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Quite frankly I *hate* this kind of distraction and drain on my bandwidth. My surfing PC is a rather aged 400MHz Pentium-powered box that copes quite well with regular web content but struggles to deal with video or heavily animated Flash content. What's worse, my "broadband" connection continues to struggle along at about 230Kbps despite supposedly being "cheaper, faster" so anything that requires lots of bits and lots of MIPs causes things to grind to a halt here.

It was with great disappointment therefore, that I saw the headlines on today's wires proclaiming that Google was to start distributing these evil video ads.

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Up until now, Google has been a good Net citizen, keeping its ads small, non-intrusive and well targeted. How could it be therefore, that the same "good-guy" company was preparing to assault our senses with nasty video ads that could appear on otherwise useful and efficient pages?

Well reading a little deeper I see that they've tempered this decision with just a little commonsense.

Instead of just unleashing a torrent of multi-media bits onto your browser screen, Google's video will require you to click on a static image in order to play the ad.

This may (or may not) be a reasonable compromise.

The reason we can't be sure yet is because it's unclear whether that static image is just a nice little GIF/JPEG which is all your browser need download, or whether it's the first-frame of a video that may still be downloading in the background -- chewing into your valuable DSL data-cap.

And what if you're on dial-up?

Will those who still can't (or won't) get broadband find their systems bogged to a total stop while some video player and/or stream loads up in the background -- even though they haven't clicked on the image?

I've already predicted that video is the mainstream future of the Net -- I just hope that we don't end up with a huge percentage of our monthly data-cap being consumed by crappy video-ads that we neither need nor want.

Of course the smarter web-surfers amongst us will almost certainly start installing video ad-blockers to deal with this nasty stuff, but just as the vast majority of "ma and pa Net users" probably don't even realise that they can block those nasty Flash ads, I suspect most people will just grin and bear it in ignorance of the freedom they could enjoy.

And let's not forget those poor folks who are on Telecom's "cheap" broadband package and have to live with a meagre 200MB data-cap. If they hit a few websites with these ridiculous video ads, they could soon find themselves out of pocket to the tune of 2c per extra megabyte consumed. How fair is it that these people end up actually *paying* extra to receive irritating ads they didn't ask for and don't want?

I think we'll have to keep an eagle-eye on the state of online advertising and let website operators and advertisers know that video is *not* a good ad medium for the web.

Or have I got this wrong?

Maybe some folks actually enjoy having their browsing interrupted by a pop-up video ad that takes over a fair percentage of the browser screen and also blares out a highly compressed audio track? (yes, I've found sites where this is the method used).

Have your say on the desirability of video advertisements on the Web in Aardvark's forums.

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