Slashdot Mirror
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.
What? You didn't think I was serious?
So... pop-up ads aren't annoying? Why didn't somebody say this before I bought all that usefull stuff?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
... they would have found that 73% prefer to have pop-up ads without AoL.
--- What?
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...
sig.
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
Funny.
Go Mozilla, you're great!
Go Proxomitron, you edit the Internet.
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
They actually needed to commission a 'task force' to figure this out? I mean, for christ sakes, I can tell you the things that piss people off the most online *right now* for free, no research required: 1. Spam 2. Popup Ads Yes, off the top of my head I came up with those 2 stunning conclusions. Seriously, I often wonder if the employees these companies have their own brains or if they get 'CorpOS: Dumb Terminal' installed as soon as they arrive. Coming in loud and clear Captain Obvious, sir!
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
So I wonder if AOL will do a focus group to figure out if cooking their books creates investor dissatisfaction.
I recently read an article that described AOL's concern for the customer experience as "Soviet". I think that bashing the Reds this way is kind of unfair.
Until you get more subscription/donation sites going, you'll see advertising. It may not take the form of pop ups or banners, but you will see more interstials and text ads. Others will doubtless come along.
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.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
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 am a Karma Library.
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).
-- The unsig...
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 let my nephew use my sole remaining Windows machine a few weeks ago while he was over for the weekend. I went downstairs to use it and low and behold every web page I went to previously now was barraged by pop-up and pop-under ads.
Sure, I was at first amazed that I could lower my mortgage rates, increase my sexual hunger, and check out hot teen action, but then I realized that I wasn't even browsing pRon sites, and I was still getting that sort of sheer amount of ads.
Digging a little further into it and after checking out the history on the userid I had created for him I found that the nephew likes pRon, and lots of it. He also apparently deemed it necesary to install a bunch of shady software off the net while using my computer, particularly Kazaa.
I proceeded to remove any and all software that wasn't there before he used the computer. After rebooting, low and behold the pop-up ads were still popping up like zits on a teenager's face, marring my desktop with their ugly little existence. Now was the time for definite action, no time to hessitate.
After searching about a bit I recalled Ad-Aware and promptly downloaded and installed it. After running a full scan with this software and rebooting, there was no more pop-up ads. Sure, I may not be able to lower my mortgage rate anymore, but at least I'm not annoyed by 5 pop-up ads every time I open slashdot's homepage.
As for my nephew, he'll no longer be using any of my computers anymore. His taste in pRon was just plain horrid anyways. Not even one good free site did he find.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
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.
I would rather a pop-up ad any day of the week. I can always close them with a click of the mouse. But those damn CD cases ruined my latest issue of Time Magazine, so I completely missed out on the hype being generated by Bruce Springsteen cashing in on the deaths of 2,832 people with his latest CD and how wonderful of a human being he is, according to the editors of Time. Because of Steve Case and his God damn CDs, I missed on loving 'The Boss' even more.
Damn!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
AOL has crafted a special pop-up ad to let you know of their new commitment to customer satisfaction!
And the really funny part is that IE will never have it! Microsoft will never screw over its fellow biznizes by giving users control over their computers.
- Have a picture
...that the referenced article is from one of the very few places whose popups aren't blocked by Mozilla's popup killer.
AOL decreasing their own use of popup ads on their existing clients is not going to lead to your typical online advertiser curbing their own use of them. AOL is attempting to retain their clients. In order to do this, they're looking for ways to stop pissing them off. Good idea. Genius.
It's not like that for your typical online advertisers. They're generally trying to acquire new business. They want to get noticed, and if they're the kind to use popups or popunders, they're generally not the kind who are too much concerned about pissing off Joe Slashdot-User, who isn't going to click though anyway. They're aiming for the typical, unsavvy web user, who's not going to be too hesitant to give out his credit card details to the flashing lights and pretty colours. Popup ads are effective in generating this kind of business.
It's in AOL's interest to curb their use of popups. It'll help them keep their clients. It's not in the interest of your typical online advertiser to stop using them. Sorry kids, popups are here to stay.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
They just figured out that purposely interrupting a user's reading/viewing is annoying?!?
I suppose their next revelation will be that users don't like swift kicks to their nuts, either.
I hate AOL more than I can express in words. I would have to compose a song or paint something to adequately show my loathing for them.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Or at least they did for me. It eventually came down to either displaying popunders or begging for Paypal donations for the rest of my site's life.
Clickthrough is spectacular on popups and popunders. You can say it's due to all the accidental clicks, but the sales figures say you're wrong. It's one of the first effective internet advertising techniques... though it can't match that other, much more effective technique called spam.
As for the editor's question, when will content providers learn that readers don't like being diverted from the content?
I don't know, but last night I tried watching the Simpsons and was diverted from the content entirely for up to two minutes at a time while commercials ran.
Hell, if that happened on the internet there would be a rebellion.
Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Someone has to pay; either the readers or the advertisers. Advertisers won't pay unless we allow them to annoy our readers. So in the end you, the reader, will pay in money or in annoyance. Which do you prefer?
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
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
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What really frustrates me is that I submitted this story a week ago. It showed up in a CBSMakrketWatch article about AOL. This is not the old AOL president. He's just started recently, and that's why he's willing to try out some radical changes like this.
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
Does anyone know if Netscape 6+ has retained the popup suppression? Someone else mentioned that IE will never have it, basically because of the Good Old Boy system in business. That may well apply to the Netscape-branded Mozilla, as well. More likely they'll leave the feature in place, but remove the settings from the UI.
/. warned about popup ads on TV coming, and I saw one the other night. Forget the channel, but it might have been on The Learning Channel. It was about the same height as the watermark, twice as wide, used the same space, and animated. A small dinosaur jumped on some prey and ate it, to advertise some dinosaur show. It's size similarity to the watermark meant that I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except for having read the /. story.
There's a very real chance that popup suppression could change Internet advertising methods, if it becomes widespread.
On a similar topic,
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The fee you pay monthly for internet access goes to a company called an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. This allows you physical access to the network of computers and routers called the internet.
The World Wide Web sits on the internet, and is made up of content pages called websites. But understand that the ISP does not write or administer the websites on the World Wide Web. So paying your ISP does not equal paying your friendly content providers, like the fine folks at Slashdot or Mr. Lowtax at Something Awful. They are not affiliated with the ISP's and do not receive any money from them.
Therefore the individual website operators must be funded separately, not so much for their time (though that would be nice) but for the expenses it takes to run a website. In order to run a website that can be viewed, there must be a server and another internet connection, only a much higher speed one than what you probably have. These connections are expensive. The servers are expensive. The staff hired to maintain the servers are expensive. The money must come from somewhere.
Make sense?
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Good idea!!!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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
Same with Netscape, which is now just neutered Mozilla...
Privoxy will let you filter Flash ads and build specific policies for your favorite sites. I basically have a white list of sites I allow Flash from with a default denial of Flash otherwise. Ditto for cookies. I also love their "javascript annoyance" features. If you have a set list of sites you use all the time, Privoxy does a bang up job of making them PITA free.
It has a real nice web based GUI for doing all of this stuff too. I know and love the Mozilla features for doing some of this and they're quicker when surfing. But Privoxy does a far more thorough job and works with any modern browser.
And then there's Spamassassin....yum!
As usual, they paid a hell of a lot of money to learn something that any random person would have told them for free. Someone once said that a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters would eventually compose the collected works of Shakespear. We have now learned that this is not correct, a million monkees at a million keyboards will eventually form the most popular ISP in the US.
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
A four year study has concluded that annoying your customers is not good for business.
The study also concluded that when customer satisfaction is down, one way to improve said satisfaction is not to increase the degree of annoying factors.
AOL's on the ball here people! Better pay attention!!
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I can't imagine the ratio of displays vs. clickthroughs to be very high. I also can't imagine that these companies would be doing such a thing without keeping some sort of statistics. From a marketing point of view...how low does such a ratio have to be before a company ultimately axes an advertising campaign? It's just a baffling concept to me.
Standard Browser Behavior is both braindead and oversimplified, and there's no way out without some level above pure HTML. Tab to switch between fields, and enter to submit? Braindead - some idiot making a graphical interface act like an ascii terminal they once used. Reorder a list online? Not without Javascript. Javascript may be evil, but pure HTML is useless. HTML form default behavior is somewhere between pitiful and stupid.
There's more to this web than the static content sources and slashdot. Some people try to do work out here - database front ends, project management tools, work tracking, and more. It's a lot easier to write real web tools when you can reprogram the occasional broken browser default behavior with some javascript.
Is Javascript the wrong tool for the job? Well, it's the only tool for the job if you want to stay with a out-of-the-box web browser.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
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
Yea -- but at least with TV commercials they don't pop up while the show is still going on in the background. The show stops for commercials.
The irony is -- I started spending more and more time online a few years ago VS. less and less time watching TV. Mostly because of commercials and the bait that network channels news agencies use...I.E. --- "Millions of people dead, billions missing, tune in at ten for the news" forward to 10, they bait you with "coming up after the break millions dead......bla bla" -- and finally in the last 30 seconds of the news cast they actually talk about it.....and the headline is usually deceptive of the actual story. So if it is real news or sports scores -- I can use the internet to find out NOW rather than having to sit and wait....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
found that focus group satisfaction went up "notably" when the number of times people were hit in the head with a hammer was cut in half.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
All pages run in PLAIN TEXT
I tried that once. I had a blowout article six months ago called LATEST WARCRAFT III SCREENSHOTS and then did the whole thing in plain text, only describing the screenshots.
Bandwidth was way down but my research shows that reader satisfaction went down with it. I'm not sure why.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
An ISP that scans and removes the javascript that opens popup windows on page loads would be rather helpful.
Most geeks are just going to want 'raw Internet', but the AOL customers want the Internet mushed around and handed to them on a silver platter. Why not scan and strip annoying code? I think, to a degree, it can be done quite effectively. It would be similar to parental lock sites.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Pop-up ads seem to have been part of AOL's desperate, and possibly criminal, attempt to inflate earnings. AOL ran into an "ad inventory problem" - there wasn't enough space for banner ads on the main pages. Pop-ups allowed them to inflate their ad space.
Uncheck it to disallow pages from doing so. There's lots of other fun options in there, too.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
It's not a black-and-white issue, of annoy vs. not annoy.
As in, it would annoy me less if McDonalds would give away their hamburgers for free. It would annoy me more if they suddenly charged $500.00 for them.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, finding out how much annoyance the reader will take, and time after time it's been proven that it's just a little bit more annoyance than the reader says they will take.
(One of the reasons I signed up with FastClick, by the way, is that their popups are programmed to run only once per 24 hours per user; no spawning popups, no onclose popups, no multiple popups. Actually they're all popunders, but you get the idea.)
Traffic didn't fall when I started the popunders, traffic didn't pick up when I took them off for a time.
As for banners and product awareness, as God as my witness I wish we lived in a world where advertisers would be satisfied with a simple red banner that says "drink coke!" and would pay money for it that would cover bandwidth costs.
Hell, maybe even play a little coke theme song with it. Get the brand out there, call the job done. That's how pretty much all advertising works.
But for some reason on the internet they decided that if an ad didn't get clickthrough, that ad was a failure.
Banners get horrible clickthrough. So banners are dead. 80% of my revenue comes from popunders, even though I display far more banners.
Why did they arrive at that conclusion? They don't consider a billboard ad to be a failure just because I didn't IMMEDIATELY drive my car to the restaurant being advertised. No; they're satisfied to get the name and logo out there, and hope I remember it the next time I get hungry. Why can't internet advertising work the same way?
Their research must have told them that it didn't work that way. So now only the annoying ads pay.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
They did a big study whose results told them that their subscribers didn't like pop up ads? Are these guys MORONS? What did they think, that people wanted MORE ads? Or maybe AOL means ADVERTISING on line?
There was a time when water was free. You could go get it right out of the river and drink it. Now I see people (like Evian) selling bottles of it for $2.00 apiece.
Because it was free before from another source, I am absolutely within my right to steal the bottles of water off the shelf. Us freewater users were here first. If the bottled water companies go out of business because of it, I can simply go back to drinking it out of the river.
Slashdot owes us free content at their own expense. Owes us.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
It is ironic for NY Times to run this article. Not
long ago they rendered thie own r www site unuseful
with huge popup ads.
I wrote to them pointing out that since I am
paying customer (I subscribe for dead-tress version), I should not be subjected to that pop-up shit and they
basically responded that NY Times paper and www.nytimes.com are different entities and they need
to eard money.
Part of AOL's problem is that they inverted their priorities. Sure, they're primo priority is to make money. But you have a choice. Build the business to serve the customer, or serve the target income?
I think the U.S. Post Office model of increasing rates to compensate for loss revenue helps us answer that question. Instead of raising rates, make the lines shorter, make priority mail delivery dependable instead of "2 or 3 days or whenever, but there is no guarantee for you paying more," and other things. Instead, for years they have raised rates while continually cutting back services and then sit there and wonder what the problem is.
Here's another model comparison to think about. What if the computer system at your local motor vehicle administration was as efficient as the state's lotto system?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Buddy! Do the sensible thing a drop the official AIM client. Grab yourself a copy of the freeware Trillian which is a truly excellent messenger and can connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN, YIM (yahoo instant msg) and IRC. I use it religiously when in windows.
readers don't like to be forcibly diverted from what they are doing
/. editors should understand.
And television watchers don't like having commercials interrupt the program they are watching. The fact is that there has to be a balance between what the readers want and what they have to endure to get the content at the price they get it at. Either they have to pay more, or they have to get the ads.
Really what AOL should have done is made a higher price where no popups would occur. Customers who really hated them would pay the higher price. The others will feel like their getting something for free because the popups are easy to dismiss.
This is something
-no broken link
I only stuck with Altavista as long as I did because I had grown accustomed to their "NEAR" search keyword. Google has no equivalent.
Since switching, I've found that Google gives better search results -- but I wouldn't have discovered this if Altavista had not actively driven me to the competition through their obnoxious advertising policies.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
You can save several different configs which you can swap between, allow certian sites to pass-through by default, and it has a button on the main GUI to toggle on/off all filters if you are getting snagged on something it's filtering.
I've been considering putting together some filters so I can strip out excess content by using my home computer as a proxy for my palm pilot (running Xiino).
I'm kind of disappointed that development has stopped on it, but I'm figuring someone will pick up the torch and take the idea further.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Yes its a dumb title, but this is a great piece of software. I'm pretty dam jaded when it comes to browser addon's but this local proxy stops popups, protects your privacy, stop flash ads, blocks banners, etc etc. IMHO there are no solutions which even remotely compare to it in the number of features it has. Moz as much as I love it doesn't even compare no matter how much you hack up user.js. Plus it works with ANY browser because of course who wants to be stuck with only one browser that can stop popups?
Anyway if you use windows on your desktop your really missing out if you don't use Proxomitron. Oh yea, it free as well.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
No fair. I don't know French. :)
Everyone's talking about how effective Mozilla is at countering popup ads, but I think a fairly obvious question has been overlooked - what is it about this practice that required a "task force" to understand that people don't like popup ads? Is it corporate brain death, an example of the typical Harvard MBA, or something else?
Recently, they've been sending them in these really nice tin CD cases. Of course, with the AOL logo plastered all over them. I took them downstairs to my workshop, and I ground off the logo on my bench grinder (with a wire-wheel). Now I have these incredibly useful, nice, free, tin CD cases - courtesy of AOL. Thanks, Steve!
(never used your service, never will).
Don't read Time - Don't watch CNN. I don't even watch Bugs Bunny cartoons anymore. Am I violating copyright every time I sing "kill da wabbit!" to myself?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Dude, it sounds like your machine still has the offending software on it, stored in some obscure location and maybe running as an extension of explorer. You should probably just do a clean install of Windows at this point. Then switch to Mozilla and block all popups.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Have you ever gotten a positive response?
(if any)
You didn't finish reading my comment, did you?
If you had, you would have realized that the answer to your question is a pleasantly surprising "yes."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
I imagine that the previous poster was thinking of public web pages when he said that.
Of course your clients can control what browsers are used with what configurations in your case.
All of that is likely true.
However, he would be doing his clients a big favor if he avoided using popup() and, for that matter, any of the other features I mentioned in my original post as having been disabled. By doing so he would allow his clients to have all the snazzy features they've requested, but also allow them to have a much more pleasant web browsing experience when viewing public sites.
Since most people likely do both, that would be a huge plus. He could even sell it as a feature, with a little note to his clients: "Use Mozilla, change these settings, and not only will you find your customized website working perfectly, you'll get rid of all those annoying popup windows on other sites that have been driving you nuts."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Is that if you punch someone repeatedly in the kidneys for long enough, then it'll seem like heaven when you switch to just jabbing them in the ribs.
Since when did sucking less equate to being actually good?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And as for your "if you're paying, you shouldn't have ads" argument, that's bullshit. You pay over $100 a ticket to see a football game, and get bombarded with ads during every moment the ball is not in play. Those who remember the early days of cable television remember no ads on any channels whatsoever - after all, you're paying for the service! Paying to get in to a movie theater results in ads.
Now, go back to being weeded out of the free marketplace, and keep the idiot ideas about blocking ads being a form of theft.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This one is on Mozilla's frequently reported bugs list:
2 24
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126
special pop-up ad to let you know of their new commitment to customer satisfaction
Here's my speculation about what such a popup would look like:
And then after 3 impressions for an account, it disappears.
Will I retire or break 10K?
duh!!!!!!
Could you please reconsider your position on having underlined links on your website?
I don't know about you, but I hate playing "magic mouse cursor" and "computer user, 1st day" as I relearn a new interface for every website I ever browse.
I know I try to keep my site dead easy to use. It still looks good, IMO, and it has such features as underlined hyper links for easy finding. Wonder of wonders, I also have it setup so that if you visit a link, it changes colour. Stops people from accidently revisiting stuff.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Yes, and you get exactly the service they claim: A nice copy of what is being broadcast over the air without an antenna. In some limited instances local cable companies can purchase the option to insert local commercials in slots already reserved for commercials by the broadcaster.
What AOL is doing would be analogous to your cable tv provider adding in commercials on top of those already inserted by the broadcaster.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
2) Good for you for switching, but make sure you let the old bank know that they lost a customer and why.
No; a thousand times NO. They had their chance and screwed up. You don't owe them useful information for providing such lousy customer support. It's best if they lost all their customers and went under completely. The thing to do is to let your new bank know why you chose them.
Because you aren't running a closed-shop company developing web pages for internal use only. And you haven't arbitrarily had "compatibility" declared to mean "appears exactly identical to how it looks on this page of spec." Not "close" but "exact".
If you were running a shop that was supposed to run IE only, then you could tell your developers "Write your web pages to work on IE 4.0. Don't worry about other browsers. If the testers using IE like them, they're golden."
Do you have any idea how much more time it would take to test every web page written with every successful browser out there? I'll give you a big clue: multiply your testing staff by four. Just for our team that would be 40 testers instead of ten. Then, go to your director and tell her that you need 4 times the payroll budget for testing because you have two users running Mozilla and one guy running Opera somewhere in the north campus building, and three guys with AOL somewhere out in California. Oh, and you'll need cube space and computers for each of the new testers.
I don't care if YOU know how to develop web pages properly so they appear identical on all platforms. That's a skill I can't afford to teach every developer I hire. If I can hire IE-only web monkeys to crank out IE-only pages, and get away with one fourth the testing budget, I can tell you your web-page purity and HTML/JavaScript/Perl knowledge won't mean sh!t in this real corporate world of budgets and deadlines.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's late and you're wrong.
John
First of all, anyone stupid enough to not know that they NEED to disable javascript deserves what they get. I could go over all the problems with javascript, but I've done it again and again on /. .
AND QUIT WITH MOZILLA. I think I should put together a few pages that will demonstrate how to popup windows even with Mozilla configured to block them (mail.com is a start). One way is an incorrectly configured frameset, or frame with a refresh tag. And oh so many other ways.
As well as all the other annoyances javascript brings, like infinite javascript alerts, forcing you to kill your browser. On-Mouse-Overs that open PDFs or MP3s, popup windows, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
People seem to have misunderstood my post slightly. The site I work on is not on an intranet, it's out there on the wibbly wobbly. However it's the target audience which is going to be IE/NS with the default options - they are spread over many large corps.
I agree completely about the problem being people misusing the technology, but I was responding to the (common, but extreme) viewpoint that because a few sites misuse a technology, everyone should disable it and other sites should be shamed for using it.
As for downloading executable code, well that depends on your definition of code doesn't it? In this case you seem to mean any data which causes your browser to do stuff, I'd include HTML in there. There is nothing in (standard) JS which causes a danger to your machine, but there is stuff which can causes annoyance to users - either block it, don't visit those sites, or use a more configurable browser. The rules about not downloading executable code applies (for me) only to code which doesn't run inside a sandbox I trust.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
That's a good point about letting the new bank know. But if your goal is to expand the use of standards and not to blast fools from existence, then let the old bank know as well.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
yes, technology is a funny thing indeed. I give your anti-anti-ad-blocking script about 6 months before another solution is found around that.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I wouldn't get to used to this 'revolution' in internet advertising. Righ now 6 figure marketing execs are in thier respective war rooms trying to figure out more lucrative ways for advertising on the internet. It has been know for quite sometime that pop-ads and banner ads have a very low click-through rate. I just phear what they might come up with next to replace them ...
Cocksucking advertisements.
If you buy their product they send professional cocksuckers out to give you a blowjob.
Of course they'll have to jack up the price to pay for shipping and cocksucking, but I can see a market for most everything then.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
What we need is good end-user to creator payment options, and we need them fast. For many things, voluntary micropayments would work great, IMHO, for other things, other models must be empployed.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid