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?"
In many israelian sites, there are flash commercials that cover the contents, and are very hard to close.
You surf peacefully, and suddenly the screen is filled with lottery ad and the computer shouts " 50 millions!!! " at you.
There are other things, like a anti-virus ad that looks like the computer has been compromised, etc, which are just plain agressive.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
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?
Use Mozilla or Phoenix or Netscape 7.1 and turn them off. Probolem solved!
my hosts file is already several KB long. Another entry is added everytime an advertiser annoys me. Like Robofind. Soon to be Orbitz, I'm sure.
Yes, I use mozilla a lot, but I still need IE for some sites.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Pop-ups are by far the single most annoying thing on the web. I'd say that by this trend, we're only a step away from the pop-up ad that automatically installs GATOR and whatnot just by sitting at a keyboard.
What is disconcerning about these ads that it's the same thing as if you were watching TV, and there was a product on the screen. By glancing at the product, your channel is changed to an Infomercial about that product. If it's anything like other ads, changing back to your channel will give you 4 PIP windows that support that product and other products by that company.
I thought it was bad enough when I saw the anti-pop scripting that existed on a site I went to. I still use my trusty Pop-UP Killer (may it rest in peace), and was rather annoyed to be denied access to a site based on my software choice.
I am seriously starting to wonder about the legality of pop-up ads and internet spyware. I don't have a problem with things that function like a TV commericial (banner ads, or Advertisement and Click-to-continue at Gamespy), but I despise it when someone else tries to determine what I should look at, and hate it even more when someone decides to put something I didn't authorize on my system.
I say we gather up all these pop-up authors in room. Tie them all together, and make them run Windows Me on 386s. After that, we'll just send them to Equitorial Guinea to be humanitarian workers.
Go to espn to see this thing in action. I don't think this form of advertising is much worse than regular pop-ups, just slightly more annoying. I do wonder how advertising agencies will distinguish between eyeballs and click-throughs... since many people will click-through accidently on these things.
A favorite quote from the article: "There's an enormous segment of the population that are appreciating these ads". Eh, name one!
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It could be worse... They could make it so that your browser crashed whenever you went to certain webpa...
Oh wait. They already do that.
Nevermind.
Bowie J. Poag
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!
This has started with things like disabling the blink tag and having pop-up blockers, and now we see that browsers should not allow certain actions to be triggered simply by a mouseover, and so on. Remember things like this the next time you see someone on bugzilla commenting about how the browser has to respect command X because it's in the standard!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Maybe amazon should try and patent this type of thing, popup a window, when you mouse over it automatically purchase the book! Imagine the convenience, you no longer will have to even use the energy required to punch a single button, everything is taken care for you. And the best part is you don't even have to think about the purchase, the've already done it for you! Imagine getting the hottest book sells in the coutry delivered right to your door!
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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
How apt. Getting hit by all those popups can be very much like getting caught in a snowball fight.
This all sounds like nice possibilities for Mozilla (andother alternative browsers) to block those annoying ads in their default setup. Maybe M$ Internet Explorer might catch up one day, but I'm not waiting for that! ;-p
Hmm... Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
However, Moz could add a feature similar to "block images from this server", but "block scripts from this server". However, the scripts can still be on the actual web server which won't help much since it would again block *all* scripts from the server which we don't want.
A solution might be to tell Mozilla to "block scripts associated with images of this size".
That's the best I can think of now, since ads almost never change size and it's fairly unusual to have legitimate images in the same standardized size as advertisments.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Give this one a try.
simple javascript, surprised no one has thought of this before.
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.
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.
I found my cable modem has this long black thing plugged into it, and if I pull it out it completely and utterly cuts off all internet advertising... it's quite amazing.
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.
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!
It's the same numbers game that the SPAM mongers are playing.
Ie, if you can get even one half of one percent to buy something, with over 1 million people hitting your site, you still get 5000 customers. If each of those customers buy just one thing, the company is making money off of their "efforts".
Those who don't like it and don't buy are considered to not have wanted to buy in the first place.
The same is true of passing out flyers, sending spam emails, or going door-to-door. A numbers game.
Winged Power Photography
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.
Using a technique called the "kick through," advertisers can direct a person to another store if they simply kick their butt through the store entrance -- no walking is necessary.
"We're experiencing enormous success," said the company's VP of Consumer Compliance. "Excited customers just keep flying through the door."
The company's division of Consumer Compliance consists of only one employee, Lars Ulrich, former drummer of metal band Metallica and notorious anti-Napster advocate.
"BLOCKERS BAAAAAD! KICK THROUGH GOOOOOD!" exclaimed Ulrich as he pounded a confiscated MP3 player to pieces with his fists.
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!
How about you setup a seperate computer that automatically browses to any URL that is displayed in an ad? I'm sure that you could configure Squid with some ad-blocking software, and just modify it so that it uses lynk to open the ad and output the data to /dev/nul or something. That way, every time you visit a page with an ad, the ad gets clicked.
If enough people did this (or imagine a beow... n/m), you could really screw advertisers over.
Almost every executible GUI program we use today has many of these kinds of "pop-up" dialog boxes - some more complicated than others (from confirmation dialogs to config screens). And all of them serve a useful purpose.
I'm a firm believer that developing apps using HTTP/(X)HTML as an interface is a smart move, as opposed to writing an executible for a specific platform - since it is a true write-once, run-anywhere tech (well, access-anywhere, at least from as far as client access is concerned.) And there's no reason we, as web developers, shouldn't be able to use pop-up windows for web-enabled apps.
Just because commercial sites the world over have abused pop-(up|under)s, doesn't mean the technology itself is useless.
ps. - I realize Mozilla allows you to disable scripts from opening "unrequested" windows (ie. where any "window.open" call is ignored, unless it applies to link you just clicked), but for a complicated site with various domains (eg. secure/non-secure), or other complications, it still isn't a robust enough solution to those of use developing true web-enabled applications.
Phoenix has a pretty nice feature concerning this.
Whenever a window wants to pop up although you didn't click any link (so, most likely it was an ad), Phoenix will inform you that this has happened with a small exclamation mark in the left corner of the status bar.
Clicking on this exclamation mark will bring you to a window with more detailed information about the popup window, and the possibility to add this site to your list of sites that are allowed to open popups.
Sure, that goes with your warning that you might then also allow ad popups, while allowing the good, needed popups, but I think it does the job quite well. Had no problems with it.
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
...wow, can they make our web surfing experience any worse?
Three words:
CowboyNeal bestiality ads.
I'm going to go scrub my brain with brillo now.
The funny thing is, that companies that advertise like that then go on to claim that the hit count received by their website represents genuine interested visitors.
This of course is BS, but the sadly uneducated tech. media of today write an article about.
X10 did this, I got sick of reading in Computer Weekly etc. how X10 became one of the most visited sites on the Internet.
Visted???? Visited my pointed haired a***.
Slashdot them!
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
No, that would be just too intrusive. Instead, I'm guessing that we'll see more of
Just like ads in magazines, or commercials on TV.
Probably a good time to remind all the people forced to use Windows here of this little brilliant utility, which functions as a local proxy server and thus works with any browser, and can filter popups, the kind of mouseover events mentioned in this article, sounds, ads, everything. A must-have for Win32 people, in my opinion.
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.
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.
User: "What's this? My computer is too sl- AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!"
Doubleclick.net server: "Muhuhahaha..."
Glog!
Anybody who's done much Javascript can come up with plenty more annoying tricks, like hiding the close buttons, popping up a fake window, etc. Yahoo sortof does some of these with the DHTML ads. I guess the content providers wouldn't like it, but there's alot more annoying things that could be done. That being said, this is plenty annoying for me.
A small text-only non-obtrusive add that -- most importantly -- links to a comment section where potential clients can comment on the advertiser and, glory be, some rep from that company is there to answer questions and address criticisms.
For example, this ad and comment page for Johncompanies helped convince me to get a virtual dedicated host with them.
It also has the added benefit that the advertiser gets a real-life feel for how effective the ad is, and doesn't have to rely on some easily falsifiable clickthrough or impression report from the advertising company.
Now, if you're peddling shit, I'm sure this kind of instant-feedback type ad is not going to be your cup-of-tea. Another reason why I like these ads.
I went to epsn.com - another "search engine" owned by domain squatters. They call themselves "megago" this time.
However, it dropped down a Mozilla warning field!! Your only options are "Cancel" or "OK." Obviously, "OK" is the default, so if you hit return, off you go to some other website. Now that is a bunch of crap.grr..
Screenshot here
Although Microsoft has most likely done reasearch on pop up ad's and are aware of their customers wanting such a feature, Especially when MSN competitors are touting Pop Up Blockers as a feature of their service, not to mention the deceptive nature of popups these days, Microsoft Will not do it.
Why you Ask? Because They will get Sued for Being a Monopoly or Stifiling Competition, and Lose.
Dont Believe Me? When Outlook Express 4 was in it's beta stages, It had a spam filter similar to the one that Hotmail and Outlook currently have. You dont see it in Outlook Express because a company that was sending newsletters sued them for being a Monopoly because the Spam filter would fiter the companies Legitmate E-mail. Even though Microsoft explained that it was the way they were sending the mail and there was an easy fix to it, they didn't budge, They won the case, and Spam continues to flow to inboxes.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
Actually, I was thinking of something like this recently. There are a few really common bits of recycled code on the web. If google would look at the JS on the sites they index and determine if it is one of the common scripts which intends to spawn a popup onload (and even worse if that popup has onmouseover JS) they could put a little frowny face or exclamation mark icon next to the listing in their search results. If you saw that flag then you could just open the Google cached page and not have to worry about the evil popups.
I user Mozilla and Phoenix so I'm unbothered by all of this but I think it would be a great service for google to offer. If it was controversial then maybe Google could launch it among several similarl new "flags" for search results. They already have page size. They could add to that "image intensive", "not screen-reader accessible", "plugins used", and any number of other useful bits of information that I'm sure they could develop the technology to harvest when they index sites.
--Asa