A recent example involves a page-peeler advertisement for a PGA golf tournament.

Upon entering Cleveland.com, the ad automatically folds out, covering a major chunk of the front page, then, a few seconds later, folds back. If you choose to close it before it closes itself, you must click on the dark blue area at top, marked “click here to close.” Clicking the ad closed, however, does not really “close” it. When you move your mouse pointer over to the top corner to grab the scroll bar, the ad reopens, causing you to have to “click here to close” again, which really doesn’t close the ad — again.

In a partial sleep-induced coma one morning (where was my coffee?!), I must have repeated this process three or four times until I  realized that I had to maneuver around the folded-corner ad to grab my navigation bar and scroll down the page. What a terrible user experience!

Advertisers struggle to grab users’ attention online. Eye-tracking studies repeatedly show people ignore banner advertisements. Usability god Jakob Nielsen calls it “banner blindness.” So page-peeling ads on sites like the Cleveland.com one break out of the traditional, ignored spots for advertisement online to capture readers’ attention. Do they work? Or better yet: Are they worth it? Probably not.

For the past several weeks, Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, has positioned a button ad on the right side of its home page where Dr. James George, DDS promotes his dental services. (By the way, doesn’t this guy look like James Lipton?)

Ohio.com doesn’t use its medium, the Internet, in the right way for two reasons:

1. The ad is an annoying Flash animation that blocks you from clicking on any news story in the path of a blimp that zips across the page.
2. If the blimp entices you to click on George’s button, an external application fires up to read a linked pdf.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson notes in his Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design that

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

Worse yet, on slower computers or Web connections, unexpected pdfs have the tendency to crash browsers and computers. Even if that doesn’t happen, pdfs really slow down the users’ experience as their computers manage an unexpected download. On faster machines, less savvy users are disorientated, not recognizing that they are actually in an external application. I’ve witnessed this many, many times.  All sorts of other usability issues pop up with pdfs as Nielson notes in another post.

Ok, so we’ve established that pdfs generally are not user-friendly. What should have Ohio.com done?

1. If there must be an annoying flying blimp, which I’m sure the client loved, render it in javascript or some less obtrusive form of Flash so users can navigate to surrounding stories without interference. You still grab the readers’ attention but don’t meddle with their ability to use your product. (Journalists should also contemplate the ethical dilemma the blimp creates by obtruding their content.)
2. Get off their lazy butts and create a landing page for Dr. George. What an awesome upsale! Or at least do it like George does on his Web site. Although surrounded by an ugly wrapper, George’s coupon page allows you to print gifs of his money savers by opening them in a pop-up window. (If I wanted to get picky, I would point out that pop-up blockers are standard with many modern browsers and are on by default. By making the coupons a pop-up, many users will not see them — at least not easily.)
3. At minimum warn users that an external application will open a pdf of the coupons.

Ohio.com’s ad salespeople are really doing Dr. George a disservice by linking to a usability-unfriendly pdf of his printed ad and deploying story-click-blocking animations. They are not alone. Many newspapers republish pdfs of their print ads online as a “service” to readers — but more accurately as a disservice to their advertisers. The online salesforce would do better to take advantage of the Web’s abilities rather than lazily posting a pdf of the newspaper ad.

With a new Web site called Mygazines, you can scan in your favorite periodical and share it with the world. That’s a lot of work for something that is terrible to read on a computer screen.

Are publishers grateful for these extra eyes on their content and advertising? I guess not.

No, I don’t get the “convenience” of being able to read a print publication on my computer screen, especially when many Web technologies exist that allow you to do this more easily. MP3s, music, movies and software certainly lend themselves to piracy; I don’t think magazines do. I can’t think of a publication that I would like to spend time scanning. Plus, many of these magazines are already online for free!

But wouldn’t that be … awesome?

Some commenters on the Mashable article like the concept. One remarked that you could assemble articles from various sources into a single, uber magazine. This experience is something I think you could do more easily (and legally) via RSS feeds, blogs, news aggregators and the like. On your mobile, Google’s site for cell phones provides an excellent RSS reader, and there are various iPhone apps that also pull this off.

Another commenter thinks this site is the magazine industry’s Napster-like wake-up call. Uh, that wake-up call came nearly 18 years ago when the Web really took off. Newspapers and magazines alike have tried to put up pay walls on their sites and have failed miserably. The mainstream media’s problems are well documented, and I don’t need to elaborate on them ad nausam.

Go free

What does this mean for publishers? It’s just a repeat of something they should already know: you cannot control your information on the Internet. Information wants to be free, and there’s little you can do about it.

Free is not the future; it is now. Says “Free” author and Wired editor Chris Anderson:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

Anderson goes on to outline how smart business people can make money off of “free.” Clever publication leaders should take note.

If publishers wanted to get ahead — well, at this point “even” — with the game, they would create a Mygazine-like service themselves and do it better. Make it more stable. Heck, they have access to the PDFs and raw files already. They should also drop Zinio and monetize it themselves. Make this service available for free on Kindle, and create iPhone and Android apps. This alone could boast sagging subscription rates and bring more eyes to grateful advertisers.

(And don’t just post your PDFs online. That’s lame and not in the most usable form.)

As we know, a publication’s subscription rate usually goes to the costs of getting it to you via snail mail. (There are exceptions, of course, like journals that survive on subscription dollars, rather than ad money, to deliver content.) Electronic distribution is nearly costless and gets valuable content into more hands.

Would dead-tree subscriptions fall? They already are. Look at this as a way to boost them in the short term. An aging audience is *gulp* dying off and the younger one that is replacing it is turning less and less to print products for information. People who like getting a magazine every week will probably stick to it because that’s the medium they most enjoy perusing. Those people aren’t going to go to these extra services. I think online and print audiences for some publications are different beasts, different demographics.

I won’t use Mygazines, but its arrival shows there’s some sort of demand. Are magazine publishers listening?