Flying visit

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