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.""

Comments

Set mozilla script permissions

[esanbock]

Disable page moving, page resizing, and bringing page to foreground.

Gallery of Examples at Unicast...

[gludington]

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.

Evil ads

[retro128]

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.

Re:I remember popups ...

[dheltzel]

I dunno, I've got the same thing. Today one of my co-worker's sons complained about all the popups on the net. I tried to demonstrate how Mozilla blocks popups, but I couldn't remember a site that uses them, it's been so long since I've seen one. He was happy to supply a URL for me and sure enough, no popup in Mozilla. The boy's now thinking his daddy works with a real wizard (daddy's our help desk guy, and does everything the MS way). I told him to get Mozilla, the browser of champions.

I'm still not sure if popups actually exist out there. I guess I have to go fire up IE and check it out sometime :)

Thanks, team Mozilla!!

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

[Dion]

It's already possible, simply install a user stylesheet that turns off flash by default and turn it on for those(that?) page you want to use flash on, I use this one:
http://dion.swamp.dk/dl/userContent.css

Read a bit about it here:
http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff.html