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SFgate.com
The homepage peelback ad on SFGate.com today partially obscures the top story, about a significant local earthquake. |
In case you didn't hear it (or feel it), last night an
earthquake rattled San Francisco, reaching 5.6 on the Richter scale. Of course, today that's a top story on
SFGate.com.
The bummer is that people heading to SFGate.com this morning will, within a couple of seconds of landing on the site's home page, find half the home page temporarily obliterated by a default-on "peelback" ad for a new saccharine Dreamworks movie. In fact, this peelback is so large that it partially obscures the earthquake story (see picture).
I'm definitely not anti-advertising, but it seems to me that it should never overpower the news content. Not just because that's tacky and might appears greedy, but because it is (in a case like this) insensitive to site visitors. People flocking to the site out of concern about an earthquake need information. Confronting them with an obnoxious, irrelevant ad that literally gets in the way of the news sends a bad message about that news organization's priorities. In that sense, it can undermine credibility as well as loyalty.
Does your news organization have a plan to rein in large-scale online advertising (especially peelbacks or popups) in the event of major breaking stories, especially ones which may have a community scared? Should ads like this be temporarily pulled during such events? Please comment below.
(Thanks to Kate Cheney Davidson of China Dialogue for the tip.)
You're right, that was my error. Sorry. I've corrected that...
