I was recently asked to add a ticker (with daily updates) to one of our HTML-based dashboards. (A ticker would be text scrolling through the screen. In the past you could achieve something like that with the marquee tag in HTML.)
I personally don't like tickers and think they are a thing of the last century, but that's not really a good argument. There have to be better arguments though, because none of the websites I frequently visit use tickers anymore.
Do you now better arguments against the usage of tickers?
Answer
Tickers are like carousels, but worse.
Since you're asking for disadvantages, tickers are an antipattern because:
The content is unpredictable for users. Users don't know how large the content is, what order it appears in, where it starts or ends, and how long it will take to read all of it.
It either scrolls too slow or too fast. If a reader is focused on reading the ticker, she will read it faster than it scrolls, which makes for a frustrating experience. On the other hand, if the scroll speed is increased, then users not focused on the ticker will find it difficult to focus on the content because it's moving too quickly.
It's hard to read moving text. It's well studied that people don't read smoothly, but rather read words in chunks. Having those words move makes for a difficult reading experience (users spend disproportionate effort reading the moving letters, which reduces capacity for understanding the content).
It's visually distracting. Moving elements on a page will automatically grab user attention. In the case of a ticker, the content is usually supposed to be peripheral to the main content on a page, but the animation causes it to be distracting to the main content.
Finally, the empirics support your point of view. There are very good reasons why tickers are not used on the vast majority of websites today!
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