Bride of Clippy

Prepare to be annoyed.

Go here or here or here and move your mouse toward the upper right corner just as anyone naturally would to begin scrolling down the page. Suddenly, the page you were looking at disappears, replaced with “[Cumulus]* Real Time Weather” (as opposed to, I guess, weather with lots of flashbacks and nonlinear narrative). And there, in the center right of your screen, you will see what may be the least-welcome word to anyone surfing the Web: “buffering.”

This intrusive forecast is presided over by “[Cumulus]” the cartoon-cloud mascot described by its creators as “fun and appealing.” It’s possible that it could be fun and appealing in some other context, but not here, when it’s invading your browser unbidden and uninvited. In the abstract, the cloud is probably cuter and more appealing than Microsoft’s infamously unwelcome cartoon paper clip “assistant,” but Clippy’s appearance was always irrelevant. It was universally despised because it was intrusive — the software equivalent of the airline passenger who interrupts your reading to ask, “Whatcha reading?”

If Clippy had come equipped with a convenient on/off switch, or if it had only spoken when spoken to, then it might have come to be regarded as a hokey-but-whimsical, useful feature of MS Office. But as it was, Clippy’s inevitable, seemingly unstoppable intrusions came to be regarded as not merely annoying, but evil. (After all, even vampires can’t enter your home unless they’re invited.)

The insidious feature to this weather ambush is how easy it is to trigger unintentionally. You do not have to click on it to cause it to take over your screen, all you need do is scroll your mouse over (or, seemingly, near) it and you’re stuck — buffering, buffering, buffering — until you can locate the close button and get back to whatever it was you were trying to do.

This feature is interesting to anyone who’s hosted Google Ads or a similar service on their site. Google is vigilantly concerned about click fraud, and the gods of Google are swift and unmerciful in their punishment of anyone found to be guilty of it. If you were to reconfigure the Google ads on your site so that they were triggered by [Cumulus’] rollover mechanism, rather than from the more deliberate “click,” the traffic for these advertisers and thus, initially, your ad revenue, would increase dramatically due to the stream of accidental rollovers. Your newfound wealth would be short-lived, however, as Google would soon deem you guilty of click fraud, revoking your ad-hosting privileges and banishing your site from search results. Google regards this kind of accidental/ambush traffic as a form of fraud perpetrated against its advertisers.

For [Cumulus], this is a feature, not a bug. The widget’s site says as much, explicitly, boasting to potential advertisers that “It’s a roadblock.”

Well, yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a roadblock thrown across the path of anyone visiting the site hosting it. These are, as you can see from the examples above, primarily news sites. Consider for a moment the journalistic outlook that might allow one to celebrate tossing “roadblocks” between readers and the information they are seeking.

Or consider the perspective of potential visitors to such a site. I’ll let Bugmaster take it from here, with a comment lifted from an earlier post:

If you make your site annoying for your readers to visit, they’ll do one of two things:

• Write a Greasemonkey script to fix it, or

• Stop visiting your site

A script costs them a miniscule fraction of what you’ve spent on developing your latest online-push, dynamic advertisement paradigm solution, and it almost completely negates it — it’s not as effective in this respect as not visiting your site ever again, but it’s close.

So, online publications: maybe you’d like to … I don’t know … stop wasting money on driving away your readership? Just a thought.

The frustrating thing about [Cumulus] is that it could be a useful feature — something that readers might choose to click on if they were given the choice of clicking on it. But by making it, instead, a “roadblock” prone to accidental triggering, its creators have turned a potential asset into a liability.

* Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. In this case, me.