Since the beginning of this blog there were a lot of visitors and my website kept on growing. Because of that, several advertising websites contacted me if I was willing to put their clients ads on my website. I rejected them because they weren't in the best interest of my readers, which is very important for me.

I did some research and created a top 5 worst forms of online advertisement that will surely keep your visitors away.

This list is created from the users point of view. I think that if you add the number 1 on this list to your website, you'll probably receive more money. So it's up to you: Do you want more visitors and a high-quality website or do you want to fill up your website with loads of ads, keeping your visitors away?

Let me start that I wont put the Pop-up advertisement in this article. Those are old and most people now have a pop-up blocker or use Firefox to stop pop-ups. Who does believe that they're the 10.000th visitor of the website and click anyway?

5. In-text advertisement

One of the most common forms of advertisement (next to Google AdSense) has to be in-text advertisement. Services such as Kontera offer a plug-in for the website that will turn the whole page in to one huge advertisement. Words with double lines under them are the ads and when you hover over them, a text balloon will show up with more information. Your readers will have a hard time clicking on actual links in your article, other than the advertisement links that are created. Additionally, the script will make your website very slow.

Worth mentioning: The snapshots plug in from Snap is sometimes used as advertisement tool too. The plug in itself isn't that good (Why do you readers want to see a preview of the website they'll be going to?), so please don't use it.

4. Floating ads

The new form of pop-up are these advertisements: The floating ads. They'll come flying in to your web page (Flash, AJAX or some other way to avoid the pop-up blocker), making it impossible to read the actual content. Most of these floating ads do have a "Close" button, but 99 out of the 100 times it's hard to find.

Check out the screen shot below. Would you press the "X" in the right-top corner to close the ad? That's the actual URL that is linked to the advertisement page. You'll have to close the ad by clicking the square left from the "X". There goes another visitor.

3. Full Page ads

These are the ads that services such as AdBrite offer; Advertisement that will occupy the full page. This form of advertisement mostly has a "Skip ad" button on the right-top corner of the page, or skips automatically after a couple of seconds, but it isn't user friendly at all.

Who wants to bookmark an advertisement anyway?

2. Flash audio advertisement

This has to be one of the most annoying forms of advertisement: Flash audio advertisement. How many times have you already heard this sentence on a website: "Please type your message in the text box and let me say it"? It's from that Flash-female offered by services such as Sitepal. She is programmed to follow your mouse with her eyes and most of the times, she starts talking directly when the page is loaded.

And do the words "Say Something" "What" "Hello" ring a bell? I'm pretty sure you've seen and / or heared the ads from Smiley Central. When you hover over the ad, one (or more) smiley's will start shouting at you. One of the Newgrounds users created a nice Flash-animation about this phenomenon.

1. Redirecting ads

This has to be the absolute number one; The redirecting advertisement. When you find something on Google and you want to visit the page, your browser resizes and you'll immediately get redirected to another page. Most of the times, this is a website offering a spyware / malware scan. Additionally, when you want to close the window with the advertisement, you'll get smacked in the face with a huge error message that are pretty annoying to get away from.

When I see advertisement that looks like this, I'll make sure that I'll never visit your site again. Permanently.

What do you think is the worst form of online advertisement?

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