Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
bje2 writes "CNet has a disconcerting story about a new generation of pop-up ads that use a "kick through" technique such that you don't even need to click on the pop-up ad anymore, you just need to mouse over it...wow, can they make our web surfing experience any worse?"
maybe i missed something, but how will this increase revenue for the advertising companies?
so their websites get more hits. but since they are hits that are basically forced, or unaware hits, how will this increase sales for the product being advertised?
Perhaps I'm not the only one that is thinking that they should have put a couple of restrictions when they introduced commercialism on the internet.
And I swear I'll break the fingers of anyone who makes that 'In soviet Russia....' joke.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Ok, I see alot of "oh just use Mozilla or Opera or Pheonix". Well, what do you suggest I do when I want to access my bank account (www.netbank.com) and cannot because they have problems with Mozilla not always working right so just decided to disable it entirely? What about the flash-enabled pages I want to visit that, in IE work fine, but in Mozilla hang with a persistent "Loading...." screen? Or the plethora of other sites that don't work right?
Now I am not saying it's Mozillas fault, I'm sure alot of the offbeat layout problems are actually the designers screw up, but that doesn't change the fact that I cannot view the site. If adhering solidly to standardsmeans you cannot view more than just a few websites, then I guess I will have to use that "crappy" IE6. Another thing, I don't appreciate a piece of software that, after taking as long as it did to be released, makes my PC respond like a PII 400Mhz with PC66 RAM. God help you if you minimize Moz for awhile and do other things, you'd think it died when you restored the window! No other browser acts like that.
My point is, lets come up with solutions to this problem that are a bit more practical than "only use these browsers to view only these sites". Because that is NO solution.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
But the same technology could someday be used on banner ads; the marketers are just pointing out what anyone who codes for the web already knows: if your browser will run any piece of JavaScript sent to it, any website can do whatever it wants to your browsing experience, including bringing it to a grinding halt, and if your machine doesn't have protected memory, crash it. Pop-up blocking is only the first step in what will have to be a shift from the creation of new languages and plug-ins to let content creators do whatever they want on the viewers' machine, to have browsers decide what is reasonable for a web page to do. Pop-up windows not initiated by clicking a link quickly became one obvious thing that pages shouldn't be allowed to do, but flash ads that take over the page and ads that load if you mouse over them make you realize that there are many more things they shouldn't be allowed to do either. But if alternate browsers keep innovating, and IE keeps doing whatever the javascripts and plugins tell it, this can only help drive people to the alternatives.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
People say that Web advertising doesn't work, but I will click on a banner ad that displays something relevant to me. However, I absolutely refuse to patronize a site that uses popups or any of the above mentioned ad techniques. I don't care that Orbitz will save me several hundred bucks, I use a travel agent (who gets me decent deals anyway). I don't care that I can get nifty-looking spy^H^H^H home-monitoring equipment from X10.com; stuff that I might even buy under other circumstances (tiny cameras are neat!). Don't even get me started on the ones that try to defraud me by displaying Windows error messages (in Linux, no less!). These companies will never see a cent from me. Too bad, because they might have something to offer.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Weeeeee. We're in Surfin' Heaven! Nothin' like a B&W mono-spaced equally-formatted no-graphics page to inspire me...
Ok, maybe going a little too far... but these new methods of introducing dynamic content to an otherwise static medium actually CAN be useful, in the right hands.
In fact, all of them were developed with good intentions, and all can be used with purpose - it's just the few sockcuckers out there who take advantage of them that ruin it for the rest of us.
Some troll exploited a bug on slashdot a few months ago and created a goatse.cx 'kick-through'
It was something like this
<p > onmouseover="alert('You are a loser');this.href='http://www.goatse.cx'">Large chunk of text to make sure you get kicked through!</p>
That troll was a classic!
If more people contacted the websites that are running the really intrusive adverts, telling them why the ads are so annoying, and asking them to reconsider, then we'd stand a better chance of seeing the back of them.
As it is, we seem to be locked into an Arms Race of sorts - ad companies devise new ad format, ad blockers move to block them, repeat ad nauseum... Just blocking the ads will only attract the attention of the ad company, not the owner of the site displaying the ads.
-MT.
The whole point of advertising is eyeballs, not clickthroughs. Advertising creates brand awareness. If people actually click on the ad, that's a plus, but just having been viewed is often good enough. And that's why pop-ups/unders are so effective for many companies.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Internet is a wonderful media, used right. It *could* also be a wonderful media for the advertising business.
t egies.
The reason the ads get larger and more annoying, is that noone clicks on them - because no one WANTS those ads. This is *not* going to change by making them more annoying, only the oppsosite.
No, the advertising business does *not* understand Internet. Had they done that, they would have done a lot more targeted advertising, to people who WANTED it, and perhaps even used some effort to build up interesting web-sites related to the field they operated in.
Take, for example, a sports chain. Would it be as annoying if a sports chain co-financed a sports news site, or an outdoor activities site? There could be a prominent, non-intrusive link on the front page, pointing to "shop". This is only one example of things that would be less intrusive but perhaps more effective.
Instead of buying ads, buy a part of a well-used website, make the commercial section well accessible from the front page, but non-intrusive unless you REALLY want to see it.
Another thing they could do, once having bought access to an internet site, is participate in talkback fora. Teach a person that task, and make him inform about general topics AND advice about products. What makes me like and want to buy from a shop, is *service*, *well-informed personell* and willingness to help.
In other words - contribute to the community, make your name known through *that*, and I think one would benefit in the long run.
There might be better ways than my examples, they're just examples of ways *I* think are better than push-your-ads-in-the-face-of-too-many-people-stra
But no, the advertising business hasn't understood the media at all. It's all about pushing annoying ads in the face of unwilling customers, in the hope of catching *one* willing customer more.
The more annoying the advertisement, the more people that will try to find a way to block it. I'm sure with a little programming, it won't be a problem to do so...and it may not even need that.
I sit here and look at the ads on Slashdot while I'm typing away...I don't look for long and I'm not interested in what I've seen so far but the key part is that I am looking at them. If the ad popped up in my face or made me click links, etc I would immediately find a way to stop it and ignore whatever it says because I'm too irritated to care.
Bandwidth is expensive. If we were to take 20K slashdot users and have them try and go through the website as much as possible we could eat up thier bandwidth. Thereforth costing them more money without actually buying anything.
.jpg x1000 without it actually caching on my machine. though a jpg would only be 50K I am looking at it along the lines 50Megs but if I get some program that could do that on 10 machines at work have them eat up 500megs of bandwidth a hour would equal what 12gigs a day. 360gigs a month. If I can get them to download a larger gif perhaps I could reach 500gigs a month. Thats gotta cost them some money. Perhaps make them go out of business so thier add wont popup anymore.
I personally have been boycotting any company that uses a popup ad that I have run across. It doesnt appear to be doing much. But a boycott is something I can do forever while trying to get others to do the same.
though using up thier bandwidth sounds nice. theres gotta be a way to call for the download of a single
But that would be wrong too.
so boycotting it will have to be.
Ignore what I just wrote. And do not use it for evil purposes.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
Why don't we use the power of Slashdot? Suppose all of us made a perfectly legit phone call to 888-656-4546, the contact number on the Orbitz site, and told them, "I just want to let your company know as long as you use pop-up ads, especially with kick-through, I will go to your competitor's site instead."
It's kind of like "Alice's Restaurant." If one of us does it, they'll think s/he's nuts and ignore them. If two of us do it....and so on. If several thousand people called them and voiced perfectly legit complaints about their method of advertising, and this went on to the tune of several thousand calls a day for a week or more, the costs would ad up and they just might feel they need to change their ways. It's a variation on some of the passive resistance tactics used in the South in the Civil Rights Movement.
Another possibility -- and IANAL, but I might be checking with a friend who is, would be to see if you can legitimately "sell" space and use of your computer. Specify that any banner ads are acceptable, but you are charging a company a fee of $100 per ad for each window that they open up on your computer without your requesting that window. Say you don't want their product, but you are offering them the chance to test their software and you will report all successful events to them when you bill them.
This is similar to the tactic a private citizen's group (I think they're called Private Citizen) has used to get many of their members off telemarking lists. They tell the marketers they may not call their list of numbers because their members don't want to buy their product. Then they make an offer for the company to test their telemarking system by calling their members, and the rate per test is $100 or more per instance. They also specify all a company has to do to accept this offer is to call their members. This has stood up in court!
Anyway, there's two suggestions. I think the first, if organized, like what people are doing to Ralsky for his spam, would have SOME kind of effect on Orbitz. I don't even know if the second one can be done legally.
Really? Care to point out a single constructive use of popups? (If I really want to open a link in a new window, I middle click it, period.) What about <blink>?
The web was designed for user control of presentation. Technologies that attempt to subvert this paradigm are *evil*. If you've got a good browser, you can only take what's good and throw out the rest (For example, in mozilla you can enable javascript but prevent javascript from opening popups). If you haven't got a good browser, switch.
Not only would the repeated downloading eat up your own bandwidth too, but it would congest the network for others around the world. A better system would be to have your client download the ad reeeeeeaaaaaalllllyyy sssssssssllllllllloooooooowwwwwwwlllllyyyy. That way, you tie up the server for a minute say, for each connection request. This is bandwidth friendly and blocks only the advertized server from servicing other customers in the time you download.
Maybe you don't understand. We shouldn't HAVE to be forced to install a pop-up blocker just to enjoy browsing the web. On that same logic thread, all ISPs deserve the bandwidth loss for massive ammounts of spam unless they install mail filtering software... which takes up CPU cycles anyways.
Click-through indicates interest on the part of the user. It lets advertisers engage with people who are interested while avoiding annoying potential future customers. Mouse-over does not indicate interest, so it's no better than simply popping up windows randomly, and advertisers can do that already.
I develop apps for handheld devices (PDA's and phones), and this stuff is anathema to us. There isn't the screen real estate to show these fancy new fangled "windows", so everything appears in the foreground. Consequently, our browser pathologically blocks anything that might interrupt the user.
As handhelds become more popular for browsing (and it is doable even on teeny screens with the right display paradigms) this is going to become a bigger issue. If you think popups are bad on your 1600x1200 monitor, try dealing with them on a sub 320x240 screen. Yuk.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
One would figure that most of these big-time players (who can afford to do something different than the small porn-sites popping up every day) would do it, if they want to keep the surfers there. Yet most of the time, the same annoying pop-up comes up each time I click on a link (e.g. next page).
One should think that these people would be smart enough to understand that after having seen the same lotto ad 5 times in a minute, and not even once clicked on it, that I don't care much for lotto. But no! The website in question will continually annoy me with the same intrusive add, time after time, with the only reasonable conclusion that I will leave the site, and surf somewhere else. Thus the company looses one potential web-surfer and ad-revenue income.
Damn it! Why are they so stupid? This is what cookies are for! They should track my browsing behaviour, find out what I'm interested in, and serve me those kinds of ads. At the very least, they should rotate the ads. And once they have my cookie, they should limit the number of times they will show me the same ad in a given period.
There is a reason that web-advertisements are not effective! Even when they have all the tools they need to track my browsing behaviour, profile my browsing habits, check which ads I click on, etc, they still keep pestering me with the same ad for the same product ten times in a minute! Even when they know the only outcome of this is that they loose the opportunity to sell me other stuff!
Obviously, I can take some steps myself for myself to get rid of the annoyance, such as pop-up blockers and so on. But that is not my point. What I do not understand is why even the big guys (content-providers) insist on giving the cheesiest advertisers the opportunity to drive customers away from their site. One should think that they would be smarter, but obviously they are not!
Funny you should mention it. I installed Zope recently on one of my Debian boxen. I noticed it uses HTTP Basic Authentication, the "antiquated" (read: standard, universal) mechanism to which you refer. It also has a "Logout" button that works -- if you select "Logout", it returns a page with an authentication failure code, which a browser interprets as meaning that the (username, password) pair it is caching is invalid.
The fact that you, or your Web application developer, did not think of that indicates that the Zope people know HTTP better than you or s/he. It certainly doesn't indicate anything the matter with HTTP Basic Authentication. And there's a lot right with using the protocol's built-in authentication mechanism rather than writing your own: it is easier; it requires less code; it is standard and works everywhere, unlike JavaScript; and it is better tested than any new mechanism you invent, meaning that it is less likely to fail badly and let people crack your application.
The first guy was right. Since the windows don't pop up in the first place, the mouseover events within those nonexistent windows can not occur.
Is it just me or could that last sentence be restated as: "We want to annoy you...but only a little bit."
God save us from clever programmers and clueless marketers.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
It's not stupidity that drives marketers to do such things. It's desperate greed. In case you haven't noticed there's still a lot of competition, on the 'net, for 'net surfers' attention. Everyone knows how to draw interest to one's products: provide entertaining/interesting content to attract your target market with how to buy links cleverly placed within the content. That is, sell by entertaining your target market. The difficulty is that this is not easy. Any relatively intelligent idiot (oxymoron? Nah!) can create an annoying pop-up/under ad if he/she is greedy enough. But, it takes inspiration and hard work (read genius) to create something interesting and entertaining.
"The enormous success for Orbitz is directly related to these pop-unders," said Mark Rattin, creative director for Chicago-based Otherwise. "There's an enormous segment of the population that are appreciating these ads."
So you're not appreciating these ads? You're clearly in the minority. Further, Orbitz is dependent on these kinds of ads so it can stay in business. I hope you support business, what are you, some kind of communist?
The problem is that these companies (Orbitz, not the advertiser) don't get that people HATE that crap and they risk alienating their potential customer base. The advertisers are irrelevant since they are a lower life form to begin with and would sell their mother, wife AND daughter if they could make a buck.
From the statement of the advertising exec, people who don't like this form of advertising are in the minority, and possibly some kind of social deviant. We'll see an increase in this garbage until it becomes economically ineffective (lawsuits, customer non-response, ANYTHING). The other solution is technology, such as browsers that prevent this kind of thing (Mozilla, or my fav - Phoenix), that filter it out. I block unrequested pop-ups and won't install Flash.
I may sound heartless here, but when people bitch about these ads, I feel little sympathy. There are other browsers (and products in general) out there that actually are built to protect the user. Yet people won't try anything new. Those who act like sheep shouldn't be suprised when they're lead to slaughter
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy