How Text Ads Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web

securitas writes "In Sunday's New York Times, Randall Stross writes about How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web and how it is largely responsible for the demise of the odious pop-under ad. From the article: "Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no images, no animation.... Google introduced these ads at the very moment when X10 ads were strewn like chewed gum on every square of sidewalk. X10's pop-unders were accepted at mainstream sites run by companies including Microsoft, Yahoo and The New York Times." Remember that "in mid-2001, X10's company Web site was the fourth-most visited" on the Web. Thank you, Google." I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.

Comments

Pop-up ads are coming back

[davidwr]

Lately thanks to animation-plugins and other technologies, I've seen a rash of annoying pop-up and "peel-back" ads. Anything that covers existing content without me explicly asking it to do so is by definition annoying.

I'm waiting for someone who has the skill to update Firefox so plugins cannot overwrite areas of the screen already used by text and graphics. Either that or put in white space for the part of the screen the ad will eventually take over, so the ad doesn't obscure the real content.