Native ads on Mumsnet Talk topics

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,
I wanted to give you a heads up about some Native Ads we're introducing on Talk (images attached). They will appear on Talk topic home pages and will only appear once per page. We have tested them on users - we tested them in threads and on Talk topics and the feedback was that users weren't so keen on seeing them within a thread but didn't mind them on the topic pages, so that's where we're putting them. Hopefully you won't find them intrusive and they may even be interesting/useful sometimes. Obviously we already have a similar type of thing with our in-house inline ads on Talk theads, so hopefully it won't be too much of a shock/ imposition. Please do let us know your thoughts and as ever, if there are any advertisers/ partners you'd actively like us to seek out then please do let us know.

I hate them. Right in the middle of the bloody thread. They are constantly covering a thread I want to see. I'll see something like "AIBU that my..." then it reloads and there's an advert there instead.
Ironically, I had to reload the site stuff page three times to get this thread to show up, and twice I ended up on the British Gas website by mistake. It makes me much less likely to buy from that company and twice yesterday I came off of mumsnet in my frustration and did something more productive!

Really intrusive and really annoying.

Can I also take this opportunity to whinge about the adverts at the top that widen once the page has 99% loaded. So you click a link at the top just as the ad widens and you end up getting dragged off to some random other site (today it's nationwide)

Having installed Ad Block Plus I'm horrified at the amount of ads it's blocking - 13 on this page!

I just thought a thread had been deleted from a topic because it was no longer appearing on the discussion list.

It hadn't been deleted, its place on the list was just being taken by an ad instead - you could see it being replaced as the page, then the ad loaded. It's not like the picture above where the ad text interferes with the thread title, the thread was just gone. Once someone posted on it, it reappeared back at the top of the topic list, and presumably some other thread disappeared with the ad taking its place.

Yes it was taking over two threads. The point I was making was to show it covering the second. You can't actually take a screen shot of it covering one thread as the ad appears so fast over it.

Hi all,
Thanks so much for the feedback - we're going to take this format down for now and talk to the providers about solutions to some of the issues raised. I tend to agree that being taken to an external site isn't ideal (and actually not what happens in FB model - which I know isn't the be all and end all but they have managed to find an format that doesn't seem to annoy users so much, so that's why we were using them as a template). We also agree that on mobile, they are too large so we possibly need to lose the picture. And we need to make it clearer where the the ad starts and finishes to avoid erroneous clicking. So we'll withdraw them while we work on all those issues. Sorry for any headaches - please consider unblocking your adblockers!

@CarrotVan

Having installed Ad Block Plus I'm horrified at the amount of ads it's blocking - 13 on this page!

There's no way we have 13 ads on a page - 2 (or three if you include this format) is standard - so it must be identifying other scripts as ads... thanks for the heads up, will talk to Tech team about that.

@BeyondReasonablyDoubts

Can I also take this opportunity to whinge about the adverts at the top that widen once the page has 99% loaded. So you click a link at the top just as the ad widens and you end up getting dragged off to some random other site (today it's nationwide)

hi - i think this is about speed of connection - ads taking a while to download - we tend to load the content first then the ads so users don't have to wait, but I'll definitely look into it to see if there's anything to be done. thanks for raising.

@noblegiraffe

I just thought a thread had been deleted from a topic because it was no longer appearing on the discussion list.

It hadn't been deleted, its place on the list was just being taken by an ad instead - you could see it being replaced as the page, then the ad loaded. It's not like the picture above where the ad text interferes with the thread title, the thread was just gone. Once someone posted on it, it reappeared back at the top of the topic list, and presumably some other thread disappeared with the ad taking its place.

This is certainly not intentional - ads are meant to slot in not replace. We will check that out, thanks.