Soccer / Sports Extra / ireland.com

Ignore the content, for the moment. (Oh, please. You think I"m a soccer devotee? Let's get real, shall we?) Take a look at the background.

As advertising goes, I suppose it's considerably less annoying than the interstitials like Salon has, or those incredibly annoying Shockwave/Java "prestitial" ads that have bloomed like kudzu all over the web, or the pop-ups-and-unders.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that advertisers will stick with an ad format that's not up there, in your face. It isn't that hard to simply ignore it, or even just miss it altogether. (That said, I would imagine that the zippy little ad at the top of the page makes up somewhat for the subtlety of the background.)