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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?"
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.
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.)