Hah, I can just picture #12. <3 Debbie Reynolds.

Yeah, 12 seems to be a running favourite

The difference is that it's an incredibly annoying form of advertising. All advertising is annoying, but there's a fine line between necessary advertising to generate income to provide content and annoying advertising that drives consumers away from that content.

Like those 'Top 10' pages that have every ten items on a separate page to maximise your exposure to banner ads. If I'm casually googling something and I want some information fast (like reviews of top 10 cellphones or something), and I come across such a page I'll simply back out of that site and find that information somewhere else. How Stuff Works straddles that line carefully, providing really interesting content but splitting it over several pages to mine you for ad revenue. Usually, it does it pretty well, but some articles (usually the ones with lists) stray into the 'this is too slow and annoying to be worth reading' category.

Discovery.com is also a pretty bad offender here. I love Mythbusters and I'm really interested in the additional videos and content they have on the Mythbusters website, but am I going to sit through a 30 second advert to watch a 2 minute movie? No. It's too annoying to be worth it.

Of course everyone is going to have their own subjective line of what they consider to be 'too annoying', but everyone will have that line somewhere and finding that balance is incredibly difficult.

If Massassi auto-adlinked every other word in a thread, would you still read Massassi? What if it was every tenth word? What if it was every millionth word?