CAPTCH-AD: A New CAPTCHA Form of Advertising?

CAPTCHAs are a necessary evil in a modern world. CAPTCHAs, also known as those-annoying-boxes-with-the-weird-words, are used to prevent evil robot spam attacks.

Well the other days I came across a new, never-before-seen (at least by me) CAPTCHA that could have some pretty huge advertising implications.

Introducing, the CAPTCH-AD!

CAPTCH-AD: The CAPTCHA Advertisement

What’s crazy about the CAPTCH-AD is that you are required to watch (and pay attentionto) the advertisement in order to fulfill the CAPTCHA box. There’s no getting around it – you will read that ad. It’s like when you see advertisements plastered over your tray table on budget airlines; you roll your eyes, groan, cover it with a book or a laptop, but there’s just no avoiding it and the ad demands acknowledgement.

It seems like a pretty brilliant (yet evil) idea, and I expect to be seeing more of them.

CAPTCHAs: Protecting us From Spam and Inspiring Art

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Saying it aloud may make you feel like a beatboxer (say it five times fast).

CAPTCHAs are implemented to protect users from robot spam, but as computers get smarter, they become more convoluted and difficult for even the most human among us. They seem to become increasingly more difficult every year—the squiggly edges become a bit more squiggly, and the blurry parts become a bit more blurred. Often they are nearly impossible to discern, to the point where deciphering the words just becomes a crapshoot.

These silly guess-the-word-boxes are such a common and unsavory aspect of the online experience that they’ve become a part of internet culture through memes and CAPTCHArt—art created based of off the randomly generated words.

Some prime examples of CAPTCHArt:

Whether the newly discovered CAPTCH-ADs will destroy CAPTCHArt as we know it is yet to be discovered.

Have you seen a CAPTCHA advertisement in the wild? What do you think about them as an advertising technique, and how do you feel about them as an internet user?