StarTribune.com’s Print Article Advertising Gets Aggressive
I don’t know about you, but one thing I really miss when I click the print button on a newspaper website is the lack of ads. Thankfully, the StarTribune has solved this “problem” by serving full color ads within the print version. Large ads, like the ProFlowers one, appear near the bottom of each printed page; an ad for the third party service that makes this happen appears in the footer; and a house ad is currently running in the upper right hand part of each page.
They’ve also switched to 2-column formatting. Put that all together, and it’s likely going to take more ink and more sheets of paper to print a Strib piece.
To pile on further, they’ve running a few additional ads on the print preview window.
The print version advertising service, Format Dynamics has a testimonial from Director of Online Advertising at the Denver News Agency, David Harwood, explaining the benefits:
“An innovative product that has created a new revenue stream, a better user experience for our readers, and improved results for our advertisers.”
Mr. Harwood, how could it possibly be considered a better user experience for users to subject them to slower interfaces, with large ads, that takes more ink and pages to print? Does the new revenue stream make up for the disservice?
I unbookmarked StarTribune.com last October (I think it was October) after becoming fed up with their pop-under ads, auto-refreshing of pages, etc. but received a link to a story recommended to me today so I ended up on their site. Sadly, the story was paginated (spread out over more than one page in order to increase page views while wasting my time). (Doodledee has been working on fixing this particular Strib annoyance.)
To me, putting ads in the printable version is double taxation advertising. People viewed the ads associated with the story before clicking the print button, so subjecting them to more ads is the same as telling people they can’t clip articles out of the print version of the paper unless they keep the ads attached.
This bums me out because I really like to read what’s worth reading. Hidden between Favre and Michael Jackson updates, there is a ton of stuff worth reading . . . if only it was readable. And, if it’s worth reading, it may be worth passing on to others to read as well (aka, generating additional page views and ad impressions for the Strib for free). However, I’m not about to subject people I know and respect to the current StarTribune.com experience.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I’ve never had a Star-Trib bookmark, nor ever an RSS feed from anything attached to the Star-Trib, and this is not due to anything about Nick Coleman or Kersten Kreepy or over-indulgent pro sport coverage or literally any of their content or ads…it is simply because they don’t get online period. All that annoying page refreshing, how their links break because they disappear stories, and on and on.
Here is how I treat the Star-Trib, I never open it directly. If I mouse-over a link in a posting that points to the Star-Trib, I consciously decide (and sub-consciously shudder) to bother opening it or if I can do without it…pretty much always deciding I can do without it.
And when I do see that one of a kind article from one of their few remaining journalists who have been given the chance to actually report on something worthwhile?
–I open it, clip the content out, paste it into a text editor, and close the article before the annoying page refreshes can begin. But, before anyone gasps about my callousness…I think I can safely say this has occurred less than 5 times all year.
And before the PiPress puffs out its online chest…yeah, I don’t read them online anymore either.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Userscripts.org has a script for single page, but the next button still shows up since they made their change — I should go fix that sometime.
The code for it is quite easy to read if you need to translate it to something that isn’t greasemonkey or greasekit. Page refresh and no comment scripts are there too.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I’m diggin’ on some sweet Denver Newspaper Agency LLC opt out value right now:
http://www.papernapkin.org/pastebin/resource/images/imageEntryId/6139
I love all this value I get these days.
August 27th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
If you are determined to “share” a story with your friends, at least take the time to copy the text into some editing software and render it readable without any ads.
and there is a special place in hell for people who slap my email address into a “share” form.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:14 am
[...] Regardless, we know that newspapers love coming up with tricks to inflate the number of pages you have to view in order to read a single story. It’s gotten so bad that savvy web users have taken to clicking the Print version of newspaper site’s stories in order to find a less offensive version of the story to read. However, newspapers such as the StarTribune have reacted to that by creating nearly unusable and ad-laden print versions of their stories. [...]