Pop-Up Windows
No doubt you've seen them, those annoying advertising windows spawned when you visit a website.
They're called pop-ups, or pop-unders, depending on whether they appear on top of the page you were viewing, or behind it, and they deliver ads.
You may be one of the tolerant few, but many, if not most, web surfers despise them, because they take away control of the browser, distract you from your task, and force you to close those windows afterward.
Despite recent moves to stem the tide of pop-ups, they were responsible for a reported $US 2.3 billion in sales in the first three months of this year, up from $1.6 billion in the same period last year.
In the two years to June 2004, the number of pop-ups and pop-unders delivered to Web users more than trebled, and in just three months to last October, publishers delivered a reported 19.6 billion pop-up and pop-under ads to Web surfers.
According to data from researcher Nielsen NetRatings, they comprised 6.4 percent of all online ads in April 2004, compared with 1.8 percent in the same period of 2002.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
As a form of advertising, they first became popular around the year 2000, when the dot-com bust hit in the US, and content-providers were looking for a way lift their sagging revenues.
It didn't take much persuasion to get advertisers and marketers on board, because not surprisingly, this intrusive form of advertising gets results.
Ad tracking has shown that around ten times more people will click on a pop-up ad than will click on a standard advertisement.
Advertisers are now paying around $7 per thousand pop-up or -under impressions, and as much as $10 in some cases.
Compare that with a reported $2 - $3 per thousand views for static in-page ads, and it's not hard to see why site owners are tempted to compromise visitors' experience with these ads.
Users have started to fight back in hordes with the aid of software vendors, and some big internet players, and while they seem to be winning, their efforts haven't been completely successful.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN all offer search toolbars which among other things block pop-up ads, and blocking software abounds at www.tucows.com, but the more gung-ho advertisers have found ways around these measures.
Microsoft recently offered an upgrade to its dominant browser, Internet Explorer 6, which among things blocks pop-up ads, but this upgrade was offered only to users of its most recent operating system, XP.
Smaller browsers such as those from the Mozilla stable , including Firefox, and browsers for the MacIntosh have for some time offered pop-up blocking as a standard feature.
While using Firefox is the most effective solution I've tried ( I don't have Windows XP ), none of the above are totally fool-proof.
This because pop-ups rely on a scripting language, run by the browser, called Javascript, and turned on by default on most machines.
Turning this off, (Tools -- > Internet Options -- > Security -- > Custom Level -- > Scripting -- > Disable ) *will* kill pop-up ads, but it will also turn off some other interactive features, such as image swapping in menus, pop-up windows which are requested, and sites which remember your preferences and settings.
But the technical mumbo only obscures the bigger issue, which is reaching a compromise between web users' demand for content, and content providers' need to at least break even meeting that demand.
Many advertisers have accepted that the era of the pop-up is over, and are considering alternatives for serving ads.
These include embedding Flash movies into pages, presenting visitors with an entry page featuring a commercial, or serving "premium" content only to subscribers or those who agree to watch an ad.
No doubt more ideas will surface as the art of pop-up blocking becomes more succcessful.
Watch this space.
site by Urban Legend Designs