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.

Smashing lists them:

1. Color schemes – Most news sites use a white background with dark (black) text and blue links.
2. Header and sidebar banners – Lots of ads in these places.
3. Top navigation – Aside the New York Times, many news sites embrace top navigation.
4. Tabbed content areas – Cram lots of information in a small space.
5. Grid-based layouts – A good way to “manage and organize a large amount of content.”

Visit enough of these domains you and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu. Didn’t I just write that?

Lots of big new organizations of all stripes use templating in their designs. It saves time and probably makes supporting these sites from corporate HQ a lot easier. As things become more centralized and budgets leaner, these standard designs probably save money, too. Why spend months on a redesign when you need to focus all your resources on being able to report?

Advance Internet’s recently redesigned templates for Cleveland.com, OregonLive.com, MLive.com and Syracuse.com. Cleveland.com uses a hybrid of the new template, old template and a third blogging template for some story commenting. It’s rather confusing.

Gannett’s templates for Indianapolis Star, CentralOhio.com, Montgomery Advertiser and Cincinnati.com. Gannett launched these earlier this year, with the design originating from the Indy Star. Apparently the redesigns have caused a lot of turmoil. These templates, very much to their credit, push social media sharing high up on the front page.

Community newspaper powerhouse Gatehouse uses a similar set of templates on many of its 518 newspaper sites. Some are like my former employer’s site, while others are a variation of the Wicked Local brand, and yet others deliver news to the beat of a different template. All seem to have a gradient with a little bit of a drop shadow on each side of the content area.

Fox television stations that use the Fox Interactive Web template look EXACTLY the same. It’s not even worth posting more examples. Just take out “Cleveland” logo and insert “Tampa Bay” or “Twin Cities.” The templates boasts plenty of bevels, shadows and gradients, all in a red, white and blue theme. Very LOUD! I credit the Fox designs for not pimping out the 10 o’clock anchor team that no one cares about.

Smashing also compares blogs to traditional news sites. Blogs, as you would imagine, do a better job of integrating social networking, vital in the battle to turn readers into users, and users into members of an online community. I think more news sites should work like blogs. It’s already starting to trend in this direction — just a matter of getting those darn publishers to give in.

The Financial Times made its new site more like a blog with a vertical news flow called “the river”. FT also ported over the salmon color of its printed paper. Some things never change.

I would love to find designs that break out of the mold. Traditional news sources are unlikely to do this, though. Years of instituational behavior, coupled with taking themselves too seriously, mean few Web news sources are going to deviate much from the norm. Visit enough of these domains and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu.

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?