I hate Captcha systems and find them extremely irritating. It’s not only the act of having to type out the characters on screen, but the fact that deciphering some Captcha systems can be immensely difficult makes me feel less of a human somehow. (Because you know, the whole point of having Captcha systems in place is to weed out the bots.)

Enter Solve Media, a start-up based in New York. Solve has decided that Capcha systems are not annoying enough on their own — they must be supplemented by another major annoyance of the web: online ads.

As Solve sees it, their new Captcha advertisements will not only benefit advertisers by forcing visitors to look at — and comprehend — the ad, but will also rescue visitors from having to distinguish characters that are growing increasingly difficult to decipher. And advertisers are certainly jumping aboard, as AOL, Toyota, GE, and Microsoft have all already signed up.

Personally, I’m not sure which is more annoying: trying to figure out whether a squiggly character is a 7 or a T, or being forced to look at an ad to proceed to my next step in web browsing.

One thing is for certain. The new Captcha advertisements may be evil, but the idea is undeniably brilliant.

Via Gizmodo.