I use IMDB.com to track/rate what movies I’ve seen, as well as a variety of other things. The site does have ads, but they’re typically not overly intrusive. But recently I went to the site and was served this abomination of an ad for Zippo Lighters. I thought it was a problem with Safari, so I opened it in Chrome & Firefox as well. The problem showed up in all browsers.

Just because you CAN use a transparent background in your ad graphics, doesn’t mean you should.

To make matters worse, IMDB clearly screwed-up the coding, as the graphics were all over the place, the ad itself was missing a dismiss button of any kind, as well as some sort of border or background to the ad. The only way to get rid of the ad was to close the window, re-open the window and click any other link on the page as quickly as possible so as to get off the homepage where the ad lived.

When sites get too clever for their own good with these paramount/takeover ads, readers are the ones that suffer… and that’s never a good thing. So many times I hear the site owners say “we hate it, but it’s out of our control.” No, it’s NOT out of your control. You just stop using the ad service until they fix the problem. You go back to manually approving ads one-by-one if you have to. The one thing you don’t do is forget that you are in control of what ads appear on your site.