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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.
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
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.
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
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.
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
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
AOL has crafted a special pop-up ad to let you know of their new commitment to customer satisfaction!
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
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 think that you're shutting yourself off from a large, and growing, number of sites that will use javascript to create a real application out of the browser that won't require repeated trips to the server for trivial information. I have found countless places where I can greatly enhance the user experience by using DynamicHTML, which requires JavaScript or some other scripting language. I'm not talking pop-up windows, put help boxes that can show up in screen next to the item the user is on, dynamic tree menus that don't require Java, forms that hide fields you don't need to fill out, tabbed forms that don't require a trip to the server to change tabs. These types of user interface enhancments are neccesary to keep bringing the web to a larger novice crowd. It must be easy and it must be fast. Needless trips to the server break that. Javascript can be abused, but if used right, it can make the web more useable. I hope that you'll reconsider you're campaign to destroy JavaScript.
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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
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
Duuuuuude. What are you talking about? Don't worry about the hits on the server, hardware/bandwidth is cheap. If you are worried about user's being inconvenieced by slow loading web pages, then your shit is too heavy and your application isn't architected very well.
I am sorry but in my opinion Javascripts has 2 useful functions.
Form data validation. But you should still do the validation on the server, so your stuff still works with people that don't have Javascript enabled.
Javascript allows you to do really outlandish stuff when you are writting Intranet applications and you can force people to have Javascript enabled.
Seriously, anyone out there that can't build a web application without sending anything other than HTML to the browser, isn't a very good web developer. People rely on technologies to do things that I personally don't think they were really meant to do. Javascript was a bad idea. Doing some client side stuff is great, but really I don't think Javascript is the right way to do. I would rather run Applets than try and hack out some sort of 'application' with Javascript, please.
I am always amazed at the number of bad developers out there. Just look through the PHP mailing lists, for every informed post there are 300 disconnected ones. I was a loser when I started out in web development too, so I understand. Just don't act like you know anything if you relying on Javascript to make or break your app. Being a good web developer, or any programmer, requires discipline. Just because you can use a goto doesn't mean you should. The right tool for the job. And do NOT underestimate the power of a well architected web application.
I'm done now.
LoRider
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.
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"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
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.
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.