An advertisement went live on Wired.com last night that obscured much of the site and gave readers no way to remove it for close to 8 hours. The ad was a so-called interstitial, admittedly one of the more invasive styles of online advertising, even when executed properly. In this case it was not, and for that we apologize.
Wired News has an ad review process to prevent things like this from happening, but it failed us in this case. We are examining what went wrong to ensure it does not happen twice. In the meantime, we are suspending all interstitial ads from the site until further notice.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in to complain. On the one hand it's daunting to see hundreds of emails ripping us for an embarrassing blunder. On the other, it shows how much you care about the site. We don't intend to test your loyalty again.
Sincerely,
Evan HansenEditor in Chief, Wired News
A nice little apology. Signed by the guy in charge. He explains the error, promises to make sure it doesn't happen again, takes the immediate step of suspending all interstitial ads until they figure out what went wrong, apologizes and thanks everyone who wrote to complain. Well done.
But read that first paragraph again, where Evan admits that interstitial ads are annoying even when they don't take over the whole site. Wired isn't apologizing for annoying readers with interstitials — just for annoying readers more than usual in this instance.DATE OF APOLOGY: June 12, 2007
APOLOGIZER: Evan Hansen, Editor-in-chief, Wired News
APOLGIZEE: Wired.com readers
FOR: Ad gone bad
Comments