Advertisements in the brave new world of Swipeville

We've seen the different types of ads in Webland: banner ads, side-bar ads, in-text ads, pop-up ads, pop-under ads... all of the types.

My favorite are the "your page is loading" ads which block the (completely loaded, who do you think you are kidding) content page. I like them because, with multi-tab browsers, I can view a different page while the ad-covered page is "loading" while the advertisement times out. With multiple tabs, I can avoid the delay and essentially skip the advertisement.

This all changes in the world of phones and tablets. (I call this new world "Swipeville".) Classic desktop browsers gave us tabbed windows; the new platforms do not. The phone and tablet browsers have one window and one "tab", much like the early desktop browsers.

In this world, we cannot escape advertisements by using multiple tabs. Nor can we look at another window (such as another application) while our page "loads". Since apps own the entire screen, they are either running or not -- switching to another app means that the browser stops, and switching back re-runs the page load/draw operation.

Which means that advertisements will be less avoidable, and therefore (possibly) more effective.

Or they may be less effective; the psychology of cell phone ads is, I think, poorly understood. Regardless of effectiveness, we will be seeing more of them.