A spot of ad irritation for the morning

I just got driven temporarily insane by the advertising for Rockband on colleghumor.com. Like a number of entertainment/portal sites, they have ad deals where an ad effectively takes over the background of the page, around the outside of the content area. This morning it was Rockband. Before getting to the detail, I should say I'd probably have just as much trouble with any of the other sites that run ads like this, assuming they do it the same way, but as I'll mention shortly it was even worse on CollegeHumor due to the content of their pages and what happened on the Rockband site. The core problem I had was down to the way I tend to browse, which in all possibility makes me a bit of an edge case. In short, I tend to click in the margins, or whitespace, of pages before scrolling to make sure the window is focussed. I think this probably stems most from me having a dual-monitor setup where the active window could be on either screen (hence the edge case bit). It's also a bit of a habit from Photoshop to click in the background somewhere when 'idle' so that no layers are selected. Unsurprisingly, I clicked on a bit of black background out of habit and it turned out to count as a click on the advert. Here's a shrunk-down screenshot of the site: As you can see, while the ad content takes up a fair bit of space, even on my 20" display, there's plenty of empty black space. Turns out that the entire background area of the page (everything outside the central content area) is a link for the ad. So even if you've scrolled down a couple of screens worth and can't see any advert, clicking in that area will launch the advert target (see red area below). At this point, it's a really irritating type of advertising, drawing clicks when it's clear the user isn't intending to click on the advert (that they might not be able to even see anymore). What made it worse is that clicking the link takes you to a site that does something even more irritating: it resizes your browser window! To have accidentally clicked an ad and have a new page load is annoying. To have a new page load that starts messing with your browser is just infuriating. Now to why the College Humor site took this to the next level for me: it's really hard to find areas of the homepage that aren't links. Of course as I read on, I compulsively wanted to be clicking in empty areas to switch back to Firefox from Photoshop or whatever else and the target areas are tiny. Obviously according to Fitts' Law, you want links to have a large enough target area that users don't miss and the site does this, as many do, by having full blocks be clickable. Here's a screen with all the link areas highlighted: On CH though, it meant I still ended up clicking in the black outer area because most of the content area is link blocks and launching the ad link again, resizing my browser. It was like a vicious cycle of my ingrained habits vs. Fitts' Law taken to such an extreme it had gone the other way and I was clicking on all kinds of targets I wasn't trying to. Anyway, rant over; I just needed to write this all down.