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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.
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...
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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
Tuesday's Foxtrot. Not updated yet on the official Foxtrot page.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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
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...
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
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