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Pop-Up Ads Lead to Consumer Revolt, Ad-Blocking
securitas writes "The New York Times' Saul Hansell reports on pop-up advertising and the consumer backlash against intrusive advertising. It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form. The article discusses the boom in ad-blocker software, with AOL, Yahoo and Google getting into the game. Microsoft says that it will include pop-up blocking in IE when it releases WinXP SP2. According to one pop-under ad agency, 20%-25% percent of Web users have pop-up blocking enabled, double the rate of a year ago - Earthlink's numbers bear that out, with 1 million of its 5 million customers using its ad-blocking software 18 months after release. DoubleClick says that it is 'developing technology that will enable pop-up ads to evade the blocking software.' Why isn't that surprising?"
I agree. Whenever I'm thinking of buying something, I head to google, type it it, and chances are that a nice, non-intrusive text ad will have exactly what I want for a good price. Everyone wins: Me, Google, and the advertiser.
I will never buy anything from X10 or any other major pop-under company (Orbitz, I'm looking in your direction...)
Wow.
I want that plugin to work for *all* forms of plugins. I mean, I love Java and Flash, but they are too damn easy to abuse.
I live in Calgary (Canada, eh?) and the city has Transit schedule information online. However, their main page has a small Java applet that displays the time. That's all it does. I don't want to load the JVM just to hit that page. And I don't think I should have to disable Java in my browser, either.
Make this work for Java, Flash and Quicktime and I'll be a happy camper!
"I don't want to see pop-ups blocked," said Matthew R. Coffin, the chief executive of LowerMyBills.com, a site that sells long distance and other services. Pop-up and pop-under ads, he said, attract more people than any other ad format. "People wouldn't click if they weren't interested."
The toolbar on each pop-up window is often disabled and the window itself just displays a large image which doesn't allow the average web surfer to easily close it. I think most people just click on it by accident or because they don't know what else to do. I am curious to know what the percentage is of people who click on the ads and actually purchase something. I suspect it is less than 1%.
This is bullshit.
http://tomgould.com/
It doesn't have to be annoying, but it will continue to do so. Ads will increasingly become more in-your-face, until such time as we have a massive consumer backlack (and I mean *massive*, but I think we're starting to see the grassroots movment now), or, in the more ideal situation, spammers and other such low-lifes are catapulted into the sun without any sunblock.
In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, adverstising is ubiquitous. Ads are absolutely everywhere, even on chopsticks! One person in the book has her whole body and the strands of her hair tattooed so that she is a walking advertisement. Other people would just sit in their homes mesmerized by the ads everywhere, never really carrying on a conversation or anything else.
Basically, in that advanced age with nano technology and all, advertisers had basically settled on three things to get people to notice their ads amongst the clutter: tits, cars and explosions. The more in-your-face, gratuituous, outragous, or just plain wierd, the better. They even had ads that played with your peripheral vision, making it look like you were about to be hit by a car, or they'd have to 3d-esque phantom bull-rush you, attempting to get you to flinch.
Also, some people had special optical implants in their eyes, giving them overlays of various screens of data or something. One person in the book had one of those, and some people in India (I think) hacked into his vision system and ran an ad for a roach motel or something in the bottom right corner of his vision 24 hours a day. He couldn't get rid of it, even when he closed his eyes. He killed himself.
Their "technology to get round adblockers" will have to involve getting a new domain every day if they want to get past the "Adblock" extension. Using http://*doubleclick.net/* as a filter easily blocks any content originating from that domain, even if it's in an iframe. There's the option of "hide ad" (annoying blank spaces) or "remove ad" (ideal, as far as I'm concerned). It's handy for other stuff too, one of the elements I have blocked is "http://192.168.0.1/Images/Maze.swf" which is an annoying animation my router admin page sees fit to throw at me and crashed one version of flash-plugin.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
It also makes it possible to block annoying content using regular expressions.
I'm using these ones for getting rid of annoying ads:
And this one to not load those annoying 1px-spacer graphics nobody needs anymore:
Maybe they'll be useful for some of you fellow advertising victims. (But make sure to remove all the spaces which Slashdot automatically inserted.)
Try Junkbuster.
.ini file and the bad advertising just goes away. You can make the good advertising (i.e. Slashdot's ad server) continue by adding in what you want to see. It is available for at least Linux and Windows. It uses regular expressions to parse all URLs requested. I haven't seen an ad at home (except while browsing Slashdot) for about two years.
I can block any advertising that I choose. Edit the
Cookies? I don't need no stinkin' cookies except from sites that I choose. Granted it sometimes can be tough telling where the cookie is coming from, but I feel that it is a small price to pay.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
So people want to block popups. That's fine. I block pop-ups. It just irks me that some of the blockers are not implemented properly. As a designer, I want to be able to detect that the popup has been block and and provide feedback to the user in the form of a message or an alternative. Popups are not appropriate in all cases and some folks don't like them at all. I'm willing to work with blockers. Some of the blockers just don't want to work with me.
Detecting blocked popups with Mozilla/Firebird this is very easy. It throws an exception that you have to catch. With the Google toolbar it isn't that bad, you get back a null pointer from your window.open call.
Hower, I can't for the life of me figure out how to deal with either Earthlink or AOL's popup blockers. When they block something you get a window handle back that looks very legit. It has all the field filled in (width, height, content, screen, etc) but the window just doesn't show up to the user.
Somebody needs to sit down and bitchslap the developers who did the AOL and the Earthlink blockers. They are making the web a mess. Tell them to look over the shoulders of the Google/Mozilla folks.