Thursday, March 24, 2016

Wikia's Annoying Advertising

  If you lived during the late 90s into the early 2000s then you probably remember pop up ads. Those things were annoying. If you were lucky enough during your web travels to click on website that didn't manage to attack you left and right with 2 billion pop up ads. Pop up ads have seemed to have gone the way of the dinosaur in recent years. They're still out there but they rarely pop up. Ba dum tss.
  All joking aside here. If you have ever heard of a little webzone called Wikipedia, than you probably heard of it's bastard for profit cousin, Wikia. You see Wikia is used for more specific Wikis such as ones for the DC Animated Universe, Star Wars, and Hot Wheels cars, and the Muppets. However since these are considered for the die hard fans they also come at a price, annoying advertising methods.
  Owners of these Wiki's have no control over the content of the ads placed on their site and how many ads will be on the pages. Wikia uses Autoplay ads which are Adobe Flash based. The amount of the Autoplay ads that are placed on these Wikis is too damn high. Have you ever heard the rule of thumb about embedding YouTube videos on forums? The rule of thumb is to not embed  too many videos since it can crash the page or site due to an overload. This leads to my next argument about Wikia's advertising.
  All of these autoplay ads working at once slows down the time it takes the site to load and it makes your web browser freeze up and become unresponsive for a few minutes or seconds. Not to mention that there is no way to mute some of the ads. Yep that's right these ads sometimes have sound. It's just like those talking pictures they said would never catch on. Sometimes I'm reading a Wikia article and somehow I hear a muffled voice that I don't know where it is coming from since I am not multitasking watching a YouTube video responding to a forum on Monday nights. Sometimes you don't even expect any ads with sounds and then they get you off guard.
  They'll give you a freaking heart attack. I swear that if someone ever gets a massive heart attack from being startled from an Autoplay banner advertisement, the advertiser or Wikia should be held legally responsible.

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