Online adverts "very intrusive" says Microsoft

Posted by Julian Evans on June 7, 2006 at 2:42 PM

Online advertizing is "very intrusive", according to Bill Hill, director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft. Hill, dressed in a kilt and speaking at a Q&A session of the 13th annual World Editors Forum in Moscow, said: "I feel very strongly about this. Adverts are very intrusive because they move, and that triggers a movement response in humans. It's far less intrusive in print. I think a method needs to be developed whereby the multi-media moving version of an advert only appears if you click on it."

Hill was presenting a new innovation by Microsoft, working in partnership with the New York Times, called the Times Reader. It is an application that can be installed on your laptop or other computer devices, which gives the NYT fully readable online and offline, and which is updated automatically by an XML feed.

Microsoft have tried to create an online reading experience comparable in quality to the print experience. For example, you can click easily to different sections, you can annotate text, you can copy text instantly to blogs, and articles and adverts format to fit the space of different screen-sizes. All this can be navigated offline, so the paper could be read by commuters using handheld devices.

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