I understand your position, but I'd also like to argue that we at least _tried_ to make the ad be as easy to get rid of as possible, with page loading into the background, being visible there and "Continue to AfterDawn" link closing the Verizon ad immediately when clicked. After all, we're in this slightly annoying "big, but not huge" category of sites that get direct U.S. ad proposals quite rarely and rather take them than turn the advertisers away (hoping that if the experience is smooth for them, they'd consider our site also in the future for their campaigns -> thus, having better targeted and higher value ads in future).

But yep, most likely, if we get similar deals in the future, we'll exclude our logged-in users from those campaigns (exactly what we do already for variety of ads, such as in-text ads on forums).

Anyway, thanks for the feedback -- and the campaign is a one-day campaign, so it wont bug you tomorrow, if you wish to reconsider your position on coming back to our site or not :-)

Originally posted by davexnet:

---

I've got flashblock and noscript running in FF, so all I see is
an empty screen and some text at the top telling me I can "continue to afterdawn".

I must admint, the blank screen is almost as obtrusive than seeing the ad.

---

Which is why, I suggest you whitelist AfterDawn for your blocks :-) We, unlike many major websites, _try_ to keep the number of ads in minimum -- and don't exactly bathe in cash, but instead, try to use every single nickel we get, to develop our site further (be it from technical perspective or by hiring more writers).

As funny as it is, I said to DarkJello yesterday that we get directly-sold-to-our-site campaign extremely rarely -- and on the very next day (today) we got HP's welcome screen/gateway ad booked, after running the Verizon yesterday. Patience guys, patience, we'll implement the "not shown for logged in users" shortly :-) Btw. those ads are shown only once every 24hrs, if you have your cookies enabled.