Yikes! The Banner, plus the page background, plus three ads on the News Home Page is a little too much, but the Flash ad that has to be dismissed before being able to interact with the page is egregious. I hope this is just a test of capabilities and not something you are really going to start doing.

Well, these campaigns are really where the best money is for us and this is what keeps the site in the air. We have become quite famous in the last two years and our traffic doubled. It’s a big success and we like that of course, but the bills for bandwidth and storage went up accordingly so we need to be a bit more aggressive in our use of advertising. But yes, campaigns like these are also a test to see what works, what is plausible, what is acceptable and what is outright damned annoying.
 
By the way, on paper that Flash-advert ought to bother you just once but I know that in practice the limiting doesn’t always seem to work. Rest assured that this is just for a few days and that we are debating just how far we should (NOT) take advertising.

Yeah, I sorta want to take back (most of) what I said because I know you guys have, and deserve, to do what ya gotta do. I really don’t mind any of it (because I can ignore it or laugh at it) except for the pop up that prevents me from interacting with the site until I dismiss it ... and it did hit me every time (probably because I block cookies and Flash). Pop up ads totally suck. Don’t be evil. That’s just my opinion.

We try to never do pop-ups, especially ones that tend to misbehave (like this one does on occasion). This is a big exception and though I’m not privy to the financial side of our site but I sure do hope we got a boatload of money for it, seeing as how omnipresent the thing is.
 
And don’t worry about commenting to us on things that you don’t like. Feedback like this is always useful, honest.