I’ve seen this guy a few times, and it irks me each and every time, and I’ll tell you why.
When the ad loads, it uses Javascript to grab your cursor and put it into the first field in the form. This has two negative effects (one of which I can’t believe the hosting sites put up with):
- It means I can’t use the keyboard to navigate the page — to scroll down, I most often use the space bar to scroll a page at a time, but since the ad has put the cursor in a text field, I’m just entering spaces into it, and it’s quite disorienting when my browser stops behaving the way I expect it to.
- If the ad is part of the way down the page, when the focus is captured, the page scrolls with it. This happens on MSNBC articles — the page automatically scrolls to the point of the ad (since that’s where the focus is), so I have to scroll back up to see the headline and the first few paragraphs.