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Unwanted Popups Boosting Web Traffic
Most of us have experienced popups used for advertising. Now, some adware companies and advertiser networks are using popups (mostly from programs that users did not want installed) to directly boost traffic numbers for their customer Web sites. Net rating and measurement companies try to detect and discount such inflated traffic numbers, with mixed success.
or take what you paid for. I use Linux myself, but feel free to get a Mac and experience less of these spyware just the same. It is really pointless to use Windows, or rather to use Windows as a non Windows expert and then complain about such.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Adblock + Filterset.G r00lz.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
I'm surprised that it took this long for advertisers to figure out that popunders/popups increase traffic. Back around 2000 when I was working for dot-coms, the ad-revenue based groups lived and died by traffic ratings (unique page impressions, etc) like Jupiter Media Metrics. When popunders started to reach critical mass, x10.com was pushed from nowhere into the top 5 -- overnight. I'm sure it cost them a pretty penny, but the result was evident over 6 years ago.
Let's hope that advertisers take another 6 years to catch onto the next big thing.
-Turkey
Bingo!
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.
Measure anything human activity with statistics and it can be fudged and defrauded.
In this case, I think the more accurate measure would not be "web hits" but rather a measure of average time visiting said site. A pop-up ad is visted perhaps 1.2 seconds, while a legitimate site much longer, statistically speaking. Average clicks once on a site is another possible measure. Refering site is another item that can be used to uncover fraud.
I think a broader measure of other statistical information would be much more revealing than simple clickthroughs and impressions.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
adblock+ doesn't need filterset.g
See http://adblockplus.org/ and http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Chronologically speaking:
- the pop-up window is created,
- that new window requests data from the target URL
- and finally displays the data.
If you're ignoring/blocking scripts, the code to create a new window is not executed meaning that we never get to step #2.I'd use NoScript but it blocks local image loading without the option of re-enabling it.