[yellowapple]

> Just in case you missed it, that ad can be closed by clicking the X in the upper-right corner.

I was indeed aware of that.

> If you were aware of that, I don't see what's unacceptable about being shown an ad before reading a free (and interesting) article.

It's annoying and distracting. It's simply not good user experience, and the fact that such an ad manages to break through AdBlock Plus (probably because it's not coming form a third-party service, so it's harder to detect as an ad) is frustrating.

And to make this clear, I have no issue whatsoever with asking for a subscription; in fact, I might have been swayed positively (albeit admittedly slightly) instead of all the way to the negative should they have implemented a "Subscribe to us if you want to read more articles like this!" somewhere at the top or maybe right after the article itself or somewhere off to the side.

It's akin to smartphone apps (and there are a lot of them that do this, especially ad-supported games) that will step in between you and whatever you were hoping to do at seemingly random and display some fullscreen ad. I understand why they do it - they have to make money somehow, after all - but it's something that makes any somewhat-sane person not want to follow that ad or continue using that application (as opposed to the likely-intended purpose of driving users to pay for an ad-free version).