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I've got to disagree with this.

I read most of the major cycling websites and road.cc has, by a long way, the most intrusive and annoying adverts.

If you want people to subscribe then you need to incentivise them to spend more time on the website, not deliberately annoy them and then offer to stop annoying them if they give you money.

Didn't think I'd agree with you one day, but hey, here it is...

I agree on the "too many billboards" part. It's their site so their call for what they think is financially viable of course. They have done a couple of "how we make money" articles so kudos for being up-front about that... BUT without subscribing the site was one of the most annoying ones. Actually gave up visiting on my old mobile as it was unusable.

chrisonatrike wrote:

Actually gave up visiting on my old mobile as it was unusable.

I'm getting close to that, and my phone's not *that* old. The videos hover about, take an age to load and it seems that there are multiple ads at once all with overlapping (and hard to see) cancel buttons. 

Plus, and it feels like it's related, the actual content pages now seem to endlessly load and reload particularly if trying to click through comments pages. 

The staff responses are a bit "so what?" so far. That's fine, it's your site and you can do what you want with it. But non-paying users are telling you that it's a horrible experience and it's driving them away: if that's ok with you, why not just stick the whole thing behind a paywall so it works well for everyone who uses it? It feels like the 90s, chasing endless pop-ups away (including the one that just popped up to obscure the text box I'm writing in, FFS). 

Maybe the viewer acquisition model is based on "come for the reviews, stay for the arguments"

Continued existence of some noisy "contrarians" suggests some truth to that.  Obvs. the "traffic acquisition" model isn't smart in that they have kept some people away and a few have proudly expressed zero desire to contribute for their own use in any way.  "Bring my own toilet paper?  Like hell I will, I'll use the curtains".

chrisonatrike wrote:

Continued existence of some noisy "contrarians" suggests some truth to that.  Obvs. the "traffic acquisition" model isn't smart in that they have kept some people away and a few have proudly expressed zero desire to contribute for their own use in any way.  "Bring my own toilet paper?  Like hell I will, I'll use the curtains".

I don't think this is fair. I've addressed the subscription thing before: subscriptions should be about offering additional functionality/rewards, they shouldn't be a ransom for the absolute minimum level of usability for the site. If they were, you could say that about every website, and the next thing you know, it costs you £500 a month to use the internet.

If Road.cc want me to put my hand in my pocket, they need to offer me something that's worth me doing so. They currently don't.

BalladOfStruth wrote:

I don't think this is fair. I've addressed the subscription thing before: subscriptions should be about offering additional functionality/rewards, they shouldn't be a ransom for the absolute minimum level of usability for the site. If they were, you could say that about every website, and the next thing you know, it costs you £500 a month to use the internet.

If Road.cc want me to put my hand in my pocket, they need to offer me something that's worth me doing so. They currently don't.

That would be nice and I think maybe worth them exploring.  Seems from their articles on this they've done the sums pretty thoroughly though so perhaps that just isn't viable without a radical change to business model?

Anyway the attention business is a seller's market in some ways.  The interwebs are full of distractions and it's trivial to direct your attention elsewhere.

Clearly road.cc does offer you something, otherwise you wouldn't even bother to moan.

As plenty have said before for a modicum of effort on your part you can go full pirate be conscious consumer and use the wealth of freely available tools to get the good stuff while blocking / dodging the ads.  I'm not in favour of ads / data collection by default but that's our world.  There really isn't a free lunch anywhere.  Content providers have just got good at hiding "who benefits and how".

I do realise the ads aren't popular with some regular readers and my take on this isn't popular, but we have to go off the bulk of the evidence and statistics we have access to - which shows our user base is still growing and the time they're spending on the site is going up, so there just isn't a viable reason to cut a big source of our revenue off. At the moment complaints about ads on the site pop up on our forum, on social and via email a handful of times a year, if it was hundreds of times a day we'd acknowledge there was a problem. But the evidence suggests ads on road.cc don't annoy unsubscribed users more than on competitors' sites or other similar-sized websites, if anything less. 

Ads per se don't bother me: they're literally the price I pay for the content, and while I enjoy road.cc I evidently don't enjoy it as much as I enjoy £24 a year to spend on other stuff. 

It's these ads which do bother me: I get that they're meant to be intrusive to an extent, but they make the content nigh-on unreadable a lot of the time and I will, eventually, stop coming here.

(FWIW, I genuinely don't consciously know what's being advertised: there's some text and some video, but all I'm paying attention to is where the X button might be hiding. Although I think I saw the word "Pogacar", so something might be sneaking in subliminally. My hair *is* tuftier than usual.)

I know people have complained before.
Not sure if being a subscriber or having an ad block prevents it.

I don't have an ad blocker, but do subscribe and I don't see any adverts anymore. Certainly don't have any autoplay videos.

Could just be A/B testing and you're the lucky ones. I get the wretched videos.

They don't actually autoplay (because the auto-play toggle in the browser settings prevents that). It's worse than that; as you scroll beyond them they detach from the page and float so that they remain at the top of the screen, obscuring whatever you're now trying to read. It's almost like the web designer has deliberately set out to piss you off.

In fact I can see no other purpose. The really obnoxious twist is that the cancel button does not materialise until after the video content has downloaded. So whether you're going to watch it or not, you've paid for it in your mobile data. TBH, if you were going to watch the video, you'd have done so before attempting to scroll past it.

That's a pretty small screen you got there. on mine it doesn't take up three quarters of the real estate

I didn't take a whole screenshot, just a clip to illustrate what I wrote in my second paragraph.

I see from your later post that paying subscribers are denied the pleasure and convenience of these floating videos.

It's still ludicrously intrusive though and the close button, when it finally appears, will often trigger a link behind it requiring the whole rigmarole to be started again.

You don't get people to subscribe by deliberately trashing the user experience for non subscribers.

I have a small phone screen, but I don't ever really use my phone for browsing the web, so it doesn't bother me that much.

But out of curiosity, I tried loading the live blog page as if I were new to the site and browsing on 4G. It took a good 3 minutes to finish loading, by the end of the process my phone was really hot and I was presented with this screen, requiring three 'X' close buttons to be pressed to close the floating video, ad at the bottom of the screen and the email sign up dialogue, before any content was browseable.

you don't see them because you're supporting the site by being a subscriber