MoCA
Greetings from lovely LA! I just came back from a great party at the Museum of Contemporary Art's in Los Angeles. It was a great party for my dear friends David and ‘Posh’ Beckham put on by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I hadn’t met Tom and Katie before last night, but they sure were nice. Beck and I got to know each other in Madrid during his time playing futbol in Spain. Our homes were next to each other in Madrid, and his kids enjoyed playing with all the techno gadgets at my house while we cooked out for many a night. I was honored when he invited me to the gala and simply had to attend.

Never having been to such a celebrity event, I was roaming the web to see if I made it into any of the pictures. As I surfed from news site to news site looking for pictures, two things struck me: one, nobody thought I was suitable for the red carpet shots and two, some of these news sites are subjecting their audience to a mind numbing assortment of annoying banner ads. It was those ads, and not the quality of the news that determined my interest in browsing the news site.
Everyone but me!
News sites need to generate revenue from the web to survive, especially as readers of news move from paying for print to surfing for free. But loading these sites up with low budget ads announcing that you are the 1,000,000 visitor can do more harm than good. As viewers are faced with pop-ups, pop-unders and other annoyances, viewers will choose to get their news from other sites rather than be subjected to annoyances.

News sites should take a look at their advertising partners to decide if these partners are helping or hurting the news site’s image.