iVillage Renounces Pop-up Advertising

ceejayoz writes "iVillage.com, a popular women's portal, announced today that it is getting rid of pop-up advertising on its site after a survey of their users found 95% considered it the most annoying part of the Internet. Lets hope they can prove there are other, less annoying advertising models that work!"

Comments

Advertising

[Restil]

I don't care much for any type of advertising, but I'm willing to tolerate and accept it if its nonintrusive. A solitary banner ad at the top of the page is more or less expected at this point. I barely notice, and every once in a while I might even glance at it. A popup ad however annoys me before it even displays its contents. I'm already closing the window. I don't care what it says. I don't care how awesome the product might be. All I know is that its in the way. You lost me before you ever had a chance to tell me who you were or what you were about. In fact, blocking popups is easy. Certainly easier than blocking banner ads of multiple sizes. All I see of it is a waste of time. The internet newbies might pay attention for a little while before they figure it out. And the population of internet newbies is dwindling.

Targeted ads ala google make much more sense, especially with their low-key approach to it. First off, it will probably be for something I'm interested in, so even if its not in line for what I'm searching for, at least it won't annoy me. And secondly, I might actually click on it. I've clicked through on google's ads on several occasions, typically when I'm looking for prices on things. The advertising actually serves a somewhat useful purpose. Imagine that. The popup advertisers need to figure this out. Before the existance of those ads is the reason people stop visiting certain sites.

-Restil

Disable Javascript

[evilviper]

I'm amazed at the resistance I get... I think it's time to start the 'campaign to disable javascript everywhere'. Javascript is EVIL. It's like a C++ compiler on your local machine, accessible to anyone who's sites you visit. The only thing they've done is remove those functions that outright allow damage to be done. But every day, another insecure javascript feature is found, just recently Internet Explorer and Opera were found vulnerable to the same javscript bug.

What does it take to convince people? If you disable javascript, you will not longer have popup ads, no more cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, no more security exploits (we've been lucky that nobody really attempts tp exploit them, we talk about windows boxes having exploits, but all machines are vulnerable to javascript), and more.

So please, disable javascript. You can still use almost all sites without it. It will make you more secure, and have a much happier browsing experience.