Warning: Many of the links on this page are annoying as shit. Please click with care. Or at least with a sane, popup-blocking browser.
Every time I click on your ad in my browser, and a popup window with some dumbass Flash presentation starts loading, and I'm sitting there waiting for you to give me some information about your product, and getting bored, and I know if wait for it I'll be under-whelmed and under-informed and probably even more annoyed, you lose me. I close the window before that stupid Flash animation ever gets a chance to finish loading. Fuck you. Why do I have to wait for you to sell me something? My time is precious.
Or another scenario: I load up a bunch of tabs with pages I'm interested in. Some of these pages might be movie sites, some trailers, or even just Apple's site, which, since they started auto-playing their ads at every visit, I've axed from my dailies. (They've mercifully stopped doing this with the introduction of the MacBook, but it was really annoying for a while.) One of these pages has more Flash animation, with that annoying, generic background sound that everyone just hates and that adds absolutely nothing to the experience. Some of the trailers start playing automatically. Great. Now I've got sound spewing from several different tabs at once, and I have to go stop each movie trailer one by one. Worse, when I finally locate the page with the Flash sound I find that it can't be turned off. There's no mute button.
Look, assholes, I'm trying my best to learn about your products. This is stuff I'm already really interested in, or I wouldn't have clicked it in the first place. Your mindless, thoughtless use of Flash and audio say to me that you don't give a shit about my browsing experience, nor do you comprehend how people that use tab-capable browsers (i.e., any of us not using I.E.) actually surf the web. I'm sorry, but rather than engendering sympathy or even interest for your cause or product, all you're really doing is pissing me off and losing my business in the process. More often than not, I just close your window and forget about it. I don't need more stuff, or more to read, all that badly. And I certainly don't need more Flash.
Why do we surf? Most of us surf for information. Why do we click on ads? Again, for information. Not for some Flash designer's idea of adver-tainment.