Washington, Dec 10 (IANS): Poorly designed advertisements from companies with a questionable reputation may not only annoy visitors to your web page, they can also hurt your business in the long-run, says a study involving an Indian-origin researcher.

Any short-term revenue brought in by annoying advertisements is likely to be outweighed by the negative long-term effects, the findings showed.

"The practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns, as people are more likely to abandon sites on which they are present," said one of the study authors Siddharth Suri from Microsoft Research.

Study participants were asked to perform online tasks, some of which exposed participants to web pages with annoying advertisements.

An ad's "annoyingness" was determined by factors such as whether it had too much animation, was poorly designed, or had been placed by a company having a questionable reputation.

The study found that participants were far less willing to remain on a web page if it contained an annoying advertisement.

Participants also did not remember the content very well on pages that contained annoying advertisements.

The findings appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research.