I've been introduced twice today to the new interstitials from Techcrunch - once this morning while trying to go through a link on Twitter and the other when I opened my browser and brought up my favourite sites. Both times the interstitial didn't function properly. The first one with Twitter didn't take me to the link I clicked on, it dumped me on the homepage. The second one just sat there showing me the interstitial - clicking on "Skip this Ad" or waiting didn't matter, after about 45 seconds, I ditched Techcrunch and came here to write this rant.
I hate interstitials on the web. I think it is nothing more than spam and clickjacking. Even more than that, when a blog like Techcrunch posts EVERY link on Twitter directly and then hijacks my session to an advertisement, that's just complete abuse. I think that's unethical and something perhaps even Twitter should look on cracking down on - you posted a link to take me somewhere to show me something, don't interrupt it with an Ad! That's just spam as far as I'm concerned.
Interstitials are a fancy name for commercials. They divert you away from the content you intended to view and show you something you didn't want to see in an effort to make you buy something. I hate them on TV, I hate them before movies and I hate them even more on the web.
Interestingly, there's been a debate recently between Jason Calcanais (@jason) and Comscore about making sites pay for an accurate reflection of their traffic. Without going into the detail, the thing that is related about these two issues is that what sites like Techcrunch and Mahalo have in common is that they absolutely are fully dependent on our "attention". I go to your site, I "lend you" my attention in exchange for content I'm interested in and if you choose to put some ads around the side of that content, then so be it. My "attention" and everyone who visits these sites are chopped up and ranked and called a million different things like CPMs or impressions or whatever, but at the end of the day, the "score" is a reflection of the attention paid by individuals to the content presented. The most important part of this is, the content on its own has no value, the value is the amount of attention paid to the content! You can write the best blog posts in the world, but if nobody clicks on them, you won't get advertising dollars for it.
I'm by no means some kind of uber-genius who's just come up with this, people like Steve Gillmor have been talking about the "attention economy" for the last five years. And I mention Steve Gillmor specifically because of his association with Michael Arrington (who runs Techcrunch) and their relationship via the Gillmor Gang. I would have thought that Arrington would have picked up a few lessons and ideas about the value of attention and ways not to lose it before making a decision on these commercials that have been stuck up on Techcrunch.
Look at TV. DVRs are massively popular because they allow people to do a couple of simple things: one, record the content so they can watch it when they want; and two, fast forward through commercials. Some people will talk about digital programming guides and stuff like that, nonsense, those two things are the killer features of DVR. Traditional newspapers are suffering along similar lines, I can get the content when I want it without the overhead of a whole newspaper. It boils down to the same thing: my attention is valuable to me and my time is precious, I will reward you with my attention if you make it easy and convenient for me to view content that I'm interested in.
I find these interstitials/commercials to be a perversion. It is like paying an attention toll just for the chance to view the content - it is an attention "paywall". If I don't like the content, I've paid you for it largely in advance whereas if I am on your page and there isn't anything I'm interested I leave and my time on your site is diminished. I guess the only way now to protect my "asset" in this relationship is for me not to go to Techcrunch as a primary source of information, but as a last resort.
In my "Morning Coffee" extension of Firefox, the first page up was Techcrunch - it got my attention first. Sites like Mashable, RWW and GigaOm were always towards the end of the tabs, because I felt I was getting my fair share of tech news from Techcrunch. There are only so many stories about Foursquare and Gowalla a person needs to read. Similarly, if something from Techcrunch popped up along with a similar story on Mashable and RWW, I'd always click the Techcrunch link. After my experience this morning of having this stupid commercial popup and then waste more of my time to navigate to the story I wanted, I'm going to rethink that strategy - I had to pay money for that, my 3G isn't free for my iPhone. Ultimately, I'll just have to re-organise my "Morning Coffee" tabs and change how I use Twitter so that people who value my attention more, get more of it.