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.

Comments

An associated article

[Anonymous Coward]

A guy linked to his rant here related to the iVillage thing, and I think he hit it on the head: When the average person finds the internet just a frustration, the potential revenue for everyone involved will eventually suffer. Companies like AOL have to do this for long term survival.

Pop-up ads don't bother me so much...

[httpamphibio.us]

But what I do get annoyed with are pop-up ads that pop-up new ads when you close them, pages that automatically ask you if you want to install "useful" spyware, and pop-up generators. Another sort of ad that I've just started seeing proliferate are the ones that pop up in their own window that doesn't seem to be a browser window, no status bar, no scroll bar, no file/edit/etc, no max/min/close. The only way I've found to close these is by ctrl-alt-del'ing (sorry I use W2K :) ). It's a good thing companies are getting wise to how annoying these are though. Good stuff...

Fighting back

[AtariKee]

Some sites have begun fighting back against anti-popup software. There is now anti-anti-ad software. A good example of this script is here.

Attention getting (for real).

[Simon Carr]

The Onion used to run these Absolut ads are 100% attention getting. They were little squares with interactive content in them... not blaring sound files or boxes listing features of booze, but just simple stuff. And everybody's punched the monkey at least once.

There's a big difference between focusing attention to send a message and getting somebody to look somewhere and close a window. I don't think most advertisers online are smart enough to be able to know the difference.

I think NON-INTRUSIVE interactive content in ads is going to be the savior of online advertising in the future, and I think pop-ups have decimated what could have been (in my opinion anyway).

Designing for Mozilla

[Bonker]

Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?

Recently, I decided to redo my personal site with a PHP backend for easier updates. In the process I decided to eliminate all javascript from my site. I had an image gallery that opened images in a popup, and most of the text files were targeted at new browser windows. Turning on Moz's first version (not the newer, slightly more intelligent version) of 'Don't open new windows', it elminated about half the content on my site.

Javascript is a wonderful thing, but it's just like anything else. If abused, it's ruined for everyone.

Now, I'm happier. My users are happier. Those of us using Moz are infinitely happier than those using IE.

Mozilla has saved me thousands! Yes - really....

[mccalli]

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.

Funny you should mention that.

I currently have a bank account with NatWest. After they 'upgraded' their site, and .asp's started appearing instead of .jsp's, it became impossible to use their online banking unless you used Internet Explorer.

Annoyed, I decided to hunt out alternatives and found Intelligent Finance, which works fine with Mozilla.

Of course, as well as working fine with Mozilla it also happens to have a drastically better mortgage than the Natwest one I currently have, and I am right now in the process of moving my mortgage over. I am saving, literally, thousands of pounds.

So...Natwest annoying me with locked-in pages lead to me going investigating competitors, which in turns lead me to switch away from Natwest completely.

Consumer preferences in action.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Popup Ads Don't Bother Me At All

[brad3378]

> 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

Have you ever gotten a positive response?
(if any)

Did your e-mail messages ever work?
Has anybody gotten rid of their "IE only" sites?
Just curious

Re:Killing pop-up ads is a bad thing

[pmz]

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.

I think the free market will save us, here. By becoming so obnoxious as to reduce content down to 10% of a page, advertisers will be driving customers away as if avoiding the Plague!

The WWW will stabilize into some reasonable medium for both content and advertising. I'm not sure how long it will take, but, already, JavaScript-driven things are declining, which is good. The next phase will probably involve a rise and fall of Flash and other plugin-enabled formats.