Slashdot Mirror
New Ultra-Intrusive Pop-up Ads Introduced
CrashRide writes "According to this story at AdAge.com, Unicast is attempting to introduce a new on-line ad format that takes over the entire screen of the PC for about 15 seconds and must be closed by the viewer. "The ultra-intrusive new format opens when a user is on one page of a Web site and clicks a link to go to another page on the same site. Instead of seeing that new page, the user sees an ad that fills the entire screen.""
Can't pop up killers take this out?
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
Anyone else worried about the quality of the net degrading? How long until peopel are so fed up that they just stop using it?
Ok So I'm not going to stop using the net, I will continue to do what I always have done. When a website resorts to these Ad tactics, I either a) give them money to stop as is the case with slashdot. ONLY if the content on the site is worth the price they are asking though b) use the handy features of phoenix to make the site usable, block ads from this server, nuke this image, dont allow pop ups or javascripts. or c) stop using the site all together.
I imagine these ads will piss off users and confuse the hell out of net illiterate types, to the point where they just stop visiting that site. What good is running a website and selling advertising space if NOBODY is watching anymore? Seems to me if sites are so desperate for advertising dollars, there is a better, less intrusive way to do it. Or maybe they should call it quits.
I like my slashdot subscription, but im curious if they makes more money from me removing the ads or from me viewing the ads?
This article said the ads would be 300k. Imagine some poor sap on dialup who has to download that crap when he is quickly clicking through links and subjected to 4 or 5 of these stupid things.
If I ever get one of these awful ads shoved in my face, I assure you I will not be coming back for seconds.
no seriously - like the subject says - until they develop a digital technology that invades my ass without my permission - then they best lay off prepending "Ultra" to that shit.
otherwise you leave yourself no room once they do develop ass prodding software in ads.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it sure is going to make me never to visit that site again.
guru in training
won't have me as a visitor anymore.
My penguin ate my sig
... a word from our pop-up. OK, a thousand words.
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
I used to see a lot of popup ads before Mozilla could block them. Are the advertisers still using them?
See what I've been reading.
Disable page moving, page resizing, and bringing page to foreground.
The ultra-intrusive new format opens when a user is on one page of a Web site and clicks a link to go to another page on the same site. Instead of seeing that new page, the user sees an ad that fills the entire screen.
And this means that if somebody starts using them, I leave their site. How long until Yahoo starts using these?
This sig no verb.
where's my copy of Lynx!
While surfing around at work during some downtime and all the sudden you land on a questionable site and BAM a big vagina pops on your screen for 15 seconds...
You begin freaking out but that doesn't compare to the reaction your boss is going to have when he walks by...
100% Insightful
1. Think of a bigger and better ad.
2. Piss off everyone that sees the ad.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
webpage
Speaking for myself, I'd visit a site that used something so incredibly annoying exactly once. It shouldn't take site operators long to notice that no one ever clicks more than one layer down into their site and realize why.
First post WOOHOO
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
Go calculate something
I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control, just like we have pop-up control now.
If it gets obnoxious enough, people will find ways around it.
This one will work quickly to do two things.
1. make sure a user of a website is forced to see at least one ad for 15 seconds.
2. make sure the user goes "wtf is this shit?" and go find a better site without that kind of crap.
even if it becomes pervasive, and 90% of sites use this kind of 'feature' in its ads, it'll force people over to the sites who don't... which will in turn increase their traffic and own ad revenue.
tards!
Power users won't have a problem with this. Either this will be easy to block with Mozilla or only work with IE or people will get so fed up that it'll peter out quickly. I've been using Mozilla so long it's always a harsh shock when I use IE and pop-ups start cluttering everything. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who get used to sitting through this crap and it'll catch on.
I use Opera anyway, with all my windows contained within one MDI container, so there's no way it could hope to take over my entire screen. Additionally, I have the browser set not to open pop-up windows I don't ask for explicitly by clicking on links.
;)
I think this mostly just affects the poor schmucks still using Internet Explorer out there.
Don't see the point of a pop-up. However I have set my Mac to emit a large belch every time it smacks down a popup for me. I like that.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Mozilla Javascript Filtering!
These types of ads are very effective at killing the number of visitors to a web site. I know when a web site that I visit starts using click though ads I stop visiting it. IGN lost me that way.
the flash ads that pop up right in the middle of the article i am reading were annoying. this seems orders of magnitude more irritating.
good work!!
Fight popups with spam. All of us with high speed internet need to spam the hell out of these sites.
Or other pop-up blocker. If that doesn't work, turn off Javascript. If they have found a way to do it without Javascript then I'll be impressed and I'll want to see the code (I'll also never visit the site again).
The Anti-Blog
..for me when I'm not sitting at the computer, so I can replay "my" browsing session without ads later on. Just delightful. I just can't wait until the whole world is super-broadband so these delightful adverts can feature full video and sound. Sigh.
"Trust in haste. Repent at leisure"
RealMedia has cornered the market on "ass penetrating" software for the past several years.
That's certainly one way to discourage traffic at your site. Maybe they should make sure it flickers through a whole bunch of colors really, really fast just to make sure that no one will come back. Oh yeah, and don't forget really loud obnoxious sound either. The advertising trifecta of annoyance!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
But does it work in Lynx?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
I guess it's an advantage to use Mozilla and alternative open source OSes. Now we can keep this crap (probably IE oriented) from showing up on our screens.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These have been in common use in porn sites for years.
Of course, this is not through personal experence.
Of course.
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
Can I get these on OS X? I hope not.
It's a great way to cut down on those pesky bandwidth bills... make sure no one ever comes to your site twice!
Can't you right-click on it, select "open in a new window", causing it to be put in a browser as any other web page would?
Anyway, I believe that any ads in this form will backfire. I won't buy anything from those who'll do something like this. Who wants their entire screens to be occupied by advertising?
I just thank God that I use and prefer web browsers like Mozilla that will disable unrequested pop-up windows if I choose. Still, this is a new low for ads and these will be the ultimate in making end users mad beyond belief.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
even if you do get one of these ads, it's called alt+F4 (doesn't matter if you can't click the X).
Why not just call them "Stop all future traffic for your site" ads.
I know the _instant_ I ever see anything like this, that will be the very last time I go near that site.
Wow. These guys are not just evil, but their command of English is even worse than the Slashdot editors. Here's a direct quote from the article:
CmdrTaco is better than that on his worst day. I hope they can program better than they can write English, or there are going to be a lot of crashing web browsers when this thing comes out.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
This is just like interstitial ads which have been around for ages and pretty much force you to view the ad until you can continue to the next page where the content really is.
Hopefully popup killers will be able to nuke this new type though.
Garbage like this just makes b0rken browsers like IE less and less tolerable to Joe User. Making Joe unhappy with IE is good because the sites the rest of us need to use will be less and less able to count on IE as some "universal standard."
As the French Revolutionaries put it, "The worse, the better."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I tell you what, IF anything takes over my screen befor asking i will regard it as a virus and report it. And i will demand compensation for the damage the virus did (eg took my screen over)
I dont minde banner adds, or such, but if something takes over my screen and does not let me close it wiht atl f4 or any other "normal" means then it will be treeted just as the rest of the viruses out there that take over screens.
'scuse my ignorance on the laws on this, but aren't pop-ups possibly illegal? Could it not be proven somewhere in some court that these pop ups (and other other for that matter) are indeed a way of "hijacking" a computer? The original intent of a user was to go to a website. Banner ads are ok, similar to something like a billboard. If we are to follow that same analogy, pop ups would be a billboard suddenly appear in the middle of the road and you have to activly avoid it in order to move on.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
Yet another plus to using Mozilla, or Firebird, or Opera, or... Well, another plus to using anything *other* than IE, actually.
I see things are going to get worse before they get better. If you ask me, the most sure-fire way to make sure I don't ever find out more or buy a product or service, is to advertise it in such an invasive manner. This is practically rape of the mind.
This Program is fantastic for killing popup ads. and better yet, it's free. you can export your list so you can use the same list on other machines, and you only ad the popups that you want dead to the list. so, at first, you'll be busy adding them to the list, but eventually your system will kill a series of 5-6 popups just with pow sitting with its tiny footprint in the system tray.
So when are they going to come into my house, tie me down, cram lidlocks into my eyes, and force me to watch their drivel? It seems that we're getting closer every day.
Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right about the evils of technology...
A pop-up ad is one thing. It's small code and content-wise. It probably takes 3-4 seconds to download, but the article states that these new ads are 300K!!! That's almost a full minute to download at 56K modem speeds.
If their going to force people to spend 1 minute to download an ad (plus a forced 15 seconds to view the ad), they had better come up with a way to reimburse people, either financially, or with MUCH better content.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The real victim here is going to be the ability to use scripts on web pages. It's almost to the point where I'll turn off scripting entirely just to get away from these terrible things. It's like the ability to put macro things in emails. It could provide valuable new capabilities, but it's ruined by abuse.
I think it is a good thing, it will speed deployment of mozilla, and other browsers with pop-up blocking features.
The most dissapointing thing is I think adult sites have been doing this for a while now. So it really isnt new.
Anyways this technology doesnt really affect me as I dont have the features enabled to take advantage of their new ads.
They're free to do what they want with their sites but we're also free not to view their sites.
I think that with AOL reducing pop-up ads that you wont see too many of this format.
Honestly, how many advertisers who are going to use this type of pop-up ad actually believe it will put the ad viewer in a buying frame of mind? Personally, if this happens to me, I will take care to note what company forced the ad upon me and do everything I can to not purchase products manufactured by them, and let all of my friends and family know that the company is not one to do business with.
This is just pur evil. For those of us on slow connections a 300K add may take a minute or so to download. Thankfully you can disable pop-ups in Mozilla (galeon etc). Settings/Allow Popups. Simple
Also if I do get to see one of these I'm going to just blacklist the host in my DNS. Yeah they might move IP but I can just keep blacklisting. I understand people have to pay for websites and advertise but this is just shoving it to far down my throat.
Least with normal Media I can ignore it or just change channel
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
My coworker was fuming after a full-screen ad took over his screen after while he was going to msn.com.
If he's any indication of whether or not these things work, well, I think this won't go over well with people at all. It may turn some people off of the advertised products. In any case, use mozilla or netscape with pop-up blockers...and don't set msn.com to be your homepage *sigh*.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Every browser with pop-up killing capabilities tuned at these ultra-annoying ads will take market share. The least technologically savvy will be driven to "peaking under the hood", installing new browsers that prevent such invasive, annoying assaults.
This isn't new or anything. I wonder if the poster of this has ever surfed for some good hardcore p0rn. I get those full screen popups all the time whenever im p0rn searchin. Nothing new. Just gotta be fast with the Alt-F4 key. ;)
I've seen this before, sites have been doing this for at least a couple months now. And the only major browser that it'll really work on is IE. With Mozilla and other real browsers, you can disable the Javascript it uses (window resizing and repositioning).
This isn't a very new concept.
Two examples that come to mind are Salon and Gamespy.
If your not a member, then your forced to view a page (which is most likely fullscreen since that is how most of us use our browsers) for a few seconds before going to the actual news/preview/review/screenshot/etc.
I know other sites have used this method of full screen same site ads before. So call it anything but new.
Question everything.
This idea probably won't pan out, but I could see a limited use for it. Websites that stream a video or a memory intensive application might say that the cost of the free download/view is to view this commercial (kind of what Salon does today). In other words, you have to consciously choose to endure it and you are warned in advance).
A lot of times, though, you are not warned about this kind of ad, and that is really annoying. It's getting to the point where I need to keep javascript off permanently. It's starting to get extremely bothersome to go to a site that uses popups (even for legitimate uses). Besides the delay in getting the popup to appear, you lose the focus on the main page you're on.
Gosh, if they have anything like popups, they need to have a timing mechanism to close this popups automatically.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I guess this makes the other ad story 3 or 4 down the main page a bit of a moot point.
I've felt all along that at some point the internet would let me know that I wasn't needed anymore.
I will admit that it was subtle. I thought the pop-up ads were a plea for attention, but the concept of full screen ads is a direct hint that I am no longer needed.
It's time to curl up to an ex called sunlight.
http://use.perl.org
Has anyone ever looked at the angle that a good amount of bandwidth gets wasted with Popup ads.Especially the new heavy duty ones which hang ur IE.I just went to a tripod site yesterday(my fault) and it opened so many popups i could'nt find the original window.
Lord of the Binges.
www.proxomitron.org
I wonder if they actully did this because of browsers like mozilla that have the option to only open popups you click. I guess this is one way to force them to get a popup.
I also have seen popups in mozilla dispite having it set that way, and can't remember who it was, but I think they are doing some sort of new window or using obscured java.
I've run into these things all over the net, usually on the *ahem* underground sites. Imho, a full screen pop-up ad is better than those stupid pop-under applets that create new pop-up ads every 20 seconds. I prefer in my face advertising to the subversive type.
As long as the ad doesn't spawn an infinite loop of more ads, it's not too bad. A simple alt+f4 will take it out.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I've been using this little app for the past 4 months. It has changed my browsing expeirence forever. I have never gotten an unwanted pop-up since.
1. Find out who does these ads. 2. Do not buy products or services from these places.
I really am not looking forward to these ads. Nor am I looking forward to a Web that accepts them. The nice thing about the web right now is that you CAN ignore the _(*$! ads. If I see something that intrests me I'LL FOLLOW IT. But I don't want life-size porn popping up on my screen when I follow a bad link.
My opinion: if you can't make money off of what you are currently doing, maybe you should consider the fact that it might be a bad idea(tm). Or at least recognize that you aren't going to make oodles of cash from click-throughs.
"Never upset a goalie, getting hit with a blocker is an unpleasent experience - facemask or not." -Me
How is this different -- or worse -- than sites that stick an interstitial between pages. Even Yahoo makes you view an ad after reading more than a few Groups postings, then you click "Continue on to the next message" or the like.
At least if this is a genuine pop-up, you can use a pop-up blocking utility to kill it. With the interstitial ads there's no way around it because they're actually integrated into the page.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
I'm sure this is just a natural progression of advertizing and
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Support Think Geek
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it will go away eventually as it is deemed ineffective. Unfortunately all the IE users are going to be stuck in the meantime. Another plus for mozilla.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
... for any website that uses it!
does anyone know how they work or what browsers they work with??? like do you have to use ie or do you have to have flash installed? am i safe if i use mozilla or opera with popups blocked?
I propose that we build a database and client application in which people can connect and download the offensive unicast ads thereby making their ad formats untrackable. The full ads won't be partiucularly useful if the activity and impressions can't be accurately tracked (becuase of all of the downloads by people participating). In addition the "number of impressions" that are served will be inaccurate and advertisers campaigns will not run as long.
This is nothing new. Porn sites have had these full screen pop-ups for years. The worst ones are the ones with sound. Nothing worse than trying to masterbate quitely at night when one of these pop-ups take over your screan and plays at a volume load enough to wake up your roomate "Ooooohhhh! Hi, my name is Candy and I have a secret web site." That's intrusive.
Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format will enable advertisers to reach their audiences "with the same impact" as TV.
As with anything, their will be a portion of the population who will avoid this like the plague. The same people who watch PBS and pay for Cable (or liberate it in my case) so they can avoid the broadcast-friends-cop-drama-pap.
#2, will this work *anywhere* other than Windows w/ IE? Further driving the masses to somewhere where their PC did not become a vector for advertisers ala television.
Aside from porn sites, how does the company intend on selling such a service?
Everyone knows that pop ups are a hated thing by all users. So why would a in your face, take over the screen approach be that much better?
How would you sell this? If I were a company the last thing I would want is to take over the screen or use pop ups. It seems it would hurt the company's reputation or brand recognition more than help them.
I've disabled Javascript since it serves no real purpose anyway, and I haven't seen a popup ad since.
I remember when segas heat.net went live (96 I think) when you wanted to play a game there you had to sit thrue a 15 second fullscreen ad. It wasnt that bad couse you got a free gaming service that worked with ipx for free basicly. I dont see how a full screen ad working well for a basic web site thoe, I think most people will just refuse to visit that site again
There's a limit to the amount people will take. And for me, the limit was passed at about Mach 8 by that little number. I wouldn't even frequent a site that had that.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Unicast
I haven't seen it in the last week or so, but checking ol' Ebert's movie reviews (http://www.suntimes.com/ebert) was a PITA during April, because I would get one of those damn "Bend it Like Beckham" fullscreen ads, and couldn't make it go away.
To make it even MORE annoying, it displayed one when I CLOSED the browser at the main review page! I had to wait nearly 15 or 20 seconds before it closed itself.
Sure 300k is nothing to those of us that have broadband. But those poor dial-up people will have to wait 30 seconds for the 15 second add to start!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
A few good popup killers for IE (for those unfortunate enough to browse without Mozilla);
hdsoft PopNot - Shareware, personal favorite
Panicware Pop-up Stopper - free
EMS Project - free
Meaya Popup Filter - shareware
The story web page had two "Action Cancelled" panels. I guess they were fron DoubleClick or something? (Routes to 0.0.0.0 here.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
NOooo!
Anyone remember the Bloom County where the TV chases Rosebud outside and is jumping on him yelling something like: "DON'T YOU WEAR BRUT AFTERSHAVE!?! WOMEN WON'T FIND YOU ATTRACTIVE!!!"
I need to pull those books back out...
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
Wonderful. So, in essence, Unicast is attempting to bring the lovely porn site advertising model to the entire internet.
;)
Except that there is just one tiny problem... porn sites have a carrot that can entice their prospective patrons into looking past such distractions: PORN. Most web sites don't offer anything that has such a powerful and nearly universal appeal.
I predict that this new advertising paradigm will have a half life measurable in weeks...
I visited the page with the article, and the first thing I saw was an ad for that perisite of a program gator, which has caused our sys admins here to enjoy a few less hours of this wonderful spring weather.
I couldn't bring myself to take seriously a page advertising that crap, so I would imagine that I will take pages with the full screen ads even less seriously.
Sorry if this seems like a rant; an out of line statement compared to what I'm sure will be positive remarks (yeah right!).
to get rid of many pop ups... just resolve pesky ad hosts to 127.0.0.1. Works like a charm
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 popup.msn.com
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com
-Afreet
Numerous sites have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. I doubt it's especially effective, and I doubt that it'll be too popular -- but it's certainly nothing new. And there's nothing all that insidious about it, either: if a particular web site wants to go down this route, that's clearly their right -- and their audience will react accordingly.
Still, there are cases where I really don't consider it a big deal. gamespot.com, for example, puts up adverts for non-paying readers which hold them up for a few seconds. Which is fair enough, really: it's their content, and they've a right to do with it what they will. Of course it gets a little more dodgy when people start using scripting and the like to force their windows to behave in a modal fashion (which is, I suspect, what these people are *really* getting towards) -- but, hey, that's the technology we're dealing with, and anything that leads to technical improvements will likely only be a good thing in the long run.
I don't think the sky's falling to anywhere near the extent that Slashdot is implying (but hey, what's new there?) There's nothing to really see, here.. the only remotely surprising idea would be that anyone would consider this new technology or pay a premium for its implementation - you'd figure it was something any web monkey could put together in five minutes..
I quit visiting CBSMarketwatch (mentioned in the article) and MotleyFool simply because of those types of ads. When Weather.com got pop-ups, I nearly quit going there as well, but I guess I can live with pop-ups. What I can't live with is something that zips accross my screen and makes all kinds of sounds WHILE I'M AT WORK! But I'm sure no one visits CBSMarketwatch at work. Yeah, right.
You use, you lose. Would Google be search engine king if it had pop-ups, flash animation, things zipping across the screen, or 15 second full screen ads? I refuse to sink to the level to even answer such a simple common-sense question.
Those ads probably cost more and therefore generate more initial revenue for anyone visiting the sites that use them. But if you make enough surfers annoyed (as this will), eventually they won't come to your site anymore.
--
Slashdolt
Talk about killing the goose and all that. Piss your readers off. Maybe Wired should go with the Salon model (view an ad, get a few pages).
Didn't read the article because it's apparently /.ed but if from when the blurb says is correct, then these ads effectively take control of the user system without their permission and prevent the user from doing anything for 15 seconds. Could this not be construed as hacking the user's system?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
wtf? wtf? dun we say that way too many times after we shut the window n a million other open n you go "wtf? did'nt i just shut that crap?". and u thought u were quick enough to hide porn when ur mom entered the room.
Lord of the Binges.
"full-screen, 15-second, 300k online ad."
Since 70% of those who use the internet still rely on dialup connections, all those who would even THINK of waiting for a 300K ad to download, please raise your hand. Then, don't walk, RUN to your nearest phone to cancel your internet account.
like http://www.proxomitron.org/ . You can customize all of the filters to deal with new ads. Because of the nature of the web, so long as we are using HTTP it will always be possible to choose what content you see.
Besides, web sites aren't going to run 300k ads unless it's worth the bandwith. If ads cost 10k, who cares if you have a 1% click-through rate...but if you're spending 30 times that amount, the math just doesn't work as well.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I've seen a bunch of posts about using Alt + F4. I've seen ads similar to this that are not in the browser window but are full screen flash. There is no X to click and Alt + F4 doesn't work. Those are horrible.
Since they'll probably do this crap with flash..
How to Uninstall Flash Manually (for Linux users)
Direct link to Win32 Uninstaller
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
I've noticed a very slow Orbitz popunder on the NY Times website for quite some time now. It doesn't take up the entire screen, but it paints very slowly. At first I thought it was just a performance problem, then I realized it was intentional.
Pick your poison:
Phoenix/Firebird - blocked
Opera - blocked
Mozilla - blocked
Netscape - blocked
IE - oh thats a feature.
But hey, after your wife has a few kids, then that's all you got.
And what pisses me off is she acts like she's doing me a favor sharing her big vagina. I was bored with it 10 years ago. Cripes.
So then you'd figure she'd do anal because *that's* got to be a little bit tighter, right? But no, you'd think you asked her to sell her soul to the devil.
So you're stuck with her lying there, no longer doing BJ's because as far as I could tell, she only did them when we were dating, and then I'd have to ask. And now, she thinks swallowing is like I asked her to cut off her hand with a saw.
And during sex, you can get her off, but she won't *help* with that job. Its like, my job to have my orgasm and her orgasm. And then if you're not up to it that night, its like a big disappointment. So you figure that jacking off isn't so bad because then you don't feel guilty about it, and you don't have to pretend that it was wonderful.
And so you want to knock off a piece of 20 year old ass. But you don't dare, because you've got 25 years of savings, a couple cars, some kids, a nice house, some money put away, and you don't want to risk that on divorce court, just because you want a little strange. Its no big deal. But it is to her.
What I don't get is... wives don't want to give you sex, but they don't want you to have sex with someone else. Its as bad as every fricking church, always trying to control your sex drive.
Before you say anything else, my wife was really cool before we were married, and she was really very cool until kids. Then all of a sudden, she's a mother, and its like toyland... once she goes from being a wife to a mother, she never, ever goes back.
Laugh at me, but this is your life in 20 years. No kidding.
I really love this kind of thing, and I honestly hope that AOL decides to use it (though, I doubt that will happen because AOL has made it clear that they were burned badly by popups in the past).
Why is this good? Because those of us who hate these things with a passion have already blocked them (tweaking may be required on sites that agree to pop-up on-click), but there's a pain-threshold problem that leads MOST people to avoid blocking suck things. Once the ads start disrupting sessions so badly that no one can stand it, all of the browsers out there will simply not allow this foolishness.
The next step is to start browsing a derivative of the Web that is extracted, reviewed, filtered and THEN delivered to the user... someone could make a whole lot of money. Heck, several companies could (which would be better that any one company doing it, of course).
Let's hope no one combines this pop-up technology with.. THE LINK. (you know which one I'm talking about.)
Having that image full screen for a mandatory 15 seconds.. *shudder*
Unicast has their gallery of examples here. See the examples for "full-screen superstitials" -- Unicast's name for their format.
Unicast claims these ads will be *less* annoying than pop-ups, because, rather than open new windows you have to close, this ad format temporarily takes over the existing window, and people are used to this style (think TV commercials).
And, for those posters who wonder what types of sites would consider using this...Unicast has a list here.
...I'm glad I use a Mac.
Breakfast served all day!
"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing, Unicast.
Heh. I agree wholeheartedly on the point of technology not getting in the way--if what they do annoys me, I'll work around it, regardless of whatever technology they employ to keep me from doing so. The marketroids may not yet realize it, but computer geeks know how to use technology, too!
I'd say that this is like biting the hand that feeds you, but it's really more like biting the ass that flaps at you from a passing car's window. It's a really, really bad idea, the execution is almost guaranteed to be ugly, and in the end, the marketer's face is gonna be in a whole lot worse shape than the geek's ass...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Scot McLernon, CBS MarketWatch.com executive vice president of sales and marketing, said: "We're still in discussions with Unicast about the full-page on how we want to best utilize it. We might use it as you enter into channel headers, but I don't want to interrupt the reading of a story."
CBS evidently defines a interruption of reading a story as any delay 15 seconds or less. In related news the US military has decided anything less than a 1000 bomb is not really a bomb. It is just an annoyance to hostile forces in the area.
Come on! Lets call it what it is...
A 15 second, I hope you pay attention to me but don't feel like we are wasting your time or bandwidth, commericial.
Wonder why they reporter asked the executive vice president of sales and marketing? Its not like sales and marketing really waste any of you time now... do they?
"...the creative you build is what gets shown,..."
Run that by me again?
char sig[120] = "\0"
I seem to remember Salon doing this same thing for a while. The onion does it took, except you have the option to be redirected by clicking a link.
Oh yeah, and of course I agree that it blows.
-Liam
whats so new bout this anyways?
here in germany we have full screen flash ads for quite a while now. you can close them with ALT+F4 only or wait til they finish.
this is the whole spam and advertising capitalistic mafia.
fuck them spammers and advertizers. they are all the same.
Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format will enable advertisers to reach their audiences "with the same impact" as TV.
Man this really bothers me. The web put the consumers back in control; We don't like what you've got to say? Then we just hit the "back" button. I really wish more people would stop trying to turn the web into TV and get onboard the cluetrain. Thank god "push" technology was stillborn in '98.
RPGVault over at IGN has been doing this for a while now. I find it less painful than anything that forces you to wait...like Gamespot.
Why does anyone run software on their machine that allows a third party to do something they don't want?
If the next word processor allowed third parties to alter your documents (forcing you to delete the insertions) nobody would use it. So why do people use web browsers that allow third parties to do these productivity destroying things?
I have nothing against adds, but I sure as hell don't find it unreasonable to expect my software NOT to accept commands from a third party telling it to do something I don't want.
This is why I havent seen a pop-up ad in months, maybe even years.
I first saw porn sites that popped up an ad page, hid all the window decorations and then maximized the window about 5 years ago. Of course I haven't seen popups at ALL since I learned how to turn off javascript about 3 days later.
/etc/hosts now ...
I guess I'll just have to alias the entire unicast.com domain to the good old 127.0.0.1 IP address in
utter rubbish
And /. the bastards! It seems they are in flash btw...
Some demonstrations from the company are here
It's a screen with a blue background with some text on it, can't find a way out of it though :)
Surely these adverts can be killed on Windows by pressing ALT F4 or CTRL ALT DEL then kill the window.
Forget popups, even worse are those Flash ads that pop up, make all kinds of horrible noise, and cover what you are trying to read. I almost stopped going to wired.com because of those. After a visit to CounterExploitation , I discovered the Proxomitron and tried it out...It has eliminated 99% of ads. It even lets the "good" popups though, such as when you are shopping online and your cart pops up. Sometimes it causes problems with legitimate sites that require certain Javascript commands to operate properly, but it's easy enough to temporarily turn off Proxomitron to see those sites.
It basically works by acting as a local proxy on your computer. As web requests comes down, it rewrites the http stream on the fly to get rid of objectionable commands (blink tags, status line scrollers, background midi music, popups, etc). All filters are 100% customizable, but the ones it comes with do a great job.
-R
So, let me guess... These 'ultra-intrusive' ads are only compatable with IE? I mean, Mozilla can have options changed to stop windows from resizing, and to stop pop-ups from appearing in the first place.
Guess what I'm trying to say is: "I don't use IE, so I don't give a shit."
It's about time people saw that there are other, better browsers out there like Mozilla and Opera, and maybe this will push users to seek out alternative options.
I for one, support these ads.... simply because they'll push users away from the sites concerned, (so in the end they'll lose money), and will make people try out alternative options apart from what Microsoft shove in their laps.
Ads the viewers no longer coming to your website are sure to see.
paintball
Remember that these aren't just popups -- they're pop-up inters...intestin....er, pop-up intermediate pages between where you clicked and where you were going.
A simple pop-up blocker that blocks ALL pop-ups won't help, cause you'll click on the link and nothing will happen. A pop-up blocker that blocks unrequested pop-ups but allows those you "asked for" with a click won't stop them, they'll show up ('cause they appeared as a result of a click).
Finally, something that recognizes, even for "requested" pop-ups, that it's a fiendish full-screen hijacker pop-up, won't help too much if it simply resizes the window, shoves it into your current tab, etc. It'll still have to dig into the pop-up data to figure out what link to go to next (which might not be obvious, could be randomly obfuscated, etc.) Plus, they could put a bunch of links into the pop-up, for more information, to get on a mailing list, etc., and only one of them (which one??) would continue you through to the original link.
Basically, you can turn 'em off, but you can't get to the content w/out living with it. And there are LOTS of ways they can prevent you from getting there, automatically, without seeing their ad.
(at least, this is what I'd expect, as I haven't seen any of these yet. but I haven't yet seen anyone come up with a way to skip the interstitials (there's that word again!) on, say, salon.com.)
Seriously, what kind of person actually goes to a site that even uses regular pop-up ads?????
Sites like this will just go straight to popup killer's "terminate with extreme prejudice" list..
-jon
I don't think so. Terra Lycos has been doing this for over a month (AFAIK) with a Mercedes Benz ad.
News for nerds?
The Gator Corporation is the leader in online marketing. It also produces some of the Web's most popular applications.
The Gator Corporation's History of Success
Founded in 1998, The Gator Corporation is a privately held company based in Redwood City, CA. Since the launch of its first software application, GatorSM eWallet, to the public in June 1999, The Gator Corporation has become one of the world's largest behavioral marketing networks and software distributors. The company now runs consistently one of the 25 most trafficked Web properties in the world. The Gator Corporation software portfolio also includes Precision TimeSM, Date Manager and OfferCompanionSM.
The corporate headquarters are in Redwood City, CA. Sales offices are in Chicago and New York City. The company also has support staff throughout the United States.
Headquarters:
The Gator Corporation
2000 Bridge Parkway, Suite 100
Redwood City, CA 94065
Tel: 650-232-0300
Fax: 650-232-0400
Email: info@gatorcorporation.com
I also reply below your current threshold.
I used to like this site until they started redirecting me to ads that weren't exactly popups.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
This just makes me more thankful for Privoxy. As an example, here are some fun rules I created. (Note, the regexps should be all on one line, regardless of what your browser displays.)
Remove IGN interstitials: this skips them for the most part. I'm sure it can be modified for other places. (I pay for IGN Insider and shouldn't be subjected to this. Granted recently they've introduced a feature to switch off ads for insiders, but this is still a useful example.)
Just add +filter{ign} to your default.action.
Here's another one that makes a certain site you might be reading look considerably nicer:
Of course, you should support any sites that you like. As I said, I subscribe to IGN, as they provide a great deal of extra content for insiders, in addition to an already great site.
But ads still suck.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It doesn't work like that in a newspaper at all... Do they hire some guy to force you to stare at ads in between articles?
Now *that* would be ultra intrusive...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
He'll nearly break his hand trying to madly scribble down the URL (for later "disciplinary" purposes of course... bad monkey! bad monkey!!)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The impression I got was that the ads are 300k and must be pre-buffered before they'll start playing. If someone (i.e., me) is still on dial-up, they're going to be sitting on their thumb for about 1 to 2 minutes while they're waiting for that thing to preload. That, I think, would be even more irritating than the 15 second ad itself.
They call the Superstitial ads. They're very proud and excited about them. You can see them here.
Basically it looks like a full screen java script pop-up with flash content. Fortunately, Konqueror immediately complained about java script wanting to open a new window (I have it set to prompt), so it looks like these won't be much of a problem for the clueful user.
Still, the fact that a company is expending effort in the development of more intrusive advertising is reprehensible. Therefore....
Slashdot them here
. . . a penile device that could be plugged into a USB port that would be required in order to access certain sites. Simply insert the device in the appropriate orifice, then point and click for an innovate new advertising experience! I am sure people would love this creative innovation almost as much as the new "intrusive" popup screen!
Indeed, IGN, GameSpot, and others have taken their share of flack for ads similar to those described here - an ad that the user is forced to view before they can reach the content they came for.
Two major differences, though. The first is the fact that the Unicast ads hoard the entire screen area. IGN ads leave your browser controls intact.
Second,
As I understand it, IGN presents you with the click-through ad only once, upon your initial arrival to the site, and then never again that session. The Unicast way of doing things is to take over your screen for 15 seconds (not taking into account load time, so this is likely far more) every time you request a new page.
The good news is that these fullscreen 300k 15 second abominations are, in all likelihood, Flash or some other ActiveX control - and thus easily blocked.
Now really, do I need to see a 2048x1536 advertisement on an 800x800 browser? I mean, I don't even want to know how long a flashing, annoying animated gif would take to load if it were that large.
Thank god for mozilla. I haven't seen a popup in months.
America - Home of the scapegoat, land of the Corporation
Mods, ANYONE who has access to the STATS can this be quantified ?
MrCaseyB,"I like my slashdot subscription, but I'm curious if they makes more money from me removing the ads or from me viewing the ads?"
Would It be better if I just gave in and clicked a couple dozen ads a day on a site I liked and wanted to support, or does micropayment scheme work out better ?
This is like the VOD, a pipe dream, the bandwidth isn't there, and why would the customer front the bill for it anyways ? Maybe it is time for a viewer micropayment system, keep track of the ads I watch and ensure my isp is credited with them, and I get a discount based on my demographic contribution ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Block all widely known advertising sites and keywords within urls.
I love routers.
Forcing someone to view their adverts is crap, your lazy-boy doesnt strap you down and hijack the clicker when a commercial comes on.
If I ever get one of those, I will DDoS the offending server.
Not like i actually look at pr0n or anything *wink* but i'm sure everyone's familiar with some sites that either when you load them, or when you leave them they pop up the full-screen browser window (without a titlebar or any buttons so you can close it) usually advertising another site.
comments?
the ads will work this way
page A *click* page of a stupid ad, with a link thats on the ad *click* page B
@_@
Things like this make me more and more convinced that computer science curricula should be 75% ethics & 25% coding. What kind of demented person would write this kind of bovine by-product? Um, I think I've found my answer in the holy writ:
<MUSIC>
</MUSIC>- "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", Bob Dylan
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Fortunately, the X to close is easily spotted, and can be closed before the ad even fades in. If the ads suggested in the article operate as courteously I will not have a problem with them (or with ignoring them).
----------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
...out of my mind was that this looks familiar.where have I seen that b4?Then I remembered surfing to Salon,where u get a 'free' subscription to the articles for 'enduring' a minute of advt. Thanks no thanx. When r these morons going to learn that what works for one medium may not work for another.Why not put a commercial on radio that requires visual acuity of the listener:-)?
Because their pop-blocking, configurable-javascript-window-i ons ultra power cool Mozilla
meddling-permiss
Firebird Browser will keep these ads away.
What everyone seens to forget is that once these
adds are coming in when you are clicking to another
link, the actual page you want to see will probably
only become avaliable after the dreaded 15 seconds.
So, at most one will not see the add, but would
probably have to wait the full 15 seconds + add
download time to get to the page he wanted to see.
-><- no
You briefly mention a good point, which is that as/if the web gets more intrusive, software makers will respond by adding features demanded by the users to block these ads from even appearing. So the solution isn't bigger is better (in this case, bigger ads).
-- Kircle
Wouldn't that be a nightmare?
-Lucas
Honestly, why do marketers think that if they beligerently prod us with their advertisements, we will want to buy their product. For me, the more annoying the ad, the higher the degree of vengence I swear upon that company.
:-p
And as soon as I find my trusty steed and finish off these windmills, I will unleash my wrath upon them all....muahahahah!
most popups dont resolve to a real website thanks to my super large "hosts" file in win (no I dont like win). But nothing is foolproof. I think a good idea for a browser would be to have a little bar at top or bottom or something, that displays a scaled image of the popup window you could click to open it, or the title in a side scrolling like buffer. Sounds stupid yeah, just and idea.
For Windows...and it's free as in don't pay a thing. If you're a Windows user not using it then you're a sucka...
Proxomitron!
Thanks Mozilla
Why should I worry?
I don't go to sites that use such garbage. Very simple.
in order to read the "salon premium" content, you have to view a long ad that you have to click through. They give you the choice, and they get get the revenue. http://www.salon.com
"we are looking at a variety of ad formats -- including Unicast -- that advance advertiser interests without in any way negatively affecting the member experience..."
Like that's ever going to happen.
Then again, we are talking AOL customers, here...
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
I get a large window with the "click here to get the plug in" link :)
Pays to browse with just about everything turned off/not installed.
I think the best defense against this sort of thing is to email the company in the pop-up add telling them you saw the add and because of it you are instigating a 6 month boycott of their product. Company gets enough of those, and they might rethink their adverting methods.
This looks like it requires Javascript to work.
Yet another reason why I normally have JS turned off, and turn it on ONLY at need.
I must point this out to my webmaster friends.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you use Phoenix, which in my opinion kicks I.E./Netscape/whatever elses ass, you don't even think of this. One of the main points of Phoenix is that it gets rid of these stupid web "tricks".. Read this http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/why/ and weep IE users..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
I Found this site while I was finding a pop up stopper for my boss. It does tests for various popup killers and rates them based on their effectiveness.
http://www.popup-killer-review.com/
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They have done a good job at stopping the normal pop-ups from annoying the **** out of me, so I hope they find a way to stop these as well. I want to write a plug in for mozilla that will not only stop the pop up ad, but also start a multi-user attack to bring down the server that forces this shit on me. Since its not illegal for them to force unwanted traffic onto us, i don't see why it is illegal to for unwanted DoS attacks on them. i think that would be a really good feature for mozilla. Any mozilla coders out there want to help on this?
These galleries didn't work for me. Apparently they use Flash for the ads, which I have disabled.
I have a batch file that renames the Flash plugin. I've noticed almost zero decrease in the quality of my net experience -- it seems to me most uses of Flash are obnoxious, irritating adverts. The web is a quieter, friendlier place without Flash.
If you're using IE under Windows, the plugin can be found at:
c:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\Flash.ocx
Globe199
Comment removed based on user account deletion
there are hundreds of better ways than alt+f4.
There should be project dedicated to "neutering" specific forms of advertising, rather than blanket-bombing as privoxy has done or focusing on popups like most other solutions.
To hell with any site that does stuff like this. I won't block banner ads, but anything beyond that is an invitation for an "accident" to happen to their server.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Everyone would prefer there be no ads, but I see no way around them. Unless you pay for a subscription or buying something on their website.
Eventually the companies which have use ads will figure out which type of ads do the best.
Certain ads will drive customers away but might be more effective. Other ads will be less effective but won't drive people away. It's all about money for the most part and they will do what makes the most business sense.
For the most part you should accept these ads like we do commercials on tv or if you deem them unacceptable leave, enough people leave they will find other type of advertising(of course it will probably be more annoying).
It will balance itself out in time.
"Oh wait... i'm a marketer and i'm also an idiot."
Being redundant its not just for networks.
Yesssss!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
for those sick bastards over at goatse.cx. I am sure they cant wait to get ahold of this technology
scott
Went to their page and not one of their "technologies" works for me in Mozilla. Either they rely on javascript that Mozilla refuses to run with my prefs or they rely on Macromedia plugins that I have purposly not installed (For Strongbad which is the only good use of flash I have ever seen I just use another browser.) Guess yet another reason to recomend Mozilla to people that are sick of ads (I have already converted literally 100 people by commenting on how I haven't seen popups in over a year)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's been brought up many times in this thread but no one seems to give this any credence.
If I browse to a web-site that:
1. takes more than 30 seconds to load the first page (and, damnit, don't most of those hang waiting to load a double-click banner?)
2. has annoying pop-ups
3. is illogically organized so I can't find what I want in 30 seconds of drilling
4. has color schemes that are low-contrast or just plain annoying to read
5. makes me sit through a 60 second flash with no "skip intro" button
6. REQUIRES IE to load and display properly
7. or, now, loads one of these full-page ad foolishnesses
then I don't need whatever it is that site has to offer! I don't struggle to continue looking, the "back" button is my best buddy and I don't go back to that site ever again!
I run the site for my company (no, I will not tell you what site that is, I have enough pain in my life right now) and I watch the stats on it pretty carefully. They tell me much more than any e-mails from irate users.
Those that truly care about the image they create on the Web will get the hint from all the stats showing that the entry AND exit point were the same. Those that don't will die the death they and their company deserve.
The standard save file window pops up asking where i want to save the file, which i of course cancel. I guess i should be glad that they haven't figure out how to get it to autmatically accept the default name and location and save the file.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
We track you down via your IP address, come to your house, and beat on you with tire irons until you buy something. Even Mozilla won't be able to block that!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Imagine:
i nal_url">Free Pr0n!</a>
A server side script which parses links on a page and replaces them with
<a href="/cgi-bin/ad_redirrect.cgi?destination=$orig
The generated page contains the ad, and some script like the following:
function carry_on() { location.replace("$original_url"); }
function wait_for_it_bitch () { setTimeout(carry_on, $delay); }
onload = wait_for_it_bitch;
And how exactly do you propose to block this? There are a dozen legitimate uses for javascript redirs. This just happens to be a particularly annoying abuse that is extreemly difficult to distinguish from legitimate. I was wondering how long it would be before one of those despicable worms figured this out.
And Microsoft will know this ... how? When sales of IE start to decline?
It's not like MS has the kind of corporate culture that actively looks for user dissatisfaction and tries to head it off, after all. "Shoot the messenger" is more like it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
edit your hosts file, watch those annoying pop adds, all adds, not just pop ups, just *go away*
enjoy
It's a little different the sneaker net bandwith for me to drag the paper to my favorite reading spot is high enough to make the addition of a single full page add negligible and I can skip the ad very quickly. Say the full pager added 100lbs to the newspaper, I'd get ticked and drop my subscription. As it is, it's negligible.
As far as TV goes: the stupidity of ads is second only to the stupidity of most programming. Both of which have driven me to other pursuits, DVD and PBS.
It's amazing that the advertising industry still hasn't figured out that the web is not a push medium. The best you can do is make sure you get your add pulled when someone is searching. I've known some good marketers who aren't idiots. They pretty quickly realized that marketing via the web is limited and invested time and effort in other channels. If the smart ones leave, guess what -- you are left with the idiots.
Here is a list of companies trialing/interested in these ads. It's a good place to start with the email protests.
"Good morning. Thank you for subscrubing to CrappyMagazine Weekly. Let me introduce you to Guido.. he is our Advertising Enforcement Speciality."
Do they hire some guy to force you to stare at ads in between articles?
Yeah, they used to tie up Vinny and throw him on my porch every Sunday. He was a really nice guy with a real talent for breaking arms and hammering toes when I skimmed passed the Classified section or glanced pass one of those ad boxes on the bottom right.
Unfortunately, he suffered from splinters and abrasions after the rainy seasons when my wooden porch fell into disrepair; and, when the new paper boy started throwing him in the cactus planter, he put in his two weeks.
For a while it was kinda lonely and pointless reading the sunday paper. I kept reading from article from article until I completely forgot to focus on the "New Paint for Your Clunker" and "Vaginal Rejuvination" ads.
I hear they've hired a guy named Guido to take his place, so looks like I can finally get back to the consumer indocrination I agreed to by purchasing a paper.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
I've been happily using popup blockers for a few months, but have started to encounter sites like www.arcadeathome.com that use "anti-anti-popup" software to try to stop people like me.
Is there any solution? I defy anybody to try to use the forums on that site for more than 10 minutes without going insane.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
In Afghanistan, a mechanical arm ships with most computers attached to its side. It can be contrlled by webpage authors using specific PHP commands.
The most common application is grabbing the readers head, ramming it into the screen that is displaying the advertisement in full screen. Depending on the company, the arm can push the readers face all the way into the glass monitor. In a newer proposed version, a brick wall is assembled by the arm with the advertisement, next to the readers chair, and he/she is lifted by a huge robotic arm powered by a 600hp v8 engine, and smashed into the wall displaying the ad, at 165 mph.
These developments could pave the way for future technologies that include a machine that tattoos a companys logos on a users forehead permenantly, and another that prints out ads on a brick, opens the users mouth and shoves it down his throat.
In a related news, advertisement technologies are funded by spamming companies, tobbacco companies and companies whose products are not selling well, but the might have a lot of capital on their hands. Prof George Smith of Columbia University doesnt think theres a link.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...to piss off potential customers? I cannot imagine this doing anything positive for an advertiser. Then again, 90+% put up with IE, so maybe I just have too high regard for the masses.
I'd love to see a Mozilla feature similar to the right-click "Block Images From This Server" option that blocks an entire domain upon request. A month later when I forget and try to return it could play a little sound like ummm, no to remind me of the blacklist.
*plonk*
...
My hosts file has a brand new route of:
0.0.0.0 www.unicast.com
And, each site that gives me a nice 15 second ad will join unicast in there, along with dear old doubleclick
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Will wonders ever cease? These marketing types really are at the cutting edge of innovation.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
... has been in Mozilla for a while now.
Preferences->Advanced->Scripts & Plugins->Allow scripts to:
- sigs are for wimps.
Even on IE you can block most of the popups, unless they're hosted on the same site. Just edit your hosts files. List the common popup sites with a DNS of 127.0.0.0, and you're fine.
I haven't done it on Linux yet, but I believe on Linux you can set up lists of *allowed* sites as well as *not allowed* sites.
Anyhoo, works for me, regardless of browser.
I'm all for it if it means making IEXPLORE users pay for the sites I visit.
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
i just set my router to block any requests for doubleclick, microsoft, and any other craptacular domains out there.
^_^
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
At the very least, Mozilla's site block list for images should also be applied to Flash sites.
Incidentally, when you install Mozilla, do you sign a Macromedia EULA? If not, attacks via Flash can probably be litigated.
This gives site defacers some heavy ammo. Imagine the ruckus that would ensue if someone broke into amazon's site and made a few links take over customers' screens with goatse.cx.
Hey, since all these ad hosts accept hotlinking of images(i assume, otherwise lots of ads wouldn't work), we can all do our artwork on our web pages using images from each host, resized down to 1x1 pixel.
Sure, all of the images you make from them will have to be mosaics, but it would an interesting experience, and also kill their bandwidth if your site's popular.
Hold a contest where you make a collage in a table, using only hotlinked images from ad servers. Then submit the link to slashdot for everyone to see your pretty artwork!
The real question is, did they patent this? And if not, will Amazon? :)
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Really, between any decent browser allowing you to disable pop-ups and Junkbuster installed...
When you can block all cookies and decide what domains your browser is not allowed to get to, what's the big deal?
Gotta love targeted ads though, as I type this the banner up top is for: Kill popup windows?, Popup killer: STOPzilla, Top rated popup blocker and Block Pop Ups.
Just curious,
I know we can circumvent most ads with Software for now, but I wonder if they will be able to tie this type of advertising to hardware- where it can't be avoided.
Any chance?
This brings up an interesting question. We have
plenty of popup killers and JS limiters but I am
not aware of any Flash controlling progs. How
about a filter that allows Flash within some
bounds but prohibits it to be overlaid on text
or other page objects. Is there such a beast?
Can it be made?
"We believe that just like in television, the _creative_ you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing.
Only someone in marketing can use the word "creative" as a noun and not be considered an illiterate retard.
Also, "interstitial" in Marketese translates as "interruption" to everyone else.
General Geekery
Went to the unicast page they have some of the popup example. All of them were stopped by Opera's pop up blocker. SO Its a moot point for me.
In the UK the online version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire used to have full screen adverts. If you used IE a new window in kiosk mode would open and a flash animation would play out. Whats bad enough is the huge obnoxious advert, whats worse is that the task bar is hidden. For me that wasn't a problem, I just hit Alt-F4, but for less computer literate users they must have been annoyed/panicked when this happened.
I might be wrong, but surely covering the taskbar and denying the user the means to control their computer must break some sort of law? Even if it is only for a few seconds?
These ads didn't seem to be used for too long, so that must say something about how effective they were. Thank goodness for Mozilla!
But I don't see Microsoft putting any of those features into IE. The ad makers would scream bloody murder. The few users of Mozilla and popup killers are minority, they'll let us geek block their ads cause they're not targetting us.
They might be highly annoying, but I can't believe they're that stupid to think that no one uses Mozilla or popup killers.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Thank you for a very satisfying experience: clicking on a link that says "See ad here" and then seeing nothing!
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
The individuals responsible for spamming your web browser in that fashion should be stabbed in the face and DDoS'd off the web.
There. I said it.
What is with this? Just because people don't click on a banner doesn't mean that they don't see it. When you see a billboard on the street, do you click on it? Does your TV commercial have a click-thru rate? No I don't think so. Perhaps banner advertising works better than the marketers think, because people will remember the banner subliminaly.
An example of these ads can be found here You guys are talking about not going back to the sites using those ads...a much better solution is to email the webmasters and tell them about it. A well worded insulting letter saying you will never go back to the site again...ever... may be more effective to be just pissed off and decide not to come back. Only problem is that you have to spend time writting a complaint
Is it really asking too much to insist that we not be bombarded with advertising everywhere we look, everywhere we listen? I guess that makes me a curmudgeon.
One sure way to get rid of this is to get rid of the idiots -- both those who run such ads and those who are susceptible to them. But then, I'd have to get a real job.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It used to be that content had to be good enough to entice the viewer, listener, etc. to watch,listen to, read etc. the ads... The ads were there *because* the people were there.
Now advertisers think they are buying *you* instead of the space, thus the idea that ignoring ads is "stealing" in their eyes.
The paradign shift is that they have removed the burden of gaining attention from a viewer to being "owed" attention from a viewer, thereby placing the burden on you...
What I do not understand is who is doing the programming for these intrusive ads. Judging by the numberous posts on this subject already, very few if anyone enjoys pop-up ads, let alone the new "take over my screen" ads. No offense to the many marketing men and women out there, but in general your technological skills are "weak." This means you have to employ a geek to do the work for you. What we are left with then is, a bunch of geeks who hate intrusive ads, and a subset of these geeks who are selling their souls to the marketing devils. Does anyone else see the dilemma here. There are traitors amongst us. I say we all take a pledge to never ever write these horrible intrusive ads. Who is with me!
What will it take to rid the planet of these advertising scum?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
As more sites use this type of adversiting, I will use the Internet/WWW less. Folks that serve ads like this should find a real job and help salvage the Internet before it is too late.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
I guess IE/Modem users will just have to evolve a bit and start using Mozilla. The folks making popup blockers will make a fortune, but people are going to miss all the bandwith/CPU time wasted on these things as their 'experience' degrades.
http://www.unicast.com/pressroom/whitepapers/full_ screen.asp
According to their "research" 78% of people find pop-ups annoying, but only 30% of people found the full-screen interstitials annoying. 59% found them "entertaining"...
The sad thing is that with our culture, I am starting to believe those numbers...
-sker
nonsig. unsig. desig.
I sniffed around the code. Made a filter to replace "screen.width" with "512" and "screen.height" with "384"
Now it takes up less than a quarter of the screen. I surfed for a while with the new filter. It doesn't seem to affect my browsing.
Homestar Runner and friends disagree with you.
"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way..."
- In television, we pay $26 + change per month for basic cable, so that we can have clear reception on the two channels we ever watch. We pay $64.95 per month for "Enhanced DSL" so that all our computers have their own IP addresses.
- In television, I usually have a pretty solid 10-15 minutes of show viewing between commercial breaks. Interstitial ads will be entirely subject to reading and interpretation speed... faster is worse.
- In television, I am almost always watching for entertainment. I use the web to get news, learn, shop, and a variety of other things I find a bit more important than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as important as Buffy can be).
- In television, content is scheduled and periodic, and the commercials are built into that. On the web, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to read this story or catch up on the day's events, so adding in 15 seconds hits harder.
- In television, commercial breaks are usually around 2-5 minutes. That's enough time to go to the restroom, grab a snack, tell an amusing anecdote. 15 seconds is not enough time to do something else, and too much time to stare at the screen.
- I sit farther away from my television than my computer screen.
So it's not just like television. Any chance they'll figure that out someday?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Share with them the user experience.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
"320" should read "screen.width"
"240" should read "screen.height"
If you are stuck with IE on windows, then check out the combination of Crazy Browser and Proxomitron. Crazy Browser provides a tabbed interface using the IE engine and while it has a built in popup blocker, popups just open on another tab, so you don't have much problem ignoring them. Proxomitron is proxy with ad busting and other features.
AdSubtract gets rid of ALL of the ads you have described above.
You've been warned.
The shock effect is so substantial I'm reminded of it everytime I visit this otherwise very classy site, and it probably reduced the number of times I visited it.
Text-based ads are it. Their seeming helpfulness makes them very workable. Readers don't need big Flash'y ads in order to come in - even the little link on our web named 'Support' works very well indeed. There are too many good points to text-only links to mention :)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
It's just like spam mail, they work on volume. The ad companies that use this will likely only use it on sites with extremely high page views or unique visitor counts and play the percentages.
If you offer to sell shit to 1 person you're almost sure to be turned down, if you offer it to 1,000,000 sooner or later you'll find someone to buy it.
one word: Mozilla.
(mozilla.com for those of you with modem lines running to your cave/under your rock.)
Hmm - this is puzzling. I went to thestreet.com and no ads. Hmm - no ads at all. There are no pop ups - nothing!
DO I have to disable privoxy and re-enable java perhaps?
Darn! Go figure!
No, seriously, web site operators are DESPERATE for advertising dollars. An excellent example is this need for advertising dollars is this page. (For full effect please turn on all javascript stuff and turn off junkbuster/privoxy etc.)
/.'ers whine about the amount of advertising they see. At least I'VE got two news portals to live by. Gee, maybe I ought to send the privoxy guys the $3.00.
The above page actually invites you to PAY $3.00/mo. to avoid the pop-ups. Now I'm not dissing the above site for trying to stay afloat, I'm dissing people who refuse to use anything but IE+M$ for their web browsing.
I didn't even know there was so much stuff on that page (ie. privoxy + mozilla etc.)
And to think that
How is this "new and innovative"? Porn sites have been doing this crap for years now.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I know that broadband is getting more popular, but do these idiots think that any home user is going to wait that long for an advertisement? People usually give up if the page doesn't load in 30 seconds! Unless you use Mozilla, and load the page in another tab in the background, of course.
Advertisers have no respect for people. To them, people are all consumers, and we will purchase whatever products they feed us, and they have to make sure that their verbiage is proactive enough, and that they have actionable items and all that other buzzword crap. I wish they'd just go back to using sex to sell. That still works, and I like looking at those ads.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
and even if I did 'click-thru' it would be a rote motion, without any intention of making a purchase, which just highlights the problem. Somehow the ISP who is getting all the money, for providing the infrastructure, while not providing any content has got to be made to share the $$$'s around...They made it work for cable TV and you can't tell me the ad system there is any more functional, they just can't yet quantify it, and the one signal many users function, vs bandwidth growth issues keep crippling the net. I guess if we let the corps have their way we'll have a net that consists of 55 'channels' of digitally 'protected' content for our viewing pleasure at their scheduling pleasure :(
:)
is it friday yet
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I stopped going to IGN for my daily entertainment news fix because of their stupid ads. Every other click would take you to a full page ad (usually flash). If you tried to click thru before the ad was finished loading, it would just start over.
End of line..
force you to stare at ads in between articles
:)
They do.. They do.. Called super hot models, whom you'll sit and droll at for at least 5 minutes
It's ultra-broadband. ;)
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Using well documented "features" of IE and / or Outlook, for only $9.95, SBB's Patented Total Infomercial Awareness System(tm) will:
a) Replace the user's desktop background with [Your Message Here]
b) Replace all icons, system wide, with [Your Logo]
c) Rename all files and directories on all partitions to [Your Message Here] (with some random suffix to keep each name unique)
d) Replace the contents of all files on all partitions with [Your Message Here]
And, for a limited time only, we'll throw in a EULA for only $5.00 more!
Yes, by executing the TIA payloa^H^H^H^H^H^H System, your vict^H^H^H^H users will have agreed to a EULA which...
e) requires them to legally change their name to [Your Message Here], along with any children or pets in their custody.
f) Require your users to transfer all of their real properties to you
g) Require your users to agree to pay any and all legal fees / penalties incurred by you as a result of the TIA System, or the EULA
5 Million IP addresses! Guaranteed!
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
invest in a pair of headphones with a nice long cord. in fact, maybe you can get your roomie to chip in.
Let's see now... Google has "ads" that are small, inconspicuous, clearly separated from the search results, and highly relevant to what you are searching for. Click-through rate is high, Google is making money hand over fist, and nobody is angry at Google or tries to block their "sponsored links."
Like the Yellow Pages, most people don't even think of them as advertising, but as a genuinely useful service.
Others use increasingly intrusive, strident, techniques, present crap that 99% of the audience doesn't want, consequently get negligible click-through rates and less and less ad revenue. And create an arms race between advertisers and ad-blocking software.
So what do the marketers conclude from this? What we need is more intrusive advertising. Sure. You betcha.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Throughout my life i have seen computers and the internet develope. It started out inocently enough, but soon became a conveyance for advertising. Banner ads really don't bother me that much as long as they do not flash or move substantially. But they soon made banner ads so they would force you to look at them by flashing or creating other destracting animations. Then the pop up add came, this got fairly annoying since you would get about 500 of them and go into a [alt] + [f4] frenzy and accidentally close the window that you wanted to see in the first place. But what really pissed the |-|e|| out of me was when they started advertising through windows messanger. I got a message through it to the effect of: "|)ick enlargement, now cheeper than ever". This was when I really got pissed off. Most people would probably just disable the service after this, but i was using it to notify me when my other system (that does not have a monitor) was done with its mpeg encoding. This new form of advertising is a violation of personal privacy and dignity. I just spent 1k on a computer and they think that it is to be used for there benefit? Advertising has gone way too far and should be terminated before it takes over the entire computer industry. If you have ever seen max headroom, then you know the type of terror that i am trying to avoid. ADVERTISING IS A SATONOUS PRACTICE THAT SHOULD BE STOPPED JUST LIKE RITUAL KILLINGS.
And watch the readership of the web pages/sites that use this tactict take a serious and permanant nose dive. There should be a "spamhause" type of blacklist for sites that use offensive/invasive/rude/etc adverts so others can be warned off.
Seriously, why is it not illegal for them to send us advertisements in the first place? They are wasting bandwidth that we pay for. I could see a business case where you got internet access for free, so long as you agreed to receive advertisments, but when I pay for my access I do not want to receive advertising. The internet is not cable television and should not be treated as such.
I think it will be only a matter of time before you begin to see websites that won't let you enter unless you agree to view advertisements. Quickly following, the MPAA will start to encroach further upon the freedoms of the net surfers by lobbying (successfully) to make it illegal to not view advertisements. Similar to the situation we have with DVD players not allowing you to skip previews, PVR devices not allowing you to not record commercials, and commericals in addition to movie previews in theaters. The culmination will be the MPAA and RIAA working with the Madison Ave. folks to force commercial breaks in schools for your children (you know....to generate brand loyalty early)
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
I am not familiar with coding Flash (ActionScript) programs. I think it would be an interesting topic to persue.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
I'm not going to argue on wether this kind of ad can be blocked or not. It looks like a requested link (you clicked on it) and if your browser is allowed to resize windows and execute flash (or whatever the engine is) your stuck.
What I will say is that this model may be usefull for sites that have desireable content, if it's not abused. I remember a web site that is sadly dead - AdCritic
Would it still be alive if they had been able to finance those bandwidth bills? Would I have sat through (ONE) 15 sec add to get access to all that cool content? Maybe. Would I sit through a 15 sec ad on each clickthrough? Absolutely not!
The bottom line is the content has to be worth the inconvenience.
=Shreak
xkill
Now that would be cool - you go to a web page, some ActiveX control or whatever takes control of the InfraRed port on you pc and changes the channel of your TV set to the one running their AD. Now that would be such an awesome accomplishment I'd probably just gape open mouthed and get the ad 'impression' and subconsciously purchase their product next time an opportunnity arises in the store.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Not suprisingly, it doesn't work with Konqueror.
Score 1 for the KDE team.
I see a nice white window with a please get the plugin in the middle. oh wait, yes, I never downloaded the shockwave plugin, (if it even works on mozilla....). :):)
Anyway I do NOT need the web to live. If they wish to force feed me advertising then , fine, I will limit myself to site where i can avoid it by pop up blocking, IP blocking. If not, well they do not want me as viewer/client.
The grass is green outside, friends are smiling, bier is fresh, who need browsing on the NET anyway ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In contrast, I'm annoyed by thousands of strangers using our marvels of modern electronic communications to constantly interrupt me and steal my life 30 seconds at a time. One 30-second ad that reaches ~4 million people is a murder. These people are worse than Hitler.
This will degrade the internet explorer experience and will be more and more of a reason for people to switch to better alternatives. Especially if explorer allows it 100% the same way it accepts pop ups. I say bring on more intrusive content. Mozilla can handle it.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
think about TV for a second,
the program shuts off, and then users are forced to watch full screen ads for durations of approximately 5 minutes at a time.
the newest internet ads are attempting to do more or less the same thing with the exception that users will have to click to remove the ad and on tv people just sit there and it is removed for them.
the two advertising methods really aren't that much different.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Each time you receive a pop up like this, politely write the company doing the advertising, and explain you will not be purchasing any of their products due to this reason..
If they get enough pissed off potential customers, something might be done..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The point of the net is information exchange! If the www gets too full of crap, then its back to USENET
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Does anyone else have this problem? A site tries to load a popup, and IE simply locks up until the popup loads? It can take a minute or longer sometimes... The lockup is far more annoying then the advert itself. It happens to me on both my desktop and my laptop, although I don't remember it always being this way. Has anyone else had this problem, or is my machine just having histrionics?
That said, the ads salon uses are, IMO, way more effective, because you actually get to control the viewing experience. I don't mind spending 10 seconds or so looking at one of their 'ultramercials' because you get to decide when you view it. It's really much nicer then this popup bullshit.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Right. There was a full-page ad with my morning newspaper, folded in on top of the front page.
:-)
It was for... let me think... someone or other. I mean, it did pass across my field of vision on its way to the recycle bin. I should remember who it was, right?
Or, we could treat these like TV ads. Open a site, go take a leak. Open another site, go get something to drink. (Repeat as desired
Every time I click on 'news', my screen is filled with a bunch of unitelligible, annoying garbage... oh, wait... that's not an ad...
You know what?
You just have to make sure that the content is indispensable.
I could see something like "please watch this annoying mortgage ad while load your bank account info..."
Might also work for links to highly coveted files.. . They really have to find an instutituon that doesn't mind ticking its customers off, though...otherwise, some advertising exec should start updating his resume right now!!
I bet it won't work without javascript and macromedia.
My default IE settings are no javascript. If there's a site I want to use that needs it, I add that site to trusted sites.
As for flash, it's used for annoying ads that you potentially can't close or mute. No flash installed above what comes with IE, and I have that set to ask me first unless, again, they're in my trusted sites.
Try it. Between that and my ad-blocking hosts file, the web goes back to the good old days of reading content without being distracted. The only distractions I have any more are animated gifs, and the stop button/esc key stops those.
Oh yeah, I switched to Opera to block shiat like that. :)
Spyware?
Crap that crashed Mozilla and IE?
HA!
I fart in your general direction.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The site promises "an unrivalled opportunity for creativity". There certainly will be some pretty creative language being used by visitors when one of those adds pops up.
> but I guess I can live with pop-ups
You horrify me with your words. Every year, people become more and more lax with what they tolerate. I don't doubt that a year from now somebody will be saying "I guess I can live with hi-jak ads as long as they give control of your computer back to you within ten or fifteen seconds, but I can't live with ads that auto-extract money from your credit card". And then, the year after that, we'll get somebody who says something like "The auto-wallet ads are fine as long as they don't take more than a dime per ad from me, but I don't trust the new plan for the government to introduce an annual 'ad tax' to finance ad revenue companies". Flash forward a few more years and you'll get people who can live with the ad tax (probably because the lawmakers decided to name it the AMERICARULES bill), but they'll be complaining about those damned subdermal identity chips starting to use part of your brain for temporary ad storage.
Er.. That was odd. I think what I actually meant to say was this:
There are a whole wad of web browsers out there. I can only think of two offhand that fall prey to popup ads (Konqueror/Embedded for handheld devices and MSIE). There's nothing wrong with installing another browser to handle the sites that deliver the popups. I mean, can you honestly say that your hard drive doesn't have an extra ten megabytes to spare? Heck, even if you have some odd disease that forces you to only use that one desktop browser that allows popups through, why aren't you just installing a third party extension that gets rid of them? There's a whole bunch of options. You just need to *do* something.
-JC
1. Give whoever hosts the stupid sites a Slashdotting they won't forget. Load, reload, and triload the page until you're sucking every last bit of their bandwidth. Then set up an automated script that performs the Slashdot effect every 5 minutes and changes your IP address as well.
2. ?????????
3. *cough* *cough*
Just looked like a regular window, didn't cover start bar, the close box in top right was visible.
Maybe my work computer is too dated for these ads to function 'properly'?
Hey, I'm not trying to sell you anything, I'm just doing this as art.
How is this any different then from what Salon and the Planet * (Planet Half-Life, Planet Quake, Planet Unreal) have been doing?
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
this idea isnt new at all, porno sites have been doing that since the beginning of time
Linux.
I am not bothered by such trivial crap as ads and popups.
It is not an issue for me. Ads, popups, viruses, etc, are all things that bother OTHER PEOPLE but not *me*...
That's exactly why I switched to Linux.
Thank you Linus, you did me a HUGE favor!!
Oh yeah, Warez? Serialz? What's that?? I seem to have forgotten...
Buh bye dumb ads and script kiddies!!
weather.GOV is better than weather.COM anyway
it sucked big time. it had no way to close it with out a force quit.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Well, first get the voice right. Imagine Lorne Greene on quaaludes, saying, "You exist to have our messages poured into the empty vessel of your head. Spread your two crainal lobes like ass cheeks, cellmate, 'cuz Bubba Advertiser's here."
The Unicast take-over ad is a microcosm of something that used to trouble Americans only a couple of generations ago, in an age when our science fiction warned us of the type of mind that demanded to control the horizontal, the vertical -- a mind that always knew what was best for us...
Some will protest this description. It's just an ad! And after all, do you not, by virtue of using a web site, owe some duty of attention to its maker's livelihood? Does anyone think monosyllabic news stories at CNN or MSNBC grow on trees? Ashley Banfield has a make-up budget to meet, you know.
But that's too easily surrendering to your masters' point of view. Better to see the web as the public square, and not as the private salon (or even the private Salon) that they would make it.
If you think of the web as a marketplace of ideas, then you have no trouble deciding to sell some of its crappier "ideas" short.
And the worst idea yet to afflict the Internet is that it is no more than a televisual yoke for bringing the sheep to the feet of commerce for happy fleecing. Ask who stands to gain from transforming the Net into a billion virtual replicas of the Mall of America. Ask who doesn't want it to be an engine of democracy or an open communications medium or -- shudder -- a place where new models of software authorship and distribution arise, the political aspirations and discontents of ordinary average Joes and Jamallahs are heard, and even a nekkid lady raises her lewd head.
Or don't ask anything. Unicast... uni-brow... uni-dimensional...One Voice, One Ad, One Message: caveman time.
And for all the Flash developers out there... you are NOT programmers. You are "artists". There is a difference. Go learn OOP.
No links today, lookup Bannerblind yourself in Google. Trust me you will LOVE it. :)
Help me Obi-Wan Mozilla, you're my only hope!
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
maybe ALT-F4 (or other close application keys) still work? Or are these blocked as well?
You are right, I shoudl have not done that! Thanks.
EOM.
How tall is your cat? I mean, i generally find it easier to kick the little furball.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
"How about Instant Pestering? It's only 9.95..and the surgery to have implanted into the base of your skull is so painless it's now wonder we're number 1."
Seriously though, the best commentary (and hilarious) on the state of the Internet right now is the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Interfection".
Just remember, you could have won a porsche...
...to briefly read of the birth of something that'll be extinct almost as quickly.
Also fascinating to see the marketing heads continue to try and shoehorn things that "work" in other media into the web.
Sigh.
A couple do, I think they call the process a "click-through"
They don't make you wait 15 seconds though.
How can they expect this to work? I don't know about you guys but if a page is taking more than 15 minutes to load I start thinking about finding another page to look at...
As a modem user, I'd be thinking along the lines of, "I waited how long to download what?
Sheesh.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I browse a lot of sites in korean,
/. publicity. Maybe the bandwith requirements of having a 640x480 ad is why this is hitting stateside but this is something that is already happening in parts of the world.
http://www.daum.com
http://www.dreamx.net
http://www.yahoo.co.kr
and lots of portals tested this kind of advertising on their homesite 18 months ago. even major players like Yahoo Korea had the F12 feature of taking over your whole screen for a 15-30 second flash animation/advertisment. The unpopularity of these ads made the hosts pull the ADs but unscrupulous (read PORN) advertisers still use this technique. I hardlly think that this technique is new, the code has existed to enable this for quite some time, this is just
I think the best way to really avoid this kind of blitz AD is not to use IE.
I use a browser called Phoenix, which enables you to diable "pop-up ads"
It's a nice little feature....I believe Mozilla does this as well...
I have not seen a pop-up since I've been using Phoenix.....which you can download here peace/out!
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
Or maybe that's where they got their idea...
Somebody find out where these weasels are located and take them out. Not by DDOS. Not by any form of hacking. Just KILL them before they go any further.
flash ads would be more annoying than full page pop-ups.
Mozilla can block pop-ups; Mozilla can block images from ad sites; what Mozilla can't do* is block flash animations.
* from what I know. If anyone knows how to do it without getting rid of the plugin or switching to Mozilla Firebird, I would really like to know.
I've read Grocklaw. BoycottNovell, you're no Grocklaw
As do many other sites, including yahoo groups, when you click on reading the next group, they first take you to an add and you have to click again to go to the real site.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In fact, Opera has two options for blocking popups: "block unrequested windows only", and "block all windows regardless of who they think they are". The second option is marginally more annoying, but compared to full-screen spam it's pure heaven. I am sure Mozilla has something like this as well.
Of course, eventually popup blocking will be illegal under the DMCA... but for now, it doesn't look like the playing field has changed much.
>|<*:=
That's been going on for almost a year at some sites. Anyone go to pc.ign.com? I'm sure the other ign sites have it as well.
But I think EVERY site that is supporting the defeat of this kind of thing, should make a 'superstitial' themselves, one that only shows up in IE, and advocates mozilla or similiar in it, and the reason why?
The internet is not television no matter what the broadband suppliers are starting to say and twist it into.
It's my number one job for tommorow morning, once I close all these fucking modeless windows to make my own to educate IE and AOL users.
i usually surf with links or lynx :) :(
or... maybe... FULL-PAGE TEXT ADS
"we are looking at a variety of ad formats -- including Unicast -- that advance advertiser interests without in any way negatively affecting the member experience." --- AOL
Are they serious!! Yeah I'm sure users will agree this is less disruptive than a popup add.
I've noticed a lot of "good reason to go open source/Mozilla/etc" messages on this thread.. but you know, IE can be used, without 99% of the popups, with just a few simple steps..
/. and other "important" sites into
First - disable ActiveX, Javascript, sounds, movies, etc on all sites by Default.
Second - go back to normal ActiveX/etc settings for your "Trusted Sites", which you can put your
Now, you run hassle and popup free. No more annoying sites trying to play audio files, no more popups, and most sites run just fine. And if one of your favorite sites happens to not work for some reason, just put in in the Trusted Sites list, and voila! You're good to go.
Of course.. I'm sure this'll get marked as flamebait since it's claiming that IE can be used safely..
www.privoxy.org
Windows or Linux, no prob and no charge. Kills ads, popups, javacrap, redirects dead. Just change default.filter file and add any exceptions.
If I don't like the popups on a site, I simply won't use the site.
Though if they really annoy me, like if the number of popups exceeds 20 at once, with various animated enlarge your <bleep> ads, I might get the administrative contact email of the domain and sign it up at a bunch of spam sites. But that's where I normally draw the line for vengeance.
A full-screen Intel ad popped up on the Wired News site several times the other day. I found an "[X]" control and batted it down in a few seconds (way quicker the second time), so I never saw the whole thing. I guess you never know when good reaction times will come in handy ...
As I read about all the pop-up blocking that Mozilla does, I can't help but mention that Safari does the same thing. I also seem to notice that a lot of the super-intusive ads only really do their thing on Windows + IE. Finally, an UPSIDE to being in the software minority!
Crap. Now I have to reliquish my title as "Pop Culture King", 'cuz I have NO IDEA who Crazy Eddie is.
At least I can still identify a Simpsons episode strictly from a single unique quote... And now I see why I'm single...
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Hey, that worked great with Mozilla. Now, I wonder how to hack that, rename it and where to put it for Opera.
Err, that is, 60/30. Guess I need to pay more attention when doing my unit analysis.
Yes, that is what the fold over page on the Sunday comic section is. Plus all the crap that falls out of the paper. You have to look at it as your picking it up and throwing it away.
People already hate advertising, they'll do what they can to block it or otherwise mentally ignore it. The advertisers know this, they've made it their quest to make the ads even more intrusive annoying and otherwise harder to ignore, as if being forced to watch the ad is going to make us buy the product. If anything it's going to make me boycott the product and probably the sites supporting this new ad format.
The problem with current adverising is really that they're either in your face annoying or suspicously attached to a glowing review of their product. Targetted advertising is good in the fact that it's actually related to something you already use, but you trade off personal privacy.
There used to be websites where upon registering you'd get a whole checklist of marketing categories you were interested in, which were then reflected in the advertising. It's still targeted advertising but better in the fact that you have control over what the adverisers know about you. Unfortunately you don't see this much anymore.
Of course, the way I look at it this whole article is just an advertisment for UNICAST's ad format...
- MbM
I would, but I can't. My ad blocking proxy server won't let me. I guess I could try to avoid this, but that would be too much work
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
If you're an advertiser, I'll give you a hint: it's not that we couldn't see your ad, the problem is that your products sucks. If your product was any good, even a simple link would draw customers.
but they can't stop me from averting my eyes!
This is a new thing?
Privoxy acts as a local proxy and filters web sites to let through only what you want. No more pop-ups, no more banner ads, no more abusive javascripts. It's completely browser-independent, too. And it regularly updates its action files to catch new ads.
You'll write everything, eh? This is nothing new, I've been annoyed by them for a long time...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Most of the people who use the net now, when the see a popup, they close it..
so when the average john q public sees the full screen ad,they will just figure its a popup and close the browser... after realizing what they did they would get upset and just say f'it.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
[flash disabled] [click here to enable flash on this site]
It's one of the best utilities I've ever used. And yes, it runs on Linux with Wine.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I'm an IGN Insider (subscriber) and I was really pissed when initially they had the between pages. I was not going to renew it. They claimed that as a subscriber that I would get fewer instance of them, but I was still dissatisfied.
But then about a month ago, they gave an option for Insiders to turn those ads off. That made me happier. Now the interesting part of this is that when I went to the page where you can turn them off, they explained the benefits of the ads that they run:
Ad Preferences:
Thank you for supporting IGN as an Insider! Insiders have the ability to disable the below types of ads. We hope that you will consider leaving them on as advertising is a major source of funding for IGN and helps bring you the best possible content.
Strangely, once I read that, AND knowing that I had the choice to turn them off, I didn't. I was like, 'Well, since they're giving me a choice, that's cool. And they gotta make their money somehow.'
So maybe for sites that register, if you give your users the choice to turn them off, you could retain the max amount of your base. You would piss off the minimal amount of people, yet still get money from people who don't mind so much (especially when given that freedom to choose).
Pulled this off the website, which is presumably intended to sell a prospective advertisers on Superstitial-formatted ads:
The Superstitial® generated 20 times the response than all other units.
18% lift in brand awareness
37% lift in purchase intent was attributed to the SS
Great...... you've raised awareness of your brand by shoving it directly in the face of your would-be customer. Who, as it happens, is visiting the hosting website to do something worthwhile, and not just look at rapacious pop-up ads all day.
But did you mention that your ads might have also chased away a user from your website forever? Or, at the very least, start searching for a browser plug-in that will block all forms of advertising, thus reducing the efficacy of ALL ads on your site?
No? Didn't think so.
"Hey, I need to see this on the 'net. It says I need to install this thing called RealPlayer to see it... how do I do that?"
I am not the IT guy so I cannot tell them what to do, so I simply discourage them strongly. I tell them that, "RealPlayer is broken. It doesn't work anymore. The company died in the dotbomb. It is dangerous. It is created by terrorists. It destroys computers. You should never install it, and tell your friend that they should not use it. We can't play RealPlayer on our system. It was used on the old C-3PO operating system. Our computer doesn't support it. It is full of viruses. IT WILL KILL YOUR COMPUTER."
I hate lying to people. Hate it. However the urge to play anything, and I mean anything, no matter how inane, by their corporate buddy in another cubicle is SOOO STRONG (I mean moth to bug zapper strong) that they simply cannot exsist witout RealPlayer. After all, you are telling them not to do something, and they want to see that guy light his own flatulence. You see why you lose in that situation.
However, if you don't tell people a thousand reasons IN THE MOST EXTREME TERMS why they should not use RealPlayer, then the little moron will dodge your advice and install the danged thing. Then they will come to you with a computer that is half the speed that it was before and screws with you at all times. Then THEY START THE REAL LYING.
"I didn't install RealPlayer! No I didn't! You told me I shouldn't so I didn't!"
-TWO MINUTES LATER-
"Okay... Well, I just HAAAAD to see that baby dancing video! I saw it on an Ally McBeal rerun and it was soooo cute!"
It amazes me how many people have come to me for casual advice and then utterly bypass it to their own detriment. It is one thing to not know and accidentally install RealPlayer. It is another thing to ask, and then after hearing "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" from a person who knows, and still install it.
why should the bombardment stop? don't demand advertising silence from the advertisers - they're making too much money to give it up - demand it from yourself.
for the last five years, i have been persuing a policy of personal advertising exposure reduction. my formula for it is simple:
- kill your television. if you haven't figgured out that programming is just the coating to get you to swallow the ads... well, you're not paying attention then! donate yr tv to the women's shelter or something. if you must get the content (say, 6 pm buffy) nab it from bittorrent.
- commit to ad-free radio there are ad-free and ad-reduced radio stations out there such as your state provider (cbc, bbc &c). your local university probably has a good radio station (the one in my town is awesome!)
- don't be a billboard, eschew visible branding you pay $20 more for the shirt with the nike swoosh on it. why pay them to be their billboard? de-logo-ize your stuff and avoid purchasing items with large, visible logos. (you may argue about band tee shirts now, if you wish
:>)
- avoid points programs does every store have to have a points card now? don't play! the "savings" and bonuses you reap do not represent a decrease in the retailer's profit but, rather, an increase in the median price of services and products offered. the primary purpose of the campaigns is to gather data on you for future marketing and advertising campaigns. don't participate.
obviously those aren't hard "rules" (who the hell am i to tell you what to do?), but if you want to live with less advertising, it's a good way to start. the most important suggestion i can make is to spend a fair amount of time deciding how you classify different kinds of advertising and what you want to achieve. what do you think of classified ads? band tee shirts? the chrome logo on your car? think this stuff through early on!2 1337 4 u!
In general, a simple banner ad doesn't bother me, so I leave them enabled. However, if it blinks, bounces, or otherwise tries to annoy me into seeing it, the server it comes from goes on the block list.. These 15 second full screen ads are not going to fly.
It might just encourage more people to switch from IE to browsers with built in pop up blocking, such as Mozilla/Firebird.
:)
I imagine future versions of IE may have tabs, but I'd be amazed if they add pop up blocking. - Even if IE did block pop ups, they couldn't block application error pop ups
That has nothing to do with the definition of what a virus is. Any such behaviour is just a side effect.
You're gonna buy my chicken!!!
"Yes, but are you running it single-ended or LVD?"
"Oh, I got some antibiotics for the LVD, so I'm back to single-ended now."
"Flat ribbon or twisted-pair ribbon?"
"I pulled a muscle last time Bruno tried twisted-pair on me, so now I only do flat ribbon."
"I've never tried this before, so start me off with those nice svelte VHDCIs, OK?"
"You could get the regular terminator for $15.95, or a vibrating terminator for $29.95. Then there's the extra special triple-ripple illuminating terminator for $49.95..."
Hmmm, given the price of all this SCSI stuff, maybe all this joking around isn't so off the mark...
-----Chaz
When I dialed up Wired's site about a week ago, I was treated to a less-than-enjoyable full-screen flash ad with a teeny-tiny close box, advertising the Intel Centrino system. Before that, there was an ad on Gamedev.net (that sparked a controversy) which threw green slime on the screen with flash for the ATI Radeon line of cards. Guess what I'm not buying now, kids? That's right, Intel and ATI.
Do companies seriously think pissing off the people who surf the web is going to get more people buying their product?
http://www.unicast.com/gallery/sites_fs.asp
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Whoever sends out spam should be taken into the street and shot... :)
i'm jk, but really something needs to be done
I just used their little demo on their website, and my popup stopper killed it. I'm running Panicware (http://www.panicware.com) Pop-Up Stopper Free Edition v. 2.92. Hint: Enable aggressive mode :)
~Knautilus
that they all contain spam but in a web page rather than an email.
So why not use spam filtering algorythms to detect if a pop up should be allowed or not?
I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how feasible this idea is.
I was reading a comment by the coach of the Edm Oilers the other day. He was talking about the 1990 season when they last won the Stanley cup. In the first round, his team was down 3-1 against Winnepeg. MacT said, "they just didn't realize how close they were to knocking us off". The Oilers recovered to win three games in row, and then they went on to win the cup, becoming stronger with every round.
About the same time I read a long article in the NYT (random values required) about how we are losing the war on spam.
They cited the example that as soon as a spam filter filters out "penis enlargement" the spam changes to "p.e.n.i.s e.n.l.a.r.g.e.m.e.n.t" that escapes the filter.
Talk about not recognizing that you are halfway there to winning the war.
Once the spammers start to pollute their own messages, the battle is over. The people dumb enough to pay money for what spam promises can only handle so much noise in the message before they become overwhelmed and find a different way to injure their pocketbooks.
The same rule applies with pop-up ads. Once the ads go over the top on the amount of annoyance they create, the war is over. At a certain point of annoyance, even the idiots whose misguided purchases drive this entire cycle are going to look for different opportunities to prove PT Barnham correct.
There's a fool born every minute, and there's a new way to fleece fools born every five years--because ultimately the fleecers shit their own bed.
Can someone mod the parent to 20 please? :)
It even works on slashdot!
They have an example at this companies page. All it is is a big popup playing an annoying video like those x-cam ads, except bigger. People will just close it as soon as it opens, unless they really really want to see the page that comes after (or else they'll put that window in the background till the ad is finished). This is with Firebird - maybe it's a lot worse with IE (what isn't?).
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
i use a free version of webwasher on my windows box with mozilla, and it scrubs everything pretty clean... some legit images get blocked in the process but who cares... I looked at my stats in Webwasher (http://www.webwasher.com - free for noncommercial use blah blah) and since March 3rd it's blocked 19387 images, the MAJORITY of which were advertising. It's also stopped 1229 popup windows, 8702 cookies, and 3059 scripts. What the hell is wrong with people that they waste so much time and effort polluting our web experience with such trash? Not ONCE in many many years of web surfing has any advertising appealed to me, AT ALL. IT DOESNT WORK, people! GET A CLUE. If I were wealthy I'd start a clean slate version of the Internet that didn't allow advertising AT ALL... :) oh well.
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
The Preferences ToolBar makes quick work of the flash with the 'Kill Flash' button.
http://www.xulplanet.com
Too bad its not at the Konqueror fine grained 'Flash is off until I authorize it' level but we're getting there.
I just hit the site with my broswer the way I allus browse. No popups, clicked the link, the a page loading icon sits for a little and nothing happens. Ahh. Have to stop there, don't want to bait the OS warriors.
Seriously, I think its matter of constantly dancing 2 1/2 steps ahead of the suits. Whatever your toys or culture, you're only safe until the big fish smell money. Then you've got to move on or watch the water turn to
I'm going to take the dissenting view here and say that I honestly wouldn't mind too much if I ran into a few of these a day, if they would help keep some of my favorite sites free and IF they are used responsibly, and thats a big IF. All too often it seems net advertisers are trying to either trick you into viewing ads or makes them so obtrusive that there's no way to avoid them. Lets take a possible scenario here: CNN removes all forms of advertising from it's site and puts a few of these on it instead. Furthermore it clearly delineates links that cause one of these ads to come up from links that don't, either by putting them in a seperate location from other links or by differentiating them somehow (making them a color other than the standard blue for links or going from a solid underline to a dashed underline would be two possible examples). I would be ok with this, its not much different from the way tv works now. In fact it might even be a good idea to force people to take a break once in awhile, have you seen what someone looks like after sitting in front of a screen for 6 hours without blinking? yeesh, if they ran into one of these ads once in awhile maybe they would get up and take a break. I have a sneaking suspicion however that many advertisers would choose to use these ads in CONJUNCTION with established web advertising instead of as a replacement, which would only serve to make pop-up and banner ridden sites even more annoying. It's akin to the current situation with cable television; when cable tv was first introduced the service providers claimed that by having users pay for the service they wouldn't need to use annoying advertisements, which sounded kind of nice. Well obviously that has all gone out the window and now I am bemused to find that all too often I am PAYING cable providers to show me advertisements, which makes absolutely no sense, (unless of course you own a cable company and are watching your bank account grow).
You know if you check the formatting before you hit submit, it's pretty easy to get rid of those tell-tale signs of copy-and-pasting, which your post has in spaids.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
I think the level of instrusiveness is essentially similar in both cases.
No one forces you to be staring at your monitor (or having your speakers on) either. You could well be checking on your Kazaa downloads or catching up on the IRC channel for the full 15 seconds.
Speaking of intrusiveness, this reminds me of magazines where, just to find the table of contents, they have you sift through ad after ad after ad...
And when trying to turn to the page 76 containing the cover story, you are again lost in a sea of full-page ads that don't even show page numbers. Unintentional? I think not...
DISABLE FALSH!!! Macromedia is an intrusive advertiser's dream tool. Until they give the user the same permission control as Mozilla, I'm keeping it off my system.
According to the Prisoners dillemma, one of the few strategies that tends to win is to go tit for tat. If the opponenent co-operates, then co-operate. If the oppoenent screws you, screw them back.
Simply blocking the pop-ups is enough to get by. But the one responsible for the pop up cannot really tell if your blocking it, or just closing it. So what might work is a vengeance script.
When you are subjected to a pop-up, you execute a script that throws some pings at the sender, say 1 ping per kb of the popup. If enough people were using this sort of software, and the pop-up was obnoxious enough, the source would probably be intermittently crippled.
Of course, this would probably violate some inconvenient laws regarding hacking and Denial of Service attacks.
END COMMUNICATION
The Preferences Toolbar is a great add-on for Mozilla or Firebird/Phoenix. It has checkboxes to disable Popups, Java, Javascript, Cookies, Proxies; to kill Flash, set the user agent string and much more. (Killing Flash is only partially successful.) Search for it.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
There are places in the world where people pay for their Internet connection based on the amount of bandwidth they use. In other words, their service providers know how many megs of information was sent down that person's line and charge accordingly. Now imagine for a moment that you live in one of these places and you receive all kinds of ads. Not just web site ads, either. I'm talking about all ads... banner ads, popup ads, and even SPAM mail. Sure, your email program might be configured to erase SPAM mail, but it still has to get downloaded to you. Which leaves you doing what? Paying good, hard-earned money, our of YOUR pocket, because some jackasses in China or at some CBS site are sending you JUNK.
Online advertising simply sucks, especially when you can just go into Google and punch in what you're looking for. (Here at Harvard we do not end a sentence with a preposition. Alright, punch in what you're looking for, asshole.)
Why is this happening? Because too many people are sheep.
Yes, an enormous number of people are sheep, just following, unconciously, what the herd is doing. And guess what? Consumer mass-marketing is simply a science devoted to pulling sheep around by the strings. People are unconscious. See, in Spanish, we have a way of saying that someone is unconscious such that you would understand what I'm talking about... if you say that someone está inconsciente, you mean that he/she is medically unconscious, as when a big hammer falls on someone's head or something. But if you say that someone es inconsciente, you mean that he/she is unconscious as in Orwell's 1984, where the people don't think that the Party is unfairly controlling them simply because they don't think. The world is passing them by like some kind of television show and they're just letting it carry them along for the ride. This is the audience of sheep that we're talking about. There is such an alarming number of these sheep that it is going to reduce our world to a piece of shit. Legislation that doesn't really bother the sheep, but takes away real, useful rights of intelligent people like YOU. Television programming that sucks and is filled with commercials made for stupid people. So, you have technology that removes ads from webpages? Oh, well, we've already patented that (tomorrow), and we've already made it federally illegal with jail terms of at least 500 years (the day after tomorrow). And that pisses me off.
This is caused by shitty education systems that get people used to following directions and not thinking for themselves. Oh, there's an ad I have to look at for 15 seconds... oh well, maybe I'll buy their product so I can put it in my already cluttered beyond recognition house, so that my car has to be out on the driveway because the garage is full of so much shit.
SHEEP!
Could somebody write a program to automatically harvest all the domain names/ip addresses of the advertisers, consolidating them into your own personal black-list? Maybe even put their site in a "deny" file just in case you're ever tempted to do business with them? If the ads don't deliver the revenue, the sponsors will quit buying them!
http://www.pricelessware.org/2003/PL2003INTERNET.h tm#WebTool-ContentFilter
...it has formerly been the domain of XXX Porn sites...at least I'm assuming...yeah...'cause...I don't go there...
I used to worry about how bad the internet would be and was plagued with popups and spyware.
Now I have Ad Muncher.
http://www.admuncher.com/
It's free, it allows you to keep a list of websites not to block (some websites rely on popups for actual content reasons), it keeps a tally of the bandwidth you've saved, and I can use my favorite speedy browser Internet Explorer.
Running since March 14, 2003 - "217,395" ads removed, bandwidth saved: 1,698.
It replaces ads and banners with small, unintrusive text-links to the ads if you want that say "[ad-munched]" I haven't seen a popup for flash ad in a long time...
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Hey dude, if you want the weather...
http://www.nws.noaa.gov
weather.com just recycles the National Weather Service stuff anyway. This way you can get it direct.
If it turns out that Camino doesn't block them, it looks like its time to go back to Lynx.
That would be fun to Shift-Click to zap
images (or animated images) just to make
them go away when they are annoying.
I'm talking about images in regular pages,
not pop-up windows which we eliminated
way back with Mozilla's wonderful controls.
Does anyone have a URL that can be published prominently on Slashdot so that we can all visit their site and view their pretty ads? I mean, there are so many of us who want to know how well this technology will work.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Ah, so that explains why I didn't see it.
Great. It might be nice to have an
open-source Flash implementation with
plenty of user controls, to selectively
allow the use of flash when desired.
But, I don't seem to miss much without it.
I first experienced this at work (I use IE at work, so I can't disable pop-ups), and I was so disgusted that I immediately removed Wired from my favorites. The I went home and removed Wired from my faves in Mozilla.
And I haven't been back since. Wired is forever off the list, until they post a public apology.
There are better ways to generate ad revenue. My personal policy is to only allow images that are hosted on the server, and only if they're not intrusive. I appreciate and occasionally find useful Google's adwords, and kur05hin's text ads. Anything that blinks, moves, or otherwise clutters a page of text is blocked, period, including those annoying flash ads.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
LOOOOOOOL - now *that's* funny! Luckily IE crashed around the 20th new window mocking me :)
One of my clients have been telling us that he want one of these ad in his new designing page. We advice him that this type of intrusive ad only will lower the number of hits of the main page... but he wants one.
If you *really* don't like these ads even add the websites that use them to your hosts file... then you're guaranteed to never go there...
At least on the Unicast demo, I don't get anything at all thanks to the fine work of the Proxomitron (Windows). I'd highly recommend it for killing almost all of the obnoxious crap you'll find on the internet. www.proxomitron.org
Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
mod this back up for me please. I'm trying to negate my bodgy mod (bodgy wheel mouse scrolled options not page) by posting.
You would want to start reading this magazine.
Online they are at www.adbusters.com
Just heaping on top like the rest, to show disfavor and all. Actually, pop-ups aren't a problem with Mozilla. But I do have to use Internet Exploiter for certain websites occasionally (like my bank). Happily my bank is technically the equivalent of a geranium, so they don't utilize too many pop-up ads ... yet. (Some Madison avenue-type will probably sell it to them, though. And that'll be the day I close my account. Betcha they still won't get it. Wink.)
ALT+F4
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I quit visiting fool.com because they went with the obnoxious ads and decided to lock everyone but paid members out of anything remotely useful. Everything started going downhill when they moved their radio show over to that state-run radio station. ;)
I still use weather.com, since it seems they stopped doing popups lately. They were just about to get dropped from my toolbar before that.
As has been said many times before, any site that hosts these kinds of ads is probably going to regret it long term. But then again, I've seen too many businesses that were very short-sighted. They need a pair of those magic business binoculars...and a roll of quarters.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I must say that I bought AdSubtract back when it was still Intermute; it was the best $30 I have ever paid for a software product. Before Mozilla was stable, AdSubtract blocked ads, java, javascript, deletes cookies, and gives a log of what it blocked and why.
You can even customize which features are enabled by website. For example, don't block ads from Slashdot, but block them from Yahoo. The only thing it doesn't block is Flash, and you just delete the plugin to fix that.
No, it's
Intrusive 286
Intrusive 386
Intrusive 3.0
Intrusive 3.1
Intrusive 95
Intrusive 95 OEMSR1
Intrusive 98
Intrusive 98SE
Intrusive ME
Intrusive 2000
Intrusive XP
XP stands for eXtra Penetrating.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Big difference, and proves that annoying the consumer even SLIGHTLY less has big payoffs click thru wise.
are the popups that move themselves so that the top of the window (e.g., Close button) is off the top of the screen where you can't get at it. Got hit with one of these the other day when I was forced to use filterless MSIE on another machine.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
none of the ad types did a damn thing :)
my config contains default filters from the proxomitron but many more than just the default options enabled
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
Warez and Warez Topsites have already been doing this type of advertising for several years.
*yawn*
This isn't a problem, folks. If you see it, you have Javascript turned on. If you have Javascript turned on, you've made a tacit request for this sort of behavior.
It's like going to a boxing gym, changing into shorts and gloves, climbing into the ring, saying "show me what you got", and then whining when someone hits you.
DUH!
Suck it up and enjoy it. After all, you've asked for it.
Advertisers... gotta hate 'em
I've never had such joy clicking a "skip" button!
- The admaker company themselves --They get their site blacklisted heavily before and after some h4x0r k1dd13 scribbles it
- The site you're visiting --They get LARTed pretty fast also, and hopefully learn their lesson before Darwin gets them.
- Third parties, like banner services only worse. They need to find all kinds of bad things happening to themselves....
In general, people who design "user experiences" need to have some understanding of the user environment before selling their services. Otherwise they'll end up like that Pointcast service that didn't understand caching, which everybody really liked for a week or two before it was obvious that it trashed everybody's network performance, at which point sysadmins all blocked it. (Remember how "push media" was going to be the next cool wave of the future thingI've got DSL at home, so a 300K download is pretty fast, but it's still worth emailing the designers a copy of Mozilla so they can try out their product on a REAL browser... ("Here's my browser - try out your software on THIS!") and even making a couple of voice telephone calls to the company pushing them and its whois contacts. Companies that have 800-numbers sometimes really don't like getting their phones slashdotted with complaints, and if it happens to the customer as well as the supplier of this kind of adware, sometimes they get the hint.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Even easier:
When using a Win OS, just go rename the dll. Flash ads won't be loaded, and if you absolutely need Flash, go rename the dll again. I have a folder shortcut to my Plugins, and renamed NPSWF32.dll to aaaaNPSWF32.dll . This gets rid of Flash for both Netscape and Moz, since the Plugins are shared. Just close your browser, use the shortcut, change the name of the dll, reload the browser, if you want to turn it on/off. I need to rename the dll only rarely, since I don't need flash that often. But it keeps it installed, and ready. No more ads.
"a new on-line ad format that takes over the entire screen of the PC"
the entire screen! oh no... wait thats right i have dooooollll monitors. looks like i'll need a third just for crap that i ignore like popus and IM's from chicks
Did anyone notice that they've been nice enough to provide a "Skip Commercial" link at the top of the pop-up?
Good: They give you the option to skip the damn thing.
Bad: They call it a commercial...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Squid + squidGuard + Ads = heaven
s p; redirect http://localhost/1x1.gif
acl {
freenet-artoo-net {
pass whitelist !ads !gambling !porn !violence all
}
}
To summarize: squidGuard allows me to define source and destination groups, which can be based on domains, urls, regex, etc. such as:
dest ads {
domainlist mesd/blacklists/ads/domains
urllist mesd/blacklists/ads/urls
expressionlist ftp.univ-tlse1.fr/blacklists/ads/expressions
&nb
}
The "blacklists" are freely available and maintained by users of the system. I never see the ads because they're always replaced with 1x1 clear GIFs.
And I would buy a day of cnn.com access for a quarter, if I can browse the headlines on the "front page" first and the purchase is as easy as dropping a quarter into a slot. Sure, newspapers still have advertisements, but they also have to pay for paper, printing and delivery.
I am downloading about $50 worth of songs from Apple music store right at this moment. I can only assume that the myth that people won't pay for content is spread by people who don't have anything worth paying to offer, as an excuse to their shareholders.
Sure, there are challenges, like offering cheap or free content to people in developing countries or poor people in US. This should be written into the law, just like access for disabled people. But the benefit of having an honest relationship with your customers is well worth it.
An average non-techie may not on their own switch, but given the choice more may now choose Mozilla. I used to have a lot of trouble convincing people to even try out Mozilla. Now I just tell them it blocks popup ads and they're more than willing to try it out.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
is What Car? in the UK. I never go there anymore because of the interstitial ads.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I hereby make notice that I will never re-visit any site that co-ops my screen for 15 seconds with an ad.
As I think about it that may not be true. Everyone should re-visit these sites periodically to gather a list of all their advertisers. Each and every one of the advertisers should be contacted with a message stating they advertise on a site that abuses its customers (even if they are not the ones with the 15 second ad) and until this practice stops you will not buy their products. That will get the advertisers attention, and they will get the web site administrators attention. The people with the money have a lot more power over these sites than do you or I.
"The format has a low annoyance level" Well that's got the 957 previous /.ers told.
Since the release of pop-up ads and the gross amount of SPAM, i have grown to despise ANY form of internet advertising. In no way shape or form will i EVER buy from an ad on a website.
...who does this. This is evil. This is pure annoyance. Get no one a penny who does this to you.
When everyone who does this experience a drop in revenue, then it will go away forever!
Do the same for any stud who spams, pops ups, pops under, or basically farts in your face, digitally speaking.
Why try to get every browser out there to be even MORE bloated when you can just setup a nice filter (like junkbuster... or its successor, privoxy) to go along with the squid cache you're already using?
Blocking ads at the browser level is just asking for more bloat, and more identical blacklists to maintain. It's treating the symptom, not the transmission agent (to treat the disease, we have to have laws like Virginia's anti-spam law).
I believe you know of what I speak.
And charge like 1 billion dollars per ad to license
Eat at Joe's.
How long before the ad server begins to refuse connections and automagically improves everyone else's life?
--Udo.
Get a Mac.
Somewhere along the line, I've learned to consider context-sensitive TEXT ADS as useful *content*, which can be read or ignored just like any other content.
Witness this: Yesterday, I sent Google a complaint because the TEXT ADS that came up weren't relevant to my search!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
well i put an audio compressor between my cable box and stereo. it levels off the volume, i have it set rather nicely and crazy eddie can holler away, it gets levelled off to normal levels. alesis makes a small 75$ compressor, i've seen them used on ebay for 30$. behringer makes 100$ ones that while not the best for music are good for this sort of purpose, samson too. feel like a little more theres the 200$ RNC (really nice compressor). my friend has one and uses it for music and loves it. eh.
-- troutsoup.com
Check out my demo of this techonology. Only works in IE under Win32, but since that's 90% of the target audience and ad is presented to, it's good enough http://www.cosmicrealms.com/rant.html
I almost hope this doesn't get modded up too high, because Salon might get wise to this and find a way to disable it. But you can get yourself a free daypass by doing the following:
Change your bookmark to Salon.com to: http://premium.salon.dom/daypass/index.jsp. This will give you an automatic free daypass and take you to the frontpage without requiring you to watch the advertisement.
You're welcome.
Step 1) go to http://www.unicast.com/gallery/index.
Step 2) If using opera, right-click on their page, go to the "reload every" item in the context menu, and click "5 seconds" in its submenu.
Step 3) Browse using other tabs. Enjoy.
The X10 ads were a little annoying at first, but it seemed like a cool product actually. I read into it and actually bought a set of 2 cameras. It's actually a great little system. I recommend it for most people. I broke one of mine by hooking it up to a battery pack and ziplock bag and putting it in an R/C boat in my pool. oops...
They want ad agencies to sign their clients up for this in hopes of getting advertising dollars from companies that are now spending a bundle on TV. Not by making ads that actually work well on the web, but making the web work like the only ad medium that is making a lot of money: TV.
Here's part of their sales pitch:
"The Full Screen Superstitial® offers advertisers visual proof that the Internet can support the kinds of creative ideas they are used to delivering on Television -- a single message that dominates the medium while it is delivered to the consumer.
"This format breaks-through the shackles imposed by pixel-constrained and technology-led units, giving creatives a full and blank canvas to work from and with:"
... advertising agencies and marketing departments have been frustrated with the limitations of the web as long as it's been around. They HAVE A VISION and they want to see it happen. Text is not flashy enough for an ad agency - they have to have a flashier ad than the next agency, in a bizarre form of "mine's bigger than yours".
"*A full screen, 15-second commercial that utilizes all of the page's real estate to engage, entertain, & even sell"
Ad agencies think in multiples of 15 seconds.
"Ads play in the proper transitional space as the consumer moves between pages, as opposed to units that 'play when ready' or distract consumers in the middle of reading an article, researching a purchase, composing e-mail or searching for information. The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
It sounds like they will be preloading these, much like those damned exit ad popups, and think they have a technology that will somehow FORCE the consumer to accept it. If I have to wait 15 seconds before a link works, just to see something an ad agency thinks will help their customer retain my loyalty, I'll be off that site in about 15 ms.
Let's face it: banner ads were conceptualised when advertisers felt that a web page is like a print page, so why not put a web ad like a print ad. It's wrong. a web page is different than a print one, in that it allows for hypelinking, personlisation etc. The best advice for placing web ads is: look at junctures where the user has to make navigational decisions (e.g. not *when* the user is composing mail, but right *after* the mail is sent). Ads need to be more intelligent and respectful of people. Banners ads do neither of the two.
Turn it off.
Just turn Java off, and JavaScript, and JavaBeans, or whatever.
Boom. Problem solved.
There are no gods but ourselves.
Hello Mr. Destiney.
I was wondering if you can search for people by their country in destiney.com. Can you? I want to ask that before I register (and upload my pic..)
Can you?
-0-0- idle
I went to my favorite websites and the pages were all clean of advertising clutter. The content was there all pristine and neat. I could navigate from page to page quickly and get to the content I wanted w/o all the banners, ads flying across the screen or annoying pop-ups on every single page. The clutter had disappeared. I didn't have to install and learn any new web browsers. I didn't have to pay for, install and deal with all the annoying bugs in popup stopper software. At the end of the day I could shutdown my web browser and computer w/o having to shutdown 30 separate windows from pop-under ads. Ah, it was truly a utopia.
But then I woke up and had an epiphany. Wait, this can happen! How you may ask? One must think outside of the box.
The answer is going to surprise you: Support a product like the full screen Superstitial Unicast just announced. What you say??? You must be joking!!! No, I'm not; Grasshopper let me explain to you why I believe this is so.
1.
Websites have to sell all the junk-ads is because no advertiser in their right mind is willing to pay a high enough price for banner ads (which nobody pays attention to, but clutter up my content and slow down my page loads), popup ads or DHTML layer ads (which invariably show up just when I'm in the midst of reading how my favorite team is doing in the hockey playoffs). So what if sites could instead sell something advertisers want to buy and are willing to pay for, then sites could afford to only sell a small amount of formats. Unicast says this format is based on advertiser demand for stuff more like TV and print. Don't we have to assume if it's available, they'll pay for it, and then sites can really cleanup their pages?
2.
The website limits my exposure to these intrusive ads to a frequency comparable to TV commercials. Say every 10 minutes or so. They can do this because these ads can and should command a lot of money from the advertisers.
3.
Unicast says all of these ads have close commercial buttons on them so that I can skip advertising that doesn't interest me and I can continue on without much of a disruption.
4.
Even if I see a full screen Unicast ad every once in a while, I don't want to see the same one over and over again. I don't want to see the same ad more than say once or twice in the same day. The sites can do this too. The advertisers are going to love these ads, which in turn creates a big demand and a lot of choices of which one to show me. I don't have to see the same one over and over again!
5.
But wait you say, what about all this stuff I've been reading about 300k files slowing down my connection speed? Ah good question Grasshopper, when I read deeper in Unicast's website and examined/understood their source code, guess what? Their website gallery doesn't use their own technology. The gallery just streams in the gigantic flash ad. For some bizarre reason they don't utilize their own 'polite patented pre-caching technology' that they use for ads that run on websites on their own website. So I went and looked at the full screen ad live on a site and it played instantly with no blank window at all.
6.
So I'm thinking to myself that this is starting to make sense... The websites can make a lot of money and hopefully as a result will give me better service. I don't have to pay for anything. No subscription fee because the advertiser pays for everything just like when I'm watching my favorite hockey game on TV.
7.
So, I win, the website wins, and the advertiser wins. Everybody makes money. Is this utopia or what?
8.
So what can I do to help make this happen? Ah Grasshopper, I'm glad you asked that question. Check it out for yourself...if I'm wrong, let me know, but on the assumption that I'm right, I've started emailing my favorite websites and telling them that if I have to see advertising, won't they please sell the things they can make the most money on with the fewest number of exposu
The security model for Mozilla assumes everything is good until you block it.
A MUCH better security model is to block everything, then allow certain formats for certain servers OR DOMAINS.
I want graphics turned off unless I turn them on.
- Unless I use the "Allow graphics from the same server" option.
- Unless I use the "Allow graphics from the same domain" option. (Many large public sites have dedicated graphics servers. But I want to allow all Yahoo servers to show graphics except ads.yahoo.com.)
- Unless I choose "Allow graphics from this server" option while looking at the placeholder graphic that lets me know I am missing something. It would be nice to see the ALT text, since it's entire purpose is to be there when the graphic is not shown.
And Mozilla should not automatically load the first graphic when I look at the Media tab.
Everything that applies to graphics can be applied to other formats. The "graphics" settings can apply to GIF, JPEG, and PNGs. Flash and Acrobat and any other formats should have their own settings.
---
Why does "Submit" appear before "Preview"?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Here's an excellent site about those grocery store surveillance cards: http://www.nocards.org.
Not only that, it also translates and consolidates worldwide info. I can't find weather forecasts for Brasil and Confoederation Helvetica at NOAA.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin