Imagine you’re in a movie theater watching Dune Part 2. Down in the bottom right quadrant of the screen is an ad for a different movie. The movie and the ad are vying for your attention. Your eyes keep flipping back and forth. You can’t follow either of them.
Or imagine you’re watching Gilligan’s Island and there’s this weird floaty image of a bar of soap moving around the screen. It’s on the right, then it’s on the left, then it disappears only to pop back up in a different spot.
That would be very irritating, and nobody would put up with it.
Why do we put up with it on our phones?
There’s an inherent contradiction going on in website design. I go to a webpage to read some thing that I’m interested in and the page is trying to distract me – at the very same time – with five other things.
Movies and TV shows don’t do that. They keep the advertisement separate from the show. Podcasts don’t do that. Like TV, they interrupt the show with an ad. In none of those cases are you being assaulted with the content and the ad at the same time.
Why are we doing this on websites, and how do we stop doing it? It’s an awful, internally contradictory experience.
We got into this mess because of the centrality of the page view. “The” page view.
A movie, a TV show, or a podcast has your attention for some length of time. A website has your attention for a page. Maybe two pages. Maybe 20 pages. But your entire visit is atomized to the page view and monetized accordingly.
Can we change that assumption?
In some ways a paywall does that. Some paywalls allow three views before you have to pay. But those three views suffer from the same maddening nonsense of showing you content and advertising at the same time.
What if you got three views devoid of advertising. Those three pages would be designed to give you exactly what you want – the article you’re reading, for example – with the best possible experience. No pop-ups. No distractions. After those three, the site would say, “to get three more pages, watch this ad.”
Might that work? Has anyone tried it? The concept seems to work in movies, TV, podcasts, and YouTube videos – except that we don’t really give consent. It’s just understood that the commercial will interrupt your TV show every 13 minutes.
That seems like such a better model than what we have now. Most mobile websites are a horrible experience because they’re trying to do two contradictory things at once. What if we delivered excellent content, then good ads, then excellent content?
Why not?
