www.cbc.ca (a few moving ads)
http://movies.msn.com (Lots of moving ads)
Playing the guitar
The results show:
1. Read: reading a novel
Hi-Beta 2.90 Gamma 0.46
2. Blog: www.salon.com (no moving ads – with subscription)
Hi-Beta 2.09 Gamma 0.26
3. Ad: www.cbc.ca (few moving ads)
Hi-Beta 2.08 Gamma 0.25
4. Ads: http://movies.msn.com (lots of moving ads)
Hi-Beta 1.76 Gamma 0.19
5. guitar: Playing the guitar (just for the heck of it)
Hi-Beta 7.56 Gamma 2.86
But what about the effect of scrolling?
Dry Lips wrote:
“What about scrolling then? Couldn’t scrolling be seen as the equivalent to formal features such as panning, zooming, etc. Normally one would scroll very often when using the internet, even when reading long documents.”
I was skeptical, but it could very well be that he is correct. There was a drop off in Hi-Beta and Gamma waves comparing reading a novel with reading salon.com (with no moving ads).
There was very little difference between the blog with no moving ads (www.salon.com) and the blog with few moving ads (www.cbc.ca).
And, of course as expected, the blog with lots of moving ads (movies.msn.com) had a much larger drop-off in Hi-Beta and Gamma brainwaves.
I wasn’t surprised that the guitar playing led to much higher levels of Hi-Beta and Gamma, but I was surprised at how spectacularly fast the brain waves become while playing the guitar.
As an aside, here is an interesting article about web advertising, and how it is much less effective than TV advertising:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9709a.html
And here are a couple of article about blocking webads:
http://www.slate.com/id/2218386/?obref=obinsite
http://www.tucows.com/article/1516
And thanks Dry Lips for inspiring this study!
