That's interesting. In Firefox with the Adblock extension the wallpaper ad doesn't show up. Lets me avoid this horror altogether!

In fairness, this treatment is on boston.com today, as well. It's probably on other news sites.

Huh?

Looks like every other website to me.

BTW -- when will the MSM start charging for its online freebies?

The content free-ride is slowing down.

I don't get it. Newspapers have been filled with ugly ads since time began. Why should the internet be any different?

I saw today McClatchy sold the STrib. I know it is unreleated to the ad issue, but it is something worth talking about.

As of the ad online, who cares, it's not our core product.

The sad state in Minneapolis is management is too concerned about avdertising and not concerned enough about the product, at least that is what is evident by the story about the sale on the STrib's Web site.

We are a NEWSpaper, after all. Save you ad BS for the TMC.

I've seen this type of advertising on several newspaper Web sites since early this year. I first noticed something similar on Sacbee.com, the Web site of the Sacramento Bee.

Sacbee.com has a great design (lots of good markup behind the scenes), but this type of ad is very hard to use without offending the senses.

There has got to be a better way of selling online advertising that works with the design of the page. Yet another reason for users to grab the RSS feed I suppose!

Maybe this is why the paper was just sold off by McClatchy... :)

i live in minneapolis and can tell you - this is really horrible every time i visit the formerly nice startribune.com whoever came up with this should be hung by their toes.

there are ways to do this that are actually nice from a design standpoint

Holy I knows me some ugly Web site showdown!

http://www.zefrank.com/thewiki/I_knows_me_some_ugly_myspace_showdown

Agreed. From this screengrab it looks perfectly normal, but it's how the image loads that's annoying: slowly, with the full-page wallpaper coming up first, then the news following. Here in Mpls, we've been griping about it for quite some time. Here's a rundown of what people have been saying.

This particular background wallpaper ad is not nearly as horrendous as some of the other recent ads. Sometimes they have the blaring yellow diagonal and overly pixelated logo of a local car dealership. For such an above-average daily paper's website it is really a mystery to me why they wouldn't find a better way to do this (or at least have more judgement as to which ads are accepted).

Thank you for your website :-)
I made with photoshop backgrounds for youtube, myspace and even more
my backgrounds:http://tinyurl.com/5cy5cq
Hope you had a good day and thank you again!