Oversized ads are getting on my nerves...

I don't know if this is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of media advertising or not, but about ten times this week alone I've already ran into annoying advertisements preventing me from reading my news at online sites.

These "in your face" ads first started to bother me while I was at work, where I am constantly clicking on media sites. I work at washingtonpost.com as an intern in their politics section every morning and one of my responsibilities is to update the Web site either by text linking, writing for their campaign 2006 page, or just reading the news. But every time I clicked on a link an annoying full screen ad would pop up and not let me close it until it finished flashing or spinning or whatever it was doing.

Even my boss was annoyed while he was clicking away and said to me, "I guess they pay the bills." And that's very true - advertisers do want to be in your face to get your attention and have the ability to do so and a good amount of exposure on news sites where you have a specific demographic checking in each day, but I'm still not sold on if this is a good idea or not. At least in print, or even online before they started popping up in my face, I had the choice of whether or not I wanted to look at an ad and I was able to let things I was interested in looking at catch my eye instead of having it thrust in front of me.

And at first I just thought it was washingtonpost.com that was letting their advertising take over their site, but then the same thing happened to me again later that afternoon when I was browsing around USAToday.com. A large ad popped up with a bullfrog on a lily pad and I don't even know it was for, but I knew that I wasn't interested.

I don't know if it's just me, but these ads don't do anything for me. They don't make me want to sign up for a Citibank credit card or purchase a new ipod. They are more an annoyance than an eye catcher and I can't wait to click and close them out.

But one interesting thing that comes to mind when I see these ads is last class when we went to archive.org and looked at the way back machine to see newspaper sites from the '90s or even early 2000s when ads were nothing more than immobile, boring looking boxes on the screen. While it's interesting to see how far media advertising has come - from when they were small icons on the 1998 Los Angeles Times Web site to today when they are multimedia, full-colored, large ads, it makes me wonder if advertising on media Web sites has gone too far? Are our news sites primarily news sources or are they just about the ads? What do you think...