Why is it that so many online ads still insist on being annoying, intrusive and an all-around pain in the ass?

You see them every day—the pop ups, the roll-overs and those straight-from-hell expanding ads at the top of pages. Plus, my personal favorite—the ones that have the ‘hidden’ close buttons.

I’ll be honest here, while I have a fair amount of digital experience, I do not consider myself an ‘expert’. So perhaps I’m missing something. But it really seems that online advertising—much more so than any other form—goes out of its way to piss people off.

I mean, I don’t see billboards that drop into the middle of the highway, causing me to wait 10 seconds until they move out of the way. Or magazine ads that get larger every time my hand passes over them. Perhaps the closest comparison would be those TV ads that come on at double the volume of your regular programming. And that may soon be fixed, via legislation.

Somehow (to me, at least), traditional advertising has figured out how to be intrusive without being an impediment. Online advertising still has a ways to go.

I have literally stopped visiting sites just because they’ve adopted one or more of these annoying tactics. I can’t be alone in this. So why do these ads persist?

Someone must be clicking on them, right? Someone must find them so engaging that they are driven to click through and see what sweet nectar awaits them on the splash page.

So fess up. Are you one of these people? If so, I beg of you, please stop. Stop making me want to punch my iMac in the face. Next time you feel tempted by one of these Beelzebub-sponsored ad formats, just put the mouse down, back away from the machine and go have yourself a cookie or something.

I personally recommend Chewy Chips Ahoy. They’re delicious!

- TJ Bennett