[borisvvz]

I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at [e-mail] with anything you've got.

[Veratyr]

It's not intuitive (at least not to me). A bobbing thing on a page that appears to be an ad just looks like another ad to me and hovering is never connected to actions unless it's something I'm accustomed to (like menus). Clicking a link is what takes me to content, not hovering.

And your 'c' key isn't intuitive either. Who sees a fullscreen ad and thinks 'Oh, I'll just press the C key, that'll get rid of it, right?'.

Getting in the way of content is the reason people use ad blockers. Your audience is aware of them and with intrusive and distracting things like this, usage is going to increase.

A 'sexy' interstitial is still an interstitial. At least others like Forbes have clear instructions.

[borisvvz]

I'll focus on proving more clear instructions for now based on your feedback.

[codezero]

This doesn't bother me that much, but it's sure to infuriate Hacker News readers.

With that said, realizing what's going on, moving my mouse, and waiting for the animation takes significantly more time, and cognitive load, than clicking through an interstitial.

[borisvvz]

Point taken. We will try to improve/fix both issues.

[hanley]

The 'c' key is not intuitive at all. If anything, it should be the Escape key.

I instinctively tried to scroll down past the ad, then noticed the article was bobbing on the right. I left without reading it. I shouldn't have to do a special action just to get to your content. Scrolling is intuitive, moving the mouse to the right side of the screen and waiting for an animation to move the content into view is not intuitive or user-friendly. I'm sure your advertisers love this though. I'd never heard of your site before today, you just lost a potential new reader because of this style of advertising.

[borisvvz]

We don't mention the 'c' key anywhere yet and have only implemented it a few days ago after a reader suggested it. We are testing it now and really like it so will make it more clear asap.

[5h]

Hi Boris,

Props for replying - communicating in the face of adversity isn't fun I know, so thank you for that!

I'll try to put my thoughts together in an email for you, but just incase I don't get around to it here's a seat-of-my-pants synopsis before I get into work.

Make the back-to-article functionality discoverable, tell your uses they need to hover over the article / press c / whatever to close the ad, tell people the content is over ----> there.

Techie audiences like here are more likely to not have their hands on a mouse, If I have to take my hands off the keyboard to click on the ad it's annoying also.

Think of you power users, I open a bunch of tabs then flick through them a bit later - This meant I missed the transition where it goes off to one side. I thought your website was a pop-under type exploit - not so hot! use the windows focus & blur events to activate your ad

Seeing the article for a second, then watching it fuck-off to never-never land is really annoying, It's like someone switching the TV off just after kick-off in a game of football.

[borisvvz]

All great feedback. Will how much we can implement and how fast.

[electroly]

I'd greatly prefer a standard interstitial ad, like Forbes has, over what you have here. With a regular interstitial, I'm just irritated. With your ad, I'm irritated AND confused. It wasn't clear at all what I had to do to dismiss the ad. Then when I did figure it out, I was further annoyed by the slow animation as the article eases to the left.

[borisvvz]

Got it. We will try to fix that by providingg clearer instructions and maybe speeding up the animation.