a memo
Dear NYTimes.com,
I'm writing to complain about the animated Verizon ads that appear on some NYTimes.com pages. They are extremely CPU intensive, which makes it very difficult to read articles or even to do anything else on the computer at the same time one of these pages is open.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the use of animated ads on your pages is inconsistent with your brand identity as a sophisticated and trustworthy source of news. (oops, I nearly choked on my coffee) They are annoying to your readership, and encourage the use of ad-blocking browser extensions.
But when those animated ads are given carte blanche to use as much memory and processing cycles as they can, they go from being a bad idea to being a possibly illegal abuse of system resources on the order of spam and spyware. Please have someone look into it.
Thanks.
By Chris Snyder on November 27, 2005 at 12:50pm