New Online Ad Technology To Bypass Popup Blockers

RetroGeek writes "Falk eSolutions AG is claiming it can detect and defeat pop-up and pop-under ad blockers. The best quote is that when they detect an ad blocker they will 'replace a pop-up or pop-under ad with what are called "floating" ads, or ads that appear as transparent images over Web-site content.' As far as I am concerned they can place as many transparent images as they want. He probably meant translucent. It should be easy to defeat the detection, after all visit a web site, the pop-up blocker detects a Javascript command, then doesn't run it. Replace this with: the pop-up blocker detects the Javascript command, runs it, then places the result into a bit-bucket. Any Mozilla devs here?" WebGangsta adds "While this may ignite another round of online advertising purchasing, this news doesn't affect anybody who uses a customized HOSTS file to stop the majority of ads from appearing anyway."

Comments

why

[mpost4]

do adervisters really think this will increase their sales. The user
using these popup blockers have said they don't want them, to try to
defeat them is only going to make many users hate you, and your product
I would see that if it is a legit company they just might see their sales
drop from the angry net users. For those who have not disabled javascript
this just might be the nail that gets them to disable it.

Re:why

[MoonBuggy]

It works for the same reason spam works. Ads are more expensive than spam, obviously, but still not too pricey alot of the time. They're almost certainly cheap enough that one purchase per hits is enough. All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap - the easiest way to hit alot of morons is to saturate the web, you'll piss off millions, but still hit thousands willing to give you money.

Re:why

[MojoRilla]

Unfortunately, they might start trying to use other technologies such as flash or java for their pop-up spam.

If the people who are working on this actually cared about offending people, they wouldn't be working in marketing.

Re:why

[slash-tard]

It must help or they wouldnt keep paying for them. Kinda like spam.

Yeah we would all prefer TV without commercials but we have them and they influence some people enough to make them worth buying. Its the same with web ads.

I personally dont block any ads except pop-ups, they dont bother me that much and I understand that sites need ads the generate revenue. If I was on dial-up though I would be blocking left and right.

Re:why

[abb3w]

do adervisters really think this will increase their sales.

For the large, reponsible companies-- brands 80% of the population of your home state would recognize-- of course not. But for Fly-By-Night-Porn.com and other tiny web companies which would otherwise get zero business, even a minimal response rate from those getting the ad can be well worthwhile, even if the other 99.999% of the people seeing the ad swear up and down they "will NEVER do business with those #$%^ing @#$%^&*s so long as they exist". And they can always change names if the original company name gets tarnished.

Re:why

[s20451]

it kind of just happens to some of the weaker willed and morally challenged

marketing is a career that one chooses once one has graduated college and realizes one has no other skills companies want

I dislike these arguments of moral superiority, which lend greater importance to these issues than they truly warrant. You are being annoyed by pop-up ads, not seriously harmed. You are free to avoid any site that uses them.

I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?

Re:why

[Le Marteau]

Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.

There ARE immoral jobs. Marketing is one of them, albeit this side of manufacturing nerve gasses, but it is still not an occupation a good man should aspire to. Of course, if one has to feed his kids, etc, etc, but that is just goes to the old adage 'it is permissable to commite a lesser crime to prevent a greater crime'.

Re:why

[Anonym1ty]

I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?

If you had morals, you would realize that the ends do not justify the means. Just because your children are hungry does not automatically give you carte blanch to set your moral aside. In fact doing so only proves you never had any morals to put aside.

Character means you find a way to feed your children without being immoral or unethical. Saying there is a tough economy and you had no choice just shows the quality of your character.

What a man does with his life is not nearly as important as how he does it.

Re:why

[LiquidCoooled]

Because they saw an advert in a popup window....

Re:why

[wobblie]

Probably because many admins are installing ad busting proxies in workplaces (it can conserve quite a lot of bandwidth and is a nice courtesy to the users).

So one ad busting proxy can protect thousands of people from ads all day ... who may otherwise click on them.

Re:why

[mausmalone]

I still have a hard time believing that this kind of extreme ad saturation actually boosts sales in any way at all. (Except for maybe the x cam, which was wholly unknown until the popunder scheme) I come to loathe advertisements that are intrusive, and to loathe the products they represent. I also don't understand why 5 ads every 2 minutes on TV is a lot... but 1 ad every page load is considered tiny on the web. I'll make this clear so that everybody understands:

There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.

Re:why

[s20451]

You missed the point. I was using an extreme example to convey the idea that marketing is not necessarily immoral. I agree that certain kinds of marketing are immoral, such as high-pressure sales tactics with questionable returns. However, there are immoral possibilities associated with any job.

I simply don't believe that causing minor annoyances should be declared immoral. Immorality is a weighty word that should not be overused.

Re:why

[s20451]

Actually, I agree. It is arguably immoral to continue to pester someone once you have been implicitly asked to stop (by disabling popups). The point of the thread was that the entire profession of marketing is immoral, which is an overly broad position that I can't accept.

Re:why

[Ironica]

There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.

Oh, dude, that is an AWESOME idea! There's this whole space at the bottom of most remotes, where the heel of your hand usually goes, that is just blank except for the company logo. Put a little LCD screen down there, beam ads straight to it, and we'll make a fortune!

Seriously, there is nowhere they won't put ads these days. The bathroom, your credit card statement, the bucket your popcorn comes in at the movie... any space that people see has a price. Now DON'T GIVE THEM ANY NEW IDEAS.

Re:why

[Ironica]

Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.

Marketing is an industry built to make you want things you didn't previously want. There are two types of things you don't want: things you know about and don't want, and things you don't know about yet but might or might not want. Marketing both brings products you did not know about to your attention and tries to convince you that you want them.

It can be done well or poorly. Probably 30-40% of the calls we get on our home phone are telemarketing of one kind or another (though we get substantially fewer since we opted out of long-distance service all together, so we don't have AT&T calling to try to sell us their local service and SBC calling to try to sell us their long-distance service in alternate weeks). There are telemarketers who call knowing that they're trying to sell you something and that you might already know you don't want it, and there are those who just don't know the difference. Lately, I've had pretty good success at ending calls quickly and painlessly by making it clear that I know about the product and don't want it. i.e. "Hi, my name is [name] and I'm calling from the Los Angeles Times--" "Hi. We don't want the paper. Not even just on Sundays. We get all our news from the internet. Save a tree." "Ok, thank you, have a good day."

If there were no marketing, you probably wouldn't own half the stuff you do. Marketing departments send demos of new products to places that publish the reviews you may read when deciding what to buy. They place ads in the Yellow Pages. There are a lot of methods of marketing that don't fall into the narrow definition you gave above... in fact, *most* marketing is non-intrusive; you just haven't noticed it. (By design.)

Now, I have wondered what the effect on our economy would be if there were no more advertising. Television would all be public or by subscription. All entertainment would be more expensive. On the other hand, many products would cost a lot less, because they currently have such huge advertising budgets. I truly wonder if a significant proportion of the wealth in our economy is *created* by the existence of advertising, and I speculate that some of our economic growth is dependent on innovations in advertising (hey, we can sell ads in public restrooms!)

But marketing is not inherently an unethical business. It's easy to do it that way, of course. But the same is true of freelance computer support, health care, legal assistance... almost any service.

Re:why

[Ironica]

...you say that like it's a bad thing.

Point well taken. I tend to think that American society (and most of Western society, but we're the worst) is way too caught up in consumerism. It's damaging on many levels.

But anyone who does own plenty of stuff and claims to disdain all marketing is blind to the effects marketing has on them... which is, IMO, even worse.

I can watch a commercial, and at the end, know whether the commercial had a positive, negative, or neutral effect on me. I'm aware of whether or not I am the target market, whether I consume products like the one being advertised, and whether I am more likely to buy them afterward. I'm also aware of *why* a particular commercial worked or didn't work... I can identify whether it taught me something I didn't know about the product, or if I identified with/despised the characters used in the commercial, or if it just made me feel good/bad about the company. (The worst commercials are the ones where, a few seconds later, I can't remember what they were advertising at all.)

I also know that pretty much all of the information I get about products comes in one way or another from either personal experience or a marketing department. Sometimes both, when someone gives out free samples.

People who aren't aware of the marketing they're not supposed to notice are, I think, far more susceptible to it.

These guys missed the boat.

[Liselle]

One of the many things we learned about the advertising idiocy during the dotcom boom was that you can't just spew your message everywhere. Random, untargetted advertising is what gave us Spank the Monkey and Win $20 (someone feel free to bring up the Microsoft ad I'm looking at now, not touching that one with a 10-foot stick).

These people are trying to serve ads to people actively trying to block them. Oh yeah, that's brilliant.

Re:These guys missed the boat.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a way to secure revenue? I run a site that gets ~10k hits/day. That bandwidth isn't free so I have banners and pop-unders which just barely cover the costs of running the site. What alternative is there? Charge a fee and have 10% of the people pay it and 90% stop visiting? Even if I did that, there is no good way to accept micropayments now, so I'd just be making more money for paypal.

The choice is run the ads or don't run the site, and since I'm getting a decent amount of traffic most people seem to want the first option.

Re:Last Measure

[cshark]

No kidding.
I wonder if there's a way to block those annoying float ads. But that's a little more complicated than blocking popups. Might be a nice emerging market to get into...

Re:This is too easy

[1000101]

This is certainly what one would hope people would do. Unfortunately, you are in the very small minority. The vast majority of internet users will simply close the ad or just click on the next link. Your idea has merit, but most people won't take the time to email the host and complain.

The amorality of direct marketing

[FunWithHeadlines]

Is there any other industry that tries to force itself upon a public that is explicity making it clear it wants no part of it? This is not a case of putting an ad in front of an audience composed of people who may or may not look favorably upon that ad, and who may or may not want the product. Instead they are trying to put an ad in front of the eyes of someone who has said, "I don't want to see this ad, I hate this form of advertising, and I look down on any company that employs this form of advertising, and I refuse to use their products."

Yet they do it anyway! Remarkably obtuse people. Of course, I know the reason for it. It's all about eyeballs and the more they can prove they are shoving their stuff in front of more eyeballs, the more money they get. That's why this is so amoral: They don't care how anyone reacts, or that that are despised, or that it causes business problems for the advertisers. They just want mo' money, and that's the end of their thought process.

Buh bye, new technology. It won't work. I will defeat it. I will refuse to view ads on the Web. Don't yammer at me with the tired old whine, "But how else are I gonna pay for my web siiiiiiite?" I dunno, Sparky, figure something else out. I will never allow advertising on my web site. It doesn't belong on the Web.

The Web is about people to people communiciation. Just because a bunch of greedheads decided to use it to make money doesn't subvert the purpose of the Web. As for the endless war against pop-ups: They lose. Every time.

Re:DMCA?

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely, they'll sue you under the DMCA claiming that you are bypassing a security feature designed to protect the IP content in the ads.

Not awful...They have the right idea.

[JeanPaulBob]

This site, which is very useful by the way, will not "work" if javascript is not enable or ads are not shown.

Sounds to me like they're taking a good approach. They're not attempting to circumvent anyone's ad-blocking software--anyone who doesn't want to see their ads, doesn't have to.

But they're providing a valuable service, and they deserve to be compensated. If you don't want to pay for it by letting them display their banner ads, then you don't get to use their site.

Do you watch television?

[3770]

Are you influenced by commercials on the TV? Of course you are.

If you could choose, would you choose to have the commercials disabled? Of course you would.

With this reasoning advertisers can safely assume that even annoying ads pay off.

Proud of being a plague to humanity?

[Kiyooka]

"Over the years, various companies have claimed to have a way to sidestep their online ads from being blocked," InterMute CEO Ed English said in a statement. "History has shown [that our] AdSubtract has no problem keeping up with ever-changing online ad technologies."

He sounds quite pleased with what his company's doing, but in reality they're not "keeping up with technology" -- they're finding ever-sneakier ways to push ads into people's faces despite their explicit objection, and despite the fact that they take extra steps to be rid of them.

It's like he eats shit for a living and sports a shit-eating grin.

You bunch of whiners

[Nuclear Elephant]

Sit there and complain about it, but the reason you're able to do things like read news for free online, perform fast google searches, and even use some software without paying for it is because companies pay for these services with advertisements. Remove the advertisements and you can kiss all of this goodbye. I'm not saying we should support the more obnoxious approaches to advertising, but our demand for "free software" and "free services" requires that the people running them find a way to make a living. Obviously I'm not a supporter of spam, I'm talking about something entirely different here. We live in a material world and I am a material girl...or boy.

Re:You bunch of whiners

[Anonymous Coward]

ads dont have to be annoying,

really they dont.

You're missing the point

[Kjella]

These people are trying to serve ads to people actively trying to block them. Oh yeah, that's brilliant.

...there's a whole lot of people setting up blockers (or have blockers put up for them, which won't be able to dodge these new ones) because they are the kind that get easily tempted. When they're calm and collected, they want to block ads. But if they see an ad, they simply MUST have it. It's amazing how many people you can catch that way.

Kjella

Real solution

[Ra5pu7in]

The real solution goes beyond ad blocking software. It lies in a willingness to completely boycott any site willing to allow advertising of this style. When enough of your readership complains and walks away, and your hits drop astronomically, you definitely re-evaluate your policy (especially since your advertisers do too).

I say let those sites that want to cater to sheep serve up as much as they want and get paid by advertisers to ignore the desires of their readers. I will get my data from sites that listen to their readers over their advertisers. (Reminds me of www.techreport.com which once had an advertiser whose animated image seriously sucked system resources. Readers posted complaints and the advertiser was asked to revise the image. Win/Win because the readers got a simple unobtrusive ad, the site got the advertising cash flow, and the advertiser adjusted to something that actually appealed to those readers who might be interested).

Re:Here's an example...

[Sgt York]

I thought so, too, but I just gave it a shot, spoofing as MSIE 6.0, and I got the same message.

Re:This is too easy

[connah]

You wouldn't consider weather.com to be credible? They annoy the life out of me...I go to check the weather and I get freakin' flying ads in my face.

Re:because

[badasscat]

If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.

But it should matter to the owner of the medium, because after all, ads can't exist without a medium to run on. Pissing off 99% of their users is not generally desirable for most web site owners, so I am not sure if this is going to fly. At the same time as pop-up blockers have become popular, site owners have realized they're actually hurting their own business by hosting them. No, not every site, and pop-ups do still exist (though as a Firefox user you can forgive me if I don't know this from experience), but there have been plenty of high-profile companies that have sworn them off recently. Even AOL's cutting back.

I think that's what's getting lost in all this. Advertisers are still at the mercy of the site owners, not the other way around (despite the bad economy... it only makes things worse to piss off your users). I doubt you'll ever see this technology used on a major commercial site; it'll probably be relegated to the internet red light district where most pop-ups seem to be served up these days to begin with.

Interesting, technique, but not foolproof.

[Ayanami Rei]

It uses javascript to check the ads to make sure the size of the image is not too small (as replacement images often are) and the display properties are maintained (not set hidden with CSS).

It can't actually detect if an ad was replaced by a blank image by a proxy server, but it'll know if the ad is the wrong size.

Solution? More sophisticated ad blockers should attempt to match image size to a URL pattern by fetching it a few times and seeing what it gets back. Then it should autogenerate the replacement content with that size.

Salon

[tgibbs]

I like Salon's approach. If you are not a member, you can get a day's membership by choosing to watch a brief commercial. A site could easily deal with pop-up blockers by presenting a screen inviting the user to request to see the ads. That would make it a requested screen, and the blocker would not trigger. If you don't want to do that, they are free to withhold their content.

On the other hand, I'm not going to futz with my pop-up blocker settings trying to get a site to work. If a site refuses to load, I just figure that it's a buggy site and I never go back.

Re:This is too easy

[DustMagnet]

Every time I see a pop-up that defeats my pop-up blocking, first I'll for damned sure never buy that product. In addition, I will never go to the hosting website again. And I'll make damned sure they know why.

I've done that, but more often I reconfigure my blocker. I use Proxomitron to block both ads and pop-ups. It uses regular expressions, so it only takes me a few minutes to come up with a new rule for the website. I don't mind simple ads, but animations drive me nuts.

Some websites don't work with Proxomitron, if they are ad free, I use the bypass feature. If they have ads, I follow your system.

Re:Collateral damage from all these "blockers"

[stevek]

Oops. I forgot to mention why I wrote this in the first place.

The original article suggested that the current behavior where browsers return an error from window.open should be changed so that the calling script can no longer determine that the new window was not created.

Not only would this theoretically stop the "popup" advertisers from knowing that you had blocked their advertisement, but it would also make it much more difficult for application developers to know.

So now, where the user experience for an application user might be getting a JavaScript alert asking them to enable popups for the application server, they'd just get silent failure.

I have no problem with this.

[Doppler00]

I've already seen these kind of advertisements used on websites. They are not like pop-up ads at all. Here is the difference:

A popup ad requires you to first, close the window to see the web page, or for that matter ANYTHING that may have been underneath it on your desktop. These can also appear in such rapid succession that you have no access to your computer for several seconds as you frustratingly try to close them all.

However, a transparent pop-up embedded in the webpage itself is not as much of a problem. It is contained within the browser window, so there is a clear seperation between the website, and anything else on your computer's desktop.

If you don't like website's that use advertising that's fine. Avoid them, or find some Mozilla tool to block them. For most people however, this is much less obtrusive than standard IE popups.

We don't want your damned ads!

[squall14716]

In Soviet Russia, pop-up ads block you!

Ok, ok, I'm sorry for that. Why can't advertisers find a way to give ads to people who want them and leave the rest of us the fuck alone. If I make a concious effort to BLOCK your pop-ups, BLOCK your spam, then why would I ever want to buy your product?

I do not try to block small banner ads like the one at the top of this page. I have no problem with those. It's pop-up/under ads, spam, and banner ads that make you scroll down to see jack shit that really piss me off. I mean, make your ads non-intrusive and I'm sure more people who actually need/want what you are offering will click that ad.

What are more annoying are pop-up ads advertising pop-up lockers that cost "only $500!". Wow, what a bargain, Firefox cam at this outrageous price of free. Meh, end rant.

So, did they miss the big hint?

[BillX]

Do you think the marketers will ever realize why there are 300 different types of popup-blocking software, but no AdWord-blocking software?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

when you install Adblock you hold a gun to Taco's head and rob him.

you are a evil man.... I'm guessing that you kick Network executives' puppies, and steal candy from the babies of Radio Station owners...

you evil person! how dare you not enjoy your Ad content!

ok that might be over the top sarcasim.. but you saying "Granted, there are those that question the morallity of doing so..." is the same as giving credibility to the insane guy on the corner with the "the end is near" baner and spewing profamnity at everyone...

anyone that "questions the morality" of blocking or skipping advertising on your own property... I.E. your computer, is a nutbag that needs to be beaten severly with a clue-by-four.

Posting AC to hide from the Slashdot Advertising Gestapo