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AOL Class-Action Suit Over Pop-Up Ads
unigeek writes: "CNN --
Florida judge approves class-action lawsuit against America Online
At issue: 'Pop-up' advertisements.
A Florida judge has approved a class-action, multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the world's largest Internet service provider, America Online, on behalf of hourly subscribers who viewed so-called "pop-up" advertisements." I for one of dreamt of this day. It'll never win 'cuz you can turn them off of course, but it's pretty dang funny.
What I would like to see, is a lawsuit against porn sites who grab the 100 most searched words and put them in their meta tags for search engines to find. I hate when I search for something that I need, and the first 20 pages are porn sites. If I was looking for "cum guzzling sluts," I think that I would have put that in as my search, now wouldn't I?
Eh...
Not only did one of us get hitched,
But now AOl is getting sued!
I'm getting a little fuzzy headed.
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If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
Florida judge approves class-action lawsuit against America Online [snip] It'll never win 'cuz you can turn them off of course, but it's pretty dang funny.
......
Ahh, but the attorney taking the case has also stated the following:
"That's a new thing," he said. "Our lawsuit period goes back to 1994. That wasn't the case for the five-year period we're covering."
So there's hope yet
Here's a link to a detailed Irish Times article
Pete C
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Yes!
Now all we need is a rewritten and updated version of Dante's Inferno, and have it approved and endorsed by the pope!
Cower in FEAR, AOL, TELEMARKETERS, MICROSOFT!!!
The telemarketers will be FORCED to sit in a room answering phones all day and POLITELY LISTEN to mind-numbingly BORING advertisements!!!
Top AOL employees will have to DOWNLOAD programs to UPDATE their pitiful computers... only to have AOL CRASH on them, and give them BUSY signals!!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I believe that this isn't in reference to pop-up ads that one sees while "web-surfing", but to ads that come up when an AOL user logs on, after "6. Connecting to America OnLine. 7. Verifying Password" and before the AOL windows that let users check mail, go to different "channels", access AOL's browser, et cetera appear. Basically, while these ads are on the screen, you can't do anything except either follow them or click "No, thanks." It's not quite as simple as disabling Javascript in Netscape or MSIE. (Although I doubt a lot of AOL users could handle that easily... ah, well.)
There is *no* obvious, or even semi-obvious, way to turn off the pop-up ads -- most people I know who use AOL just endure and ignore. Granted, each release of AOL gets less and less intuitive to use (2.5 was fairly straight-forward, 3.0 slightly less so, 4.0 I never did figure out how to find the things I used (basics like FTP), and now that 5.0's appeared I've lost any semblance of hope at getting anything done *that* way on my mother's computer.)
However, I have around 200 AOL cds in the back of my car, in display boxes. This makes me happy.
Tramont said the practice amounts to charging twice for the same product. "AOL gets money from advertisers, then money from subscribers, so they're making double on the same time," he said.
I hate to bust this wonderful anti-AOL bubble, but newspapers have been doing this for years. Same with Cable TV, if I have to watch commercials while watching that CNN i pay $50/month to watch, they are wasting my time. If you say pop-ups are worse because you have to actually do something proactive to make them go away, well it's the same as a whole page ad, where you have to turn the page.
I'm not saying this class action lawsuit will not result in victory for the class, but if it does, someone in Florida really ought to try suing a newspaper on this same precedent.
-Alison
I have nothing against banner ads. They used to pay my salary. As long as they're non-intrusive and relevant to the audience of the site, I think they're great.
But then you look at things like a recent levis campaign. Every time you went to the home page of a site you got to be the proud downloader of between 80 and 100k of flash video for a popup levis ad. And you'd be sitting reading something, and it pops up right over what you're reading. Now this is intrusive and is starting to interfere with my browsing experience.
What's even worse is the Compaq non-stop campaign. My natural reaction to a popup ad is to click the x in the corner and kill it. The idea behind the compaq ad, was Compaq are non-stoppable. So they made their ad KEEP coming back up about 4 or 5 times. This is just plain annoying and adds stress and extra mouse movement to my already ruined wrists and my already stressed life. I don't need this.
So I guess, yeah, lawsuits are dumb, but as what happened with the Prof vs Demon where they settled, maybe this will scare the hell out of advertisers and sites that use this kind of advertising, and we'll all have a more pleasant browse experience.
/* Wayne Pascoe
First off, this lawsuit goes back to 1994, long before popup ads could be turned off.
Secondly, the ability to turn the ads off isn't particularly simple to find(remember, this is a service that built its success on knowing exactly how to make things simple to find; anything that wasn't simple within AOL was made intentionally not simple.
Finally, and this is important, the ads would come back on their own. In security, we make things a pain in the ass when we want to convince the users to use a more secure alternative(i.e. ssh-agent and RSA keys vs. passwords at every prompt). For AOL, it's "Watch the ads, and you won't have to keep turning them off."
They'll settle out of court; they really don't want their advertising dirty laundry getting aired. Remember, this is the company that got UCITA in their state before anyone else.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
All that you say just suggests that AOL don't provide a very good value service. That's not a reason to sue them.
The best thing you can do if you don't like it is to change ISP and tell AOL why you changed. If enough people care about this issue, they will do the same and AOL will be forced to act.
In the end, all they are doing is offering a service (which includes pop up ads) and they are offering it at a price. You get to choose whether the service as a whole is better or worse value than competing services.
This really is a minor issue which can and will be easily solved by the free market as long as people do something constructive about it (such as changing ISP if they are not happy) rather than trying to restrict the freedoms ISPs Just because YOU don't like what they offer doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to offer it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
What's really funny about it is that the pr0n ads on warez sites are for pay sites. Yeah! Like I'm not going to pay for software but I will pay for porn.
kwsNI
I used to think it was keyword spamming too (and maybe it is to some extent). Then I started using the new version of analog which gives me a report of the search terms which users use to arrive at my site. Here's one day's results:
;)
reqs: search term
----: -----------
14: quake 3 stuff
5: scanterm
3: human copulation pictures
2: wordlist.txt
2: cannibalism snuff
2: genital jewelry
1: akasha
1: aluminize
1: quake 3 levels
1: emazing
1: antigravity backpack borscht
1: barmy badger backpackers
1: ssachs
1: axolotl adaptions
1: directory listing mp3
1: aerometer
1: wordlist barons
1: argumentive analysis of advertisements
1: isthmus algorithm
1: spacebar.org
51: [not listed: 51 search terms]
"barmy badger backpackers"?? Fully 75% of these searches have NOTHING to do with my site, and I do not keyword spam in any way.
Maybe, when search engines get bored or tired, they just return more or less random results?