Seesmic, an app on Android that aggregates your activity from social networks, has started to play around with ads on their FREE app. I started seeing them at the top. I didn’t mind them at first because they gotta make money, and I understand that.
Lately, I’ve been seeing the ads at the bottom of the screen, which is good. It doesn’t distract and collide with the top navigation. The problem I have with them lately is that the ads are very deceptive. They’re designed to look like navigational elements of the app, like a notification message that alerting you of new messages. I’m sure the click-thru rates on these are pretty high, but the conversion rates are probably really low.
I clicked on one of them unknowingly and got forwarded to a webpage. I think they should ban these kind of ads, but I also understand that they have to pay their employees. Hopefully, they’ll get more advertisers and can eventually not accept these of kind of ad buys.
Seesmic is a handy app to keep track of your social networks. I use it to interface with my various Facebook and Twitter accounts. I don’t mind ads, I just don’t like ones that look like it’s part of the app.
