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

Re:popups are annoying

[foobar104]

You're not the only one who ignores ads. A great paper was published in '98: Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss "Obvious" Links. Excerpts:

None of the participants in the study had any trouble moving from the home page to the page containing this item, but to our surprise, when they reached the training page almost every participant scrolled past this "Internet Courses" link and selected a small link labeled "courses" from a menu at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the information on Internet courses wasn't available there, and the participants were forced to give up on the task. When the facilitator directed them back to the earlier page and showed them banner-style link, most participants showed extreme surprise that they could have missed it.

Similarly, Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, Snyder & DeAngelo (1997) noted that a participant in a usability test overlooked an animated banner containing the information she was looking for. It may be that people searching for specific information on the web tend to ignore large, colorful items that are clearly distinguished from other items on the page.

There's more than just anecdotal evidence, too. These guys actually performed a double-blind study in which they constructed special web pages that included both regular links and large, "banneresque" links. The data shows that the subjects found the regular links almost all the time (94%), but only found the banner-like links a just over half the time (58%).

The conclusion of the paper pretty much sums it up:

One item separated visually from everything else on a web page may be completely ignored by web searchers, even by searchers who are deliberately searching for the information provided in that item. Designers should be cautious about following guidelines stating that increasing the visual distinction between "important" items and other items is desirable; the visual distinctiveness may actually make important items seem unimportant.