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Pop-Up Ads Begin To Face Serious Opposition
guttentag writes "The New York Times is running an article that looks at the ways AOL is trying to reinvent itself. Apparently, as customers began terminating their accounts and revenue dropped, AOL tried to make up the lost revenue by increasing the frequency of its popup ads. But the level of consumer satisfaction just seemed to plummet, so AOL's president formed a task force to study the problem. It found that focus group satisfaction went up "notably" when the number of popups was cut in half. As a result, AOL has scaled back (but not eliminated) the popups and it says this has been a catalyst for revolution within the company." Combine this with the recent announcement from iVillage and who knows - maybe more content providers will see the light - the light that readers don't like to be forcibly diverted from what they are doing.
Why? Because I use mozilla exclusively, and have turned off javascript's ability to
- open unrequested windows
- move or resize existing windows
- raise or lower windows
- hide the status bar
Any site I hit that says something asinine like "best viewed with Internet Explorer gets an email from me explaining why I will never bother to use their site, and (in the vast majority of cases, where I find a competitor that does adhere to standards), why I have gone to their competitor instead despite having found their page first.I keep a template of the email handy, so that only a few seconds are required to make the complaint to both the webmaster AND two others who are as high up in the firm as I can discover in a quick web search.
These sites are few and far between
In any event, there is absolutely no reason for one's web browsing experience to be the kind of popup hell described here
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've tried various add-on pop-up stoppers, but none seemed to be both effective and unintrusive. I choose to use MSIE, and was delighted to find that CrazyBrowser, a free MSIE add-on whose primary purpose is to add a tabbed interface, is supremely effective at blocking pop-up ads without also suppressing useful popups. It has a number of other cool features as well. Did I mention it's free? It's not "spyware", either. I like it a lot.
On a related and truly ironic note, I was helping my mother set up her web site on 50megs.com, and was amused that the first time I brought up her new page (using stock MSIE, no popup stoppers), a popup appeared advertising a popup blocker! At least that didn't show up again!
Get Proxomitron
!
The setup is a it geeky, but it will remove almost all ads and popups and such crap. It also has many other powerful features and you can easilly add things to the blocklist. Since it runs as a proxy, you can point other machines on your network to it and it will filter them as well, great if being used in a buisiness to save on bandwidth costs, or to simplify home setup if you have a network with several machines in the house.
Best of all, its totally free!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
They wouldn't state their pages and DHTML code worked in anything other than IE, and so actually blocked Mozilla from seeing the page. If it wasn't IE (or Netscape 4.7.1 - yes, .1, not any other .), they wouldn't allow it in.
Regarding the second point - yes, I'm going to do that. I already tried to get them to sort it - there's a Bugzilla entry somewhere in the evangelism section regarding Natwest.
Cheers,
Ian
Last I heard, Netscape 6/7 does not have the "Open unrequested windows" option in the GUI. It is still in the browser, however, and can be enabled by using the following line in your prefs.js file:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
DennyK
A thousand times yes. I disabled flash, by moving the plugin file, and just re-enable it if I need it by copying back into the plugins directory. Big hassle, but not as bad as the motion sickness you get from gratuitous, over-down, endlessly looping flash animations.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
That's really interesting. Fortunately, I took a quick look at the source code used to block popup blockers. Basically it works though javascript that uses a timer to make sure certain popup windows open and close. An easy solution in Mozilla would be to allow the javascript to run but to not show the windows and to occasionally do garbage disposal at random times. I hope someone implements this. I would, but I don't have enough time and there are enough anti-ad-blocker sites yet.
Or you could remove the JavaScript altogether:
<a href="somewhere.html" target="_blank">Link to somewhere</a>
If you're using Linux, it would be incredibly easy to write a couple bash shells that could do this, then just add two icons on your KDE/Gnome desktop, one saying "Enable Flash" the other "Disable Flash." This would be a very convenient way to do what you're asking. Here's an example of what "Disable Flash" would look like:
/!MozPath/filename /usr/src/
#!/bin/bash (or insert your favorite shell here)
# Script to remove flash capability of Mozilla
# !MozPath = path to Mozilla Plugins directory
mv
It would also work to just rename the file to something new... like adding a period "." to the front of the filename, to make it a hidden file.
Batch files would have the equivalent function in Windows:
Disable.bat
move x:\Path\filename x:\NewPath
Then, just create a shortcut to the batch file on your desktop, and you have the same functionality. The "Enable Flash" batch/shell script would be nearly identical, except with the parameters reversed on the move function.
The speed of time is one second per second.
The paradox that content providers are finding themselves in is interesting. No advertisements, equals no revenue. No revenue means you can't pay the bills, and the site goes offline.
:)
Advertisements piss people off, and they get annoyed and stop hitting the site.
ok we all know all of that.
What happened to me recently was very interesting.
I got sick and tired of the ads on alberta.com. Specifically, the news. I really enjoyed reading the news on alberta.com because of how they set it up... I can get national, provincial, or international news, or all of it together. A few months ago.. I noticed that every single fsking time I clicked on a news story, a popup ad came up. SO, if i read say... 12 news stories in one visit, I had 12 browser windows open with the SAME ad. (or I had clicked them closed 12 times)
I got so mad that I emailed them. I thought they wouldn't care, let alone reply to me. I was wrong.
They care about you!
this is the reply I got within 48 hours of firing off my flame mail:
"Thanks for the feedback.
Sorry to hear you're so upset about the advertising on Alberta.com, but we have
faced a difficult challenge: Drastically cut the
amount of news we purchase for our users, or subsidize that content by responding to
advertisers' demands for increasingly more
intrusive advertising.
We are working on trying to ensure that most pop-up advertising occurs once per
session. I'll pass this along to our advertising
department to see if something can be done. In the meantime, we can only hope you
give us another chance.
Thanks,
Rob Klovance
Managing Editor
TELUS Multimedia Solutions"
Interestingly, within a couple weeks, the popup ads were gone. It seems that there are more (and bigger) ads on the site (wihch I much more prefer over popups), and I don't know if this was a result of my measly flame mail, or if I was merely one of hundreds that voiced my opinion, but one thing is clear:
If you like a website, but you're ready to stop hitting it because you are so annoyed, tell them! They want to hear from you. You are more important to their site than the advertisers. Oh, and thanks Rob.
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