...Banner Ads are terribly ineffective...

Banner ads have always been annoying, but definitely some more than others. Sure their content and product have changed over the years, but they have never ceased to be annoying. Especially those ones that were clearly drunkenly glued together by amateur flash designers who clearly just needed the money to support their coke habit. You remember the ones back in the day when people were just discovering the internet? (Probably around middle school for most of you). You'd be in the computer lab, trying to play a nice friendly game of Slime Volleyball, flash mini golf (and it was always mini golf for some reason!) or caring for your Neopets when something would catch your eye. It was bright and flashing all kinds of colors (thus why your attention was on IT and not on your GAME or let alone your COMPUTER CLASS). The flashing, the colors, your eyes are drawn to the periphery of the monitor, intrigued by what this message from the internet gods could be that demanded your attention so readily.

YOU ARE THE 1,000,000TH PERSON TO VISIT THIS PAGE! CLICK HERE FOR YOUR PRIZE!!!!

If you didn't have ADHD before viewing this ad, you sure as shit did after. Then they changed. They realized that, the flashing colors really didn't get enough traction with the populace. And moreover, the level of ADHD those fucking things induced in viewers meant they were too busy chasing a jar of mayonnaise before they could be bothered to click the damn link.

Next came the dancing people ads. You know the ones, they advertised something incredibly stupid like lower mortgage rates in YOUR state, just click the pulsating button with your state's abbreviation on it! And at the top of it, was a silhouette, dancing and dancing. It never stopped. And the dance....it was so uninteresting....it bored you just as much as it intrigued you. Was this individual really dancing so energetically about lower mortgage rates? As a fresh faced high schooler, should you even fucking care? All we knew then, was that the word mortgage was the kind of word we heard our parents use, and we didn't care about that. For all we knew, a "mortgage" was an exciting new brand of cottage cheese that they had since discovered, and needed to inform everybody about, including the bald fat man at the bank, because adults find cottage cheese that fascinating.

The most recent incarnation of these proverbial internet herpes sores are the:

Lose a billion pounds from your fat fucking stomach by following this one weird rule! Do it! TRUST THE FUCKING INTERNET YOU BITCH!

And these new ones feature terrible drawings of a cartoon woman MAGICALLY losing what looks to be about 20 pounds. I'm sorry internet, I don't even believe the infomercials on TV...you know...the ones that use REAL FUCKING PEOPLE...and you expect me to believe that you helped a two inch tall poorly drawn cartoon to lose weight? Fuck you internet. Fuck you so hard. I don't believe that you possess a weird rule that helps me lose weight while still consuming my weight in Kraft Mac and Cheese on a daily basis. I don't believe that your stupid dancing silhouette SOMEHOW knows more about the housing market than my personal financial adviser. And I DEFINITELY don't believe that I was the magical millionth viewer on that page, and that because I was SO LUCKY, that a magical banner genie was going to grant me some WONDROUS prize that ISN'T the equivalent of internet SUPER-AIDS. (Besides, every kid in my middle school was on that fucking Nabisco Mini Golf game...you wanna talk about smart advertising? THAT'S fucking smart advertising.)

The saddest part about all this though, is that these annoying fucking ads STILL EXIST. One would think that if people had stopped clicking them DECADES AGO that people would have stopped GIVING A SHIT and investing REAL MONEY into these things. But no. Apparently there are people out there who still fucking click those things. And to each and every one of you, I hope you're happy with yourselves. You are the reason viruses exist. You are the reason tech support professionals hate their jobs. You are the people who give investors a reason to keep creating these ads. I hope you're all VERY HAPPY WITH YOURSELVES.


fuckers



...And that's what I learned today.