Steve, I'm all for the ads and understand their purpose. Ads are surrounding me this very minute as I type, they are on every forum as well as my profile and home. The only difference is, they're no longer moving which is my Only complaint.
I love MedHelp and have endless patience and will always support it, but if at some point, my sollution no longer works, I'll still be here, just not as much :)
Flash is falling out of favor with a lot of advertisers (and users). So that may just be a temporary solution for you.
Plus, if you ad block sites you enjoy, you also hurt their bottom line because many ads are based on page views (like TV - some advertisers often just pay for visibility and not on whether someone clicks through to an ad).
Somewhere there's a happy medium, but (like TV), the advertisers haven't found it. And many people really do like to see the information offered by some advertisers.
Your patience (and support) is appreciated!
Thanks so much for working on this so hard, Emily. I think a small fee ($4 would be better than $6, of course) would be acceptable to a lot of people, however, I've come up with a free way to be at MH and not go into seizures from the ads. I have two browsers now. One for MH without a flash player (no flash player, no ads) and different browser with a flash player I use elsewhere. A tiny hassle, but workable for now.
I can see why the advertisers use the formats they do. They want our attention, but I'll make a bet these advertisers are healthy and can't appreciate the impact of such ads on people suffering from medical issues. The format of the ads have a most undesirable effect and the advertisers would be doing themselves a favor to reformat on such a place as MH. I have clicked on a few ads in the past, but that's when they used to be only blue text.
Good idea, Emily and MH. This idea should somehow be broadcast in a larger way than just on the Suggestion Forum though so all members can see it and give their opinion. I think it's a good option :)
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback. We've passed your comments back to the advertisers but it looks as if a lot more advertisers are using these types of ad formats.
As some of you had mentioned, the reason that we have ads on ours site is to keep MedHelp a free and effective health resource for the millions of people that use MedHelp on a monthly basis. To show those advertisements we work with partners and do not have total control over the format of those advertisements and that is why we are not able to act immediately to handle your concerns.
One option to help address this is to build a system whereby users can pay a few dollars a month ($4-6) and we would not show them any ads when they are logged into their account. If this is something of interest please let us know so we can get a feeling for how many people are interested in this option.
What do you all think?
Thanks!
Emily
I'm sorry, guys.
As the ad industry evolves they try new things and testing these new interactions is the current phase they are in as there are a few ads on our site that work similarly e.g. Levaquin. We have passed the feedback on, but it's a slow process to get the ads changed.
I'll pass your feedback on again.
Emily
Too much movement on the screen in the ads is comparable to strobe lights for migraine sufferers and I'm sure anyone with seizure disorders.
I'm experiencing the same thing, Linda. A calm tolerable couple weeks then yesterday they all returned more active than ever. I stayed off MH for the most part yesterday because of them. Not only is the movement and flashing distracting, it slows my PC waaay down.
Emily...I had reinstalled another flash player at the beginning of the week and thought something had been done about the ads. They were still here but impressively better and more easily tolerated and I saw more text than not, but yesterday, it all started up again. I notice something different too. When jumping from page to page the ads seem to Flash a couple times while trying to "settle" into the usual, flash, scroll etc. The best I can explain it.