On the World Wide Web, interstitials are web pages that are displayed before an expected content page, often to display advertisements or confirm the user's age. The concept of interstitial advertising was first launched in 1997 by Typo.net founders Timothy L. Kay and Robert Hoffer, who called it "the first World Wide Web URL spellchecker." Some people take issue with this form of online advertising. Less controversial uses of interstitial pages include introducing another page or site before directing the user to proceed; or alerting the user that the next page requires a login, or has some other requirement which the user should know about before proceeding. Sparingly and prudently used, interstitial pages can avoid confusion and aid usability. Even interstitial advertising may arguably be beneficial in that a well designed system can process a misspelled address in a fraction of the time that it would take for a browser to do so. Rather than receiving a DNS error message and re-entering the desired destination, users can be taken directly to their desired site following the display of the ad.
Meaning of interstitial
In this context, interstitial is used in the sense of “in between”. The interstitial web page sits between a referenced page and the page which references it—hence it is in between two pages. This is distinct from a page which simply links directly to another, in that the interstitial page serves only to provide extra information to a user during the act of navigating from one page to the next.
