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.""
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
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.
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
Mozilla is a good choice.
Seriously, this is nothing new...suddenly changing the size of the popup ad makes it innovative?
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
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!
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.
..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?
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!
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,
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.
1. Find out who does these ads. 2. Do not buy products or services from these places.
I'm sure this is just a natural progression of advertizing and
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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;
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.
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
Pick your poison:
Phoenix/Firebird - blocked
Opera - blocked
Mozilla - blocked
Netscape - blocked
IE - oh thats a feature.
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.
"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
That's how these people "think".
They also think annoying people will get them to buy their advertizers' products.
For the good of society, I should be allowed shoot whoever I see fit.
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
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.)
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
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
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.
They also think annoying people will get them to buy their advertizers' products.
This is more effective than you might think - look at x10. They were the first company to carpet-bomb the web with popups, everybody hates them, yet they are pretty successful at selling their product. Also consider loud, annoying TV commercials. They are universally despised and hated, yet everybody remembers that Crazy Eddie has the best prices on electronics.
Innovative enough to get patent protection, according to their home page! Good ol' US patent office. ;)
"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. "
Unless you're using Opera with pop-ups disabled. And their examples don't download completely before playing anyway.
They must be so proud of themselves.
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.
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
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!
"37% lift in purchase intent" my ass.
/rant
I've worked in product marketing and know firsthand that such "research" can be highly misleading. Generally, these results come from focus groups where you bring people in (for pay) to evaluate an ad or campaign or whatever. When being asked to view an ad, then answer a series of questions, people invariably tend to be more favortably inclined because of the context of their experience--i.e. "I'm at a focus group to look at ads."
If they are on their own time, and attempting to access whatever content and are delayed by an unexpected ad which hinders them, the effect is almost universally negative.
And I'll only mention the psychological desire to please the questioner in passing (ever notice how they always pay for focus group participation and ply you with tasty goodies before showing you the "exciting new ads that our client wants to share with you").
If you've ever wondered why so much marketing seems so blatently stupid, a lot of it has a lot to do with the ubiquitous "focus group" system. it's a classic case of the "Emperor's New Clothes." Market research firms tend to wind up being supportive of the hypothesis as a simple matter of survival. They usually don't cheat the numbers per se, but they stack the deck ridiculously in their favor.
If I were to set up an objective test for these ads, I'd tell the participants that the objective is to "read all the slashdot articles of interest to you" (or whatever) and then interrupt them with the ads. Although even this method is flawed (most people are savvy enough to know what's being tested), I would bet that the results would be different.
Most focus groups are a scam. They exist to cover Marketers' asses and rubber stamp their ideas because they're too gutless to innovate.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada