Permanent links

Daily links
  • BBC's World Forum: Water
    • BBC's Conservation now: Global Top Ten
  • Asia quake disaster
  • BBC Drama: Pride and Prejudice
  • Caltech Tsunami Relief Effort
  • Tsunami relief efforts weblog
  • The Wondering Minstrels
  • Today in Literature
  • the Literary Saloon
  • Double-Tongued Word Wrester
  • Lonely Planet
  • Calvinball: Règle du jeu
  • Poems of the fantastic and macabre
  • The Republic of Pemberley
  • Caltech/Pasadena vs. UIUC/Urbana
  • Chronology of the Second World War
  • BBC Radio 3
  • del.icio.us
  • Wikipedia
  • Technorati tags
  • Google Holiday Logos
  • Sangeetham
  • Miscellaneous writings
  • The Nostalgic Eighties
  • Movies watched
  • (Blogger version)
  • Journal archives
  • Journal permanent links
  • Main page

    • Journal sitefeed RSS 1.0 Entries

    Movies sitefeed
    Atom Entries

    del.icio.us sitefeed
    RSS

    8 March 2006

    A letter to the editor

    Hi,

    I used to be a regular reader of the online edition of The Hindu, religiously making sure to read the edition as soon as it came online at about 12pm PST every day. The Hindu was even on my daily bookmarks list. All this was until a few weeks ago. Now, I no longer regularly visit the main page -- all this because of your irritating pop-under advertising policy.

    It does not make any business sense to put advertisements that annoy and anger your readers, because they are simply going to avoid visiting your site like I have. I am all for advertisements as part of the content, which you already provide in terms of keyword-based advertising on a sidebar to the right of the news material -- this is unintrusive, yet prominent and even effective in that readers are made aware of business propositions and online vendors selling items that may be related to the content they are currently browsing. This is the future of online advertising, as vindicated by what a share of Google costs on Wall Street nowadays.

    However, to succumb also to crass and obnoxious pop-ups and pop-unders advertising online casinos and for-a-good-time chat rooms suggests short-sighted strategising and opportunistic money-grubbing. For all your vaunted efforts to bring transparency and integrity by going the way of the Guardian and hiring a Reader's Editor, I would rather you cleaned up your online content, did not scare away your international readership and stayed on the level with us. I am nearly tempted to say that such underhanded subterfuge could only be the doing of your tabloidal counterparts, such as the Times of India and the Hindustan Times but in light of falling standards in your own broadsheet ethos I will demur from such commentary.

    You might imagine that such shellacking is unwarranted for so harmless and innocuous a transgression as Flash pop-unders for American Express credit cards, but for someone like me who sets great store by Hindu's commitment to upholding high standards and who has grown up with Britannia Marie biscuits, piping hot cardamom tea and a crisp edition of The Hindu this is as grave a folly as any other.

    I fervently hope that you will take heed of my plea and do away with those nasty little devils. It serves to bear in mind that simplicity goes a long way towards a platform to make yourself heard, read and felt -- look again at Google, or much closer home to your purported role model in newspapers, the Guardian.

    Regards.




  • December 2004 - March 2005
  • October 2004 - November 2004
  • July 2004 - September 2004
  • May 2004 - June 2004
  • April 2004
  • January 2004 - March 2004
  • October 2003 - January 2004
  • July 2003 - October 2003
  • May 2003 - June 2003
  • April 2003
  • January 2003 - April 2003
  • 2002




    • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.