Recording of me trying to follow a link in a Salon article today. Somehow I wish there was a code of online advertising ethics that stated One Must Never Obscure Content With Advertising but I’m not holding my breath for that happening anytime soon.
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A Whole Lotta Nothing 
I know you are a sharp dude but you vaguely sound like Butthead in this.
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Transcript:
MATT HAUGHEY: Oh! What’s “salvia art”? Uh! Um… Um… Oh. Wha–? [Sigh.] Unnnnnaaargh.
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Advertising pays my bills, and I still block it with Adblock Plus. 99% of all online advertising is irrelevant to me. Naturally, I’d love to see only the relevant ads, but that’s a spectacularly hard problem.
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If there’s one thing I have learned in the last 6 years working for a major media company with many advertising driven properties, it’s that there is no end to what the advertising sales people are willing to do to sell something. They would agree to anything, obfuscation of content is just the start. It’s a constant push and shove between the Web development arm and the sales arm. In battles such as this, sales inevitably wins. They hold the final money driven trump card in this argument. It’s frustrating.
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I double-checked the IAB standards quickly and didn’t see anything about this. Advertising should hover over content only at the user’s explicit request (e.g. “click here to expand”.) It’s the role of a publisher’s top management to protect the user experience and brand and reign their sales in when necessary.
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Thank you for making this. Using it to convince my publisher of what a bad idea these ads are.
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