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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.
iVillage said they would no longer us pop-up ads, instead they would use pop-under ads. AOL is likely to do the same. AOL already disables the function to supress pop up windows in Netscape. They need those ads for revenue. So I really don't see them being serious about eliminating pop-up ads or some form of "invasive ads". I'll continue to use Opera and Mozilla, where I the user am given a choice on what is forced down my throat and what isn't.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Wow, I almost had forgotten about popups. Every system I deal with has Mozilla loaded, and unrequested popups are not allowed. Nor are "open in new window" links, those drive me nuts. If I want it open in a new tab, I'll middle click it.
:-)
Glad they are getting the message though. Back when I did use a browser that wouldn't kill them on it's own, I always just closed them without looking anyhow. I could care less what was being advertised. Just as I instantly crumple all papers left on my windshield instead of giving them one minute second of my attention (Unless it says TICKET of course
Seriously. I wish Advertisers use pop-up ads, atleast we know how to kill them. If they find that pop-up/under is not working, they will come up with new ways to be intrusive, Like showing a full-page ad before directing to the actual page we clicked. Ads taking 90% of the page, so that we have to click 10 "next" pages just to read a small article.
Its like "You sing so well, You should be on radio(atleast I can switch channels) situation
Cheers,
Roshan
Way back when I saw the only definition of marketing that I can respect.
"Find out what users want and give it to them"
I like this better than
"Find out what makes us most money and look for ways to con users into accepting it"
Sounds like AOL are waking up to this too.
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.
... when finally taking over the position as CEO of a major dotcom, become incredibly stupid and greedy. In addition, force customers to be constantly harassed by countless advertisments via potentially annoying pop-up ads - technology makes things easier. Also don't forget to really believe that people really want to see ads and buy the junk (stuff) that our advertiziers are selling. Remember, people are sheep and they can be herded like them. You're a CEO and you're above those little people.
Additional note to self: Continue to find ways to prevent other tech companies from interacting with our tech so we can mantain our monopoly over the masses.
If a site doesn't work without Javascript, the site designer and programmers are incompetent, careless, or stupid, and I'd be foolish to use the site with Javascript enabled anyway.
As a programmer working on a very large site, which requires JS, I take offence at your statement that I am either incompetent, careless or stupid. I can assure you I am none of those things. What I am is employed (a rare thing these days). While you may not like JS, clients do, and it's they who pay the bills. The site I am currently working on is aimed at users within large corporations. They have asked for (and got) some pretty wizzy features, many of which are simply not possible to implement without JS (or some other kind of scripting). Given that all of them (and I mean ALL) are using either NS or IE, and will almost certainly have JS enabled, am I supposed to turn around and say "sorry, we can't make the site JS only, it goes against my geek principles"? I think not.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Two quick points: .asp's don't break in Mozilla. ASP is strictly server side. However, .asp is often occompanied by FrontPage and IE specific code. Just wanted to make sure no one was confused on that.
1)
2) Good for you for switching, but make sure you let the old bank know that they lost a customer and why.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
"This is not good. Once the advertising companies realise that people find the ads an annoyance, they'll stop paying for them. And if they're not paying, I'll have to.
I'd much prefer a free web and popup-killer apps to paying for anything."
I'd prefer a web that is free of these commercial "we're gonna get rich online" sites, that is made up of sites created FOR THE LOVE of it.
I run one such site myself, www.wvradio.net.
It's not just online that advertising is in trouble. It's ALL advertising... The whole market in general is depressed, and isn't recovering as fast as expected. Radio billing is down, and broadcast TV face a similar problem.
The reason, IMO, is that the public at large have been oversaturated with advertising. Their exposure to ever more obnoxious ads online is leading them to an overall CONTEMPT for ALL FORMS of advertising. I know it sure has for me.
It also doesn't help that radio stations, for example, are running longer and longer commercial stopsets (Clear Channel's standard one now is 6-8 minutes, with 10 minute+ stopsets not at all uncommon in certain dayparts on my local CC Top 40 station).
What this all does is FURTHER annoy consumers. They get to the point where they resent IT ALL, even the traditional type, especially as TV and radio programming gets shorter to make stopsets longer.
I think in many ways, the Internet ad market collapse has led to all of this. Advertisers are increasingly stingy in paying what the marketers want, because they are doubting rate of return "click through" on traditional TV and radio ads, now that they know how low they are online.
So, the marketers offer ever more intrusive, annoying ad methods to their clients. Which pisses off the targeted consumer even more. Which in turn hurts ad response rate, which in turn depresses the value and revenue of advertising.
It's a viscious circle, all fueled by the fact that the marketer types have no ethics to speak of, and no sense of RESTRAINT at all. Ergo, Darwin is now teaching them a lesson.
Corporatism != Free Market
You may have a reasonably informed opinion (OK, I'm being generous), but you really don't further your argument by posting "You fscking Nazi." No one on Slashdot is a Nazi. (They all get really bad karma and leave.)
Big companies are free to use JS exclusively, and we are free to turn JS off in our browsers. They'll learn eventually. Why don't you help them to do so?
Marcus