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.""
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.
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!
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
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 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
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.)
I really just wish that Mozilla would implement a "block flash crap from this server" option along with the "block images from this server".
TV ads work, even in an age of remotes and Tivos, because TV is a passive medium. To flip to another channel or hit the "Skip 30" button takes effort from an non-interactive individual (even as small of an effort as using the remote is.) I've been known to watch commercial breaks on taped programs just because I'm too zoned out to notice, which says as much about the program as it does me. Inertia works against active ad avoidance on the TV.
The Internet, however, is a very interactive medium. Since the death of push, the only time I'm not interacting with the browser is when I'm streaming audio or video. Since I'm so interactive, it take very little effort for me to alt-tab to a new browser window or alt-f4 to kill the pop-up (if it even makes it that far with Mozilla.) Since I'm already interacting, inertia actually works for active ad avoidance.
Ultimately, this ad format will fail, not because it's too intrusive, but because it's too annoying. It's annoying enough that people will find a way to block the ads. Internet advertisers need to find a way to make their ads intrusive without being annoying, and full-screen pop-ups that steal focus are not the answer.
A while back, I compared the ratio of ad space to editorial content on Slashdot as compared to other media. For example, magazine ads are relative benign, you don't see people rising up demanding ways to get around magazine ads. But where /. has less than 1% of it's space devoted to ads, a magazine might have 33-50%. Those ads are intrusive, in that they're always there in front of the reader, but they're not too annoying. It helps that they're also highly targeted, you don't see ads for bridal dresses in a video game magazine.
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.