Slashdot Mirror
Pop Up Advertising Continues to Suck
djchristensen sent us a link to a yahoo article detailing those obnoxious pop up ads from souless marketroids whose mothers don't love them any more. I own a ton of X10 stuff, but I'll never purchase another item from them. And thank god that the modern web browsers have helpful options like 'disable window.open for this domain' rendering this sort of torture harmless.
After getting sick of some popup ads, I was pointed at The Internet Junkbuster , which, as the name implies, gets rid of the junk. Completely. I haven't seen an ad since I installed it. It's free, it's GPL'd, it does the job, and it's easy to install. What more could you ask for?
--
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Actually you should purchase from smarthome.com they give you the products without the X10 sticker over the real name. (and the home automation products that are X-10 (the protocol not the company, they are not related in any way) are actually superior quality from leviton instead of the crap sold at X10)
X10 is a clearinghouse for crap.. they get products after the manufacturer has decided to offload them or has switched models.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Of course, Media Metrix is treating every ad display as a page view, which really makes the statistics misleading.
bp
This was actually suggested by someone on Kuro5hin, but I think it's a good idea. The idea of paying for a web site with no ads doesn't usually generate much support, unfortunately. I myself am guilty of not donating money to sites I frequent. The idea suggested was to use something similar to MS's passport site.
Why can't five or six different web sites get together that have common characteristics and charge one rate to access content on all these sites? I would gladly pay one overall bill to access five of my favorite sites rather than having to pay each one less. Say Slashdot gets X% of the total, Kuro5hin gets a slice, bluesnews, etc. Then those who do pay get the sites with no ads plus one general login account for all sites.
Just a thought.
-Frijoles-
A story on how Yahoo's testing pop-under advertising, and it's running on... Yahoo.
That would like it if boycottadobe.com was made with Adobe products...
<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive 5">
Oh, er, i mean...
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
... I'll change my homepage from Sneakemail to PopUp Killer-- for those of us on Win32 who can't run Konquerer.
Acutally, you want to put that in your user.js file, becuase prefs.js will be overwritten when you change your preferences, or when Mozilla feels like it.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
I've clicked on more banner ads from Slashdot and oreilly.com than any other sites I currently visit. These sites cater directly to my demographic -- computer geeks who like toys and like to learn. Delivering such relevant advertising is worth lots of money to advertisers.
Some people don't like to hear this solution, but I truly think it works better than anything else proposed.
USER REGISTRATION
Get web users to reveal some details about themselves. In return, offer them a quality web experience with non-intrusive advertisements that they may truly be interested in! And finally, give them an opportunity to change their profile easily, and allow them to opt-in (NOT OPT-OUT! Big difference) to other types of ads, like e-mails.
Web advertising is supposed to accomplish 3 things:
- Strengthen their brand recognition
- Drive traffic
- Drive Internet sales
These goals cannot be met without targeting the people who may be interested in your product/service!
If someone has an ad for a new Asus P4 motherboard with SDRAM support or a special deal on that new Acura RSX Type-S, damnit I WANT TO SEE IT! However, I DO NOT want to see ads for baby diapers or Retirement Monthly.
Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Enable JavaScript for Navigator = NO
There, no more nasty pop-up ads (for Netscape/Mozilla) atleast.
Bite me x10.
Not to mention that pop-overs can be closed as they are loading. Pop-unders require much more work. I think that's really why they were invented.
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
Mozilla does this. In fact, it does it better than Konqueror (though there's no ui for it, yet).
2. View the Web in anti-aliased fonts.
I've found anti-aliased fonts to be over-rated. Crappy fonts still look crappy and good fonts don't really need anti-aliased.
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
Mozilla has been doing this for quite some time, now.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
I enjoy browsing the web more with Mozilla than with Konqueror, but YMMV.
This looks cool, but I'd like to have more granular control over javascript opening windows. In particular, I'd like to only dissallow Window.open calls when they are hooked up to BODY's event handlers (mainly, ONLOAD, and ONUNLOAD, which are the main one's used to trigger those damn popups).
---
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Not really, no. Taco doesn't have to worry about paying the bills, because VA Linux does it for him. If you check, VA Linux also constantly loses massive amounts of money, at least some of which must be due to the massive amount of bandwitdth used by the not-profitable OSDN and Slashdot.org.
I however, have worked with numerous small web sites that have had a hard time paying the bills, and pop-up ads pay far better than any other time of advertising (Excluding hard core porn ads.).
Quick! Name a company that manufactures small web cams!
Either you said "X10" or you thought "X10" and then tried to quickly come up with another company name because you hate X10's ads so much.
As the token slashdot reader who works in marketing (Technical Marketing to be precise, but the sleeze travels by osmosis), I want to weigh in here.
The point of advertising is name recognition, rather that to directly influence sales. That's the reason why it's so hard to quantify how successful an ad campaign has been: generally $x ad dollars does not equal $x increase in revenue. One can say that after an $x ad campaign went out, the company saw a $y increase in sales, but one cannot assume that the increase in sales was directly related to the ad campaign.
So the idea is to get you to think of the brand name when you think of a product type. X10 is successfully doing that, although I don't condone the method. So for every person that refuses to buy X10's product on principle, there's probably 3-4 people that will recognize the product name but will forget the annoying context.
Ads do work the way people think, assuming that the person thinking is a marketing person. You're right, Pepsi tastes better to you and no matter how Coke advertises you aren't going to switch (for me, it's the opposite, I prefer Coke, although I don't generally drink soft drinks). But taste is a psychological thing as well. Here's an example: have you ever taken a sip of something when you expected it to be something else? Maybe you were drinking Pepsi at a restaurant, but your waitperson gave you iced tea instead? That first taste is horrible because you were expecting Pepsi, but you got a completely different taste in your mouth.
Coke and Pepsi advertising are trying to get you to associate a particular taste with a feeling. Most people drink the soft drink that they're used to -- something they drank when they were young. It's the psychological aspect that the companies are trying to define for you.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Be sure to check out...t s/configPolicy.html
(take out that space after component)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/componen
Instead of redirecting ads.x10.com to localhost, redirect it to 208.233.99.162 (ak47.algebra.com). This server runs some sort of Javascript hack that automatically closes the window as soon as it appears.
Ran across this gem on alt.marketing.online.ebay.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Apparently, it is. People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us.
When you watch TV, you put up with the ads. Or, you subscribe to some premium channels that don't have ads. Or you just don't watch TV. Same with printed magazines. Why screw over webmasters?
Thanks to Davin and Eugene at StorageReview.com for making me aware of this issue.
---
--It's all fun and games, 'till someone loses an eye. Then it's one-eyed fun!--
Hehe, can't seem to find that feature in IE or Netscape?
In IE: Tools > Internet Options > Security > Restricted Sites > Sites
Then add the offending site. Voila, no more annoying Javascript.
If you're still using Netscape 4... well... popup ads should be bliss for you since you obviously like pain.
NO CARRIER
So the desperate web sites made a mistake selling a more annoying ad for less, and no wonder X10 wanted to capitalize on it.
Not that anything would stop them. A couple of years ago I bought some X10 stuff from them directly (instead of via stores) and they started bombarding me with special offers at least once a day. Worse, every time I would write to get off, the mailing address I wrote from would get on the list, so soon I was getting 3-4 copies of their mailing each day. It took a while to get off, and of course I have not, and will not buy directly from X10 again.
And I used their 30 day disable flag for the pop-under.
They don't seem to be aware how hated it's made them to do both the mass mailings and the pop-unders, and sites selling them need to know too.
Of course, there are two sides to this. Those who like the "free" web realize that the failure of banner advertising is endangering it, and mass resistance to the other forms (stupid as they may be) and ad blockers will only assure their failure, and the eventual loss of the free web.
But I would rather pay for the content then get the linux pop-unders, which don't start on the bottom. I've noticed that in IE they are not so bothersome. Perhaps the ad sites should consider not providing them to linux netscape?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
One of my favorite sites for news and nicely displayed info (weather, stocks, news) was my.yahoo.com. Recently, Yahoo has been putting up these annoying pop-under ads on many news pages.
As much as I love the "free web", I fully understand the need for these web companies to feed their bottom line. Ads just aren't cutting it. Affiliate networks aren't cutting it. Face it, to get good content you simply have to pay for it. Or at least pay for a good share of it. I, for one, am quite willing to pay a yearly fee so I can get ad-free (or button ad only) service. Granted, I'm not full of money, so it has to be affordable. Say, $20. Sure, it can have a banner ad on each page, but only one (like Slashdot), and definately no popups.
I don't mind if Yahoo were to target their ads towards me, because good advertising can be just as useful as a good link or review (I can't tell you how many nifty Think Geek ads I have seen - if anyone who helped to make those happens to be reading - great job!). I'd rather they not keep each and every exact article I viewed and for how long, but a tally of sites is fine(for example, if it tallies how many tech and world news articles I've read vs. sports). Most importantly, my data cannot be sold, and I'd like to know as specifically as possible in their privacy policy what they do collect, and preferably for how long.
My problem is, I have found absolutely no way to express to Yahoo management that I desire this feature. Unlike most web sites, I simply cannot find a feedback feature for the web site in general or for My Yahoo!. If anyone could point this out to me, I'd be very happy to send off a feature-request e-mail.
On a related note, I'm off to try the Wall Street Journal Online Edition for 14 days. I've been a print subscriber for 3 years now, but I just let it cancel because it's expensive for non-students and generates a lot of paper. Instead, I'm going to try out the online version which includes all of the print articles plus other features for half the cost. They don't have to print and ship, I don't have to waste the paper and pay as much. This is why I love online content.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Tuesday's Foxtrot. Not updated yet on the official Foxtrot page.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
For those who don't already know, Galeon can:
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
3. Open n related pages in one split window. (I presume this is the same as Galeon's "tabbed browsing" feature - perhaps it's not, but tabbed browsing is still very cool
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
Galeon runs Mozillas rendering engine, Gecko, so the web looks just as good as it does in Mozilla, and all the netscape plugins work (although sometimes this can be an uphill struggle)
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
It also changed my Windows Media Player title bar to say "Windows Media Player Provided By X10 Media Player".
I checked out your screenshots and would bet that Microsoft would be interested to see them as well. I dont know of any skins available for Media Player (I havent read the licence either) but I would bet that they wouldn't look favorably upon another company rebranding their software.
M$ is obviously litigation-happy. Why don't we use it to our advantage for once?
--------
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
I especially like the home security ads with the "home security bunny" supermodels on them. If you're like me, I'm sure you'll be getting one of these. Now I can monitor my home from work, so when the supermodels in evening wear try to break in again, I'll catch them red-handed.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Things to do with Konqueror that you can't do with the others, at least in Linux:
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
2. View the Web in anti-aliased fonts.
3. Open n related pages in one split window.
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
If only Mozilla had come up with something so nice, more people would be using it now...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
And the "Zoom Zoom" kid is an improvement? ;)
When the person ultimately in charge of something as big as Slashdot, who undoubtedly normally has to remain neutral for advertising sales purposes comes out and TRASHES a company, you know he's pissed...
*grin*
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Yes, I think we are all very tired of the countless "X10" camera ads that seem to be popping up everywhere. I can't take a stroll through anywhere in my company without seeing some poor sap whose closing those ads. But the problem really isn't the pop-up ads. The problem is that no one has really found a way to turn the web into a truly money-making medium... except for those selling porn of course. In the absence of real profits, the marketing geniuses of the world turn toward the one thing that they know: selling advertising time and space. And the reality is, this isn't that bad. Like many Americans, I watch my share of television. I have of watching the good old broadcast stations (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, etc.), but I choose to pay for access to other channels via cable. I do not, however, pay for premium channels like HBO, Showtime or Playboy. That is my choice. And here is where it gets scary for the internet... we are headed toward the same direction. In the near future, the Internet is going to be segmented according to what content you are willing to pay for. Using AOL/Time Warner? You get access to what they want you to see. If you want more, you have to pay outside interests. Meanwhile, your buddy down the street is using @home and the two of you are lucky just to be able to email each other. You won't be able to game against each other or IRC together of anything because you will each be seperated by various firewalls that the service providers and content providers will have in place to make sure you pay your dues. And the "free" sites on the internet will be few and seldom used. They won't have the same glitz that the big sites will have. Now, I realize that I am tired. Looking over my rant, I'm not sure if any of it made any sense... and there ain't a drop of caffiene in the house. Hopefully, it will interest someone and add to the discussion, otherwise just mod me down. Karma is at 50... 45... 30... Warning Karma level is dropping rapidly, please change your rate of descent. 25... 20... 10...
I visited the X10 site and bought the Remote DVD package. The product is good, but the marketing this company uses is down right ruthless and in some cases counter-productive toward customers.
Upon installing the support software, X10 overwrote all my shortcut icons (the little arrow which appears on all icons) with a tiny X-10 logo. It also changed my Windows Media Player title bar to say "Windows Media Player Provided By X10 Media Player". Also before previewing any movie files there is an X10 logo in the video, right before it begins playing.
And if that wasn't enough, they put their logo in the General section of System Properties, such as OEMs do. And yes, my bookmarks in both Navigatior and IE have all kinds of X10 links.
I uninstalled the software but this still didn't solve the problem. So I called the company and they said this is all in the license agreement. Well, I sent their product back and got my refund and used a registry editor to painfully remove all of the X10 brandings and subliminal messages.
It really makes me mad when a company thinks they have the right to mess with your system. And no, they haven't stopped e-mailing me promotional stuff even after I unsubscribed (didn't know I ever actual subscribed in the first place) from their mailing lists. I am also starting to get stuff in the mail now too.
For some pictures of the brandings, see:
http://root.27south.com/x10.html
I will never buy an X10 product again. Just shows how advertising can actually be bad.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
If I owned any YHOO stock I'd sell right away. This will just turn people away from the website. I can't remember if I ever bought anything where advertising annoyed the hell out of me. In fact I remember many times making a concious decision of NOT buying things that are marketed with annoying commercials. I even decided to buy a Mazda instead of a Honda because the stupid "Who let the dogs out" commercial was annoying me to no end. Take that Honda.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Look at this from an Advertisers perspective. The pay money for ads (like ThinkGeek with Slashdot), but very few probably act on those ads, let alone notice them.
:p
POP-UPS (or pop-unders) get attention. No publicity is bad publicity. For every person who boycotts X10 because of this, some poor schmuck is going to go out and buy a cheap wireless camera (for who knows what), and they'll at least do better than they'd do with a 468x60 ad at the top of the page.
They just want their ads to get noticed, that's all. Yeah, they piss me off to, and I close them, but I can see why they'd try this.
Maybe the truth is the fact that advertising rarely works as well as they think it does. Think Pepsi made back the tens of millions they spent on that Britney Spears/Bob Dole ad in increased sales DIRECTLY RELATED to that ad (and the ads FOR the ad)? Hell no.
Ads don't work as people think. Coke can spend billions of dollars a year, and I'll still drink Pepsi. And that has nothing to do with Pepsi's ads either. Just like the taste better. People will stick with two things. Best quality (in THEIR opinion), or cheapest. I know plenty of people who drink crap like "Adirondack Cola", which tastes like CRAP, but is DAMN cheap, and they live by it.
Sure, put the following line in your prefs.js file:
, "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open"
You can find more info in the release notes.
God became man to enable men to become sons of God. -C.S. Lewis
Banner ads have always looked tacky and cheap. The ZDnet ads are often placed by reputable companies (IBM, Compaq, etc.) and have often have decent production values, so they usually don't bother me even with the animation. Most importantly, I don't have to spend 2 seconds and wear out my tendons closing the popunder window.
OTOH, maybe I'm just weird. I've always appreciated high-quality ads; in fact I once payed good money for a video of nothing but old animated TV ads.