This morning, I was browsing the news online and came across
a link to an interesting feature about unusual ways businesses have innovated. Naturally
intrigued, I clicked on the link, patiently waiting the 2-3 seconds it takes
for my computer to load a page. However, after my wait, I am not met with my
most innovative businesses feature. Instead, my screen turns a transparent blue
and I am met with a picture of an animated plane zooming across a page. What is
this? I can vaguely make out my article behind it, so I search around the
plane, which is now making a chugging sound and omitting several puffs of
(hopefully eco-friendly) smoke, for an ‘X’.
No ‘X’ in sight. I try to avoid the plane, thinking that if
I click on a blue area behind it, it might disappear. But the plane seems to be
one step ahead of me; as I move my mouse, it mirrors my movements. There
appears to be no escape from this thing.
What does it even want? Why won’t it go away?
After about a minute of trying to dodge this plane, I
finally succumbed to what it obviously wanted me to do – I clicked on it.
Perhaps if I did this, it would go away. Within nanoseconds, another webpage
appeared. I don’t even know what it was about as I was so annoyed I immediately
shut the page. But whoever it was that sent that little plane to harass me
perhaps got what they wanted – a click through to their website. Even if it was
done just to get rid of that damn plane.
It made me wonder how many unscrupulous websites build up
their “unique visitor” numbers through tactics like this. Pop-up ads and links
are becoming increasingly common and often they are designed to make you click
on them in error (when they keep following your mouse around) rather than
creating engaging content that people actually want to read.
I admit I don’t know much about click-through rates and
advertising, but I can have a guess that the more unique visitors a website
has, the more it can charge companies for advertising space. Perhaps companies
with online advertising budgets are already onto this; many of them no doubt
have teams trained to source potential ad spaces that will offer a genuine,
targeted audience – one where the average website visiting time is more than
0.001 seconds. But for those companies that are choosing an online space for
their adverts based on unique visitors alone – beware.
By Jess Matthias