In What’s Up With Popup Ads?, I was a bit disappointed that Cecil didn’t address what, to me, is the more interesting question: “How can infuriating potential customers in this manner possibly sell product?”
I can’t imagine why I’d ever need a tiny hidden camera in my home, but if I ever do, I’m going to find out who X10’s biggest competitor is and buy it from them, just because of all of those awful pop-ups from a few years ago (although I haven’t seen one in a while, that may be because I use Firefox, which blocks pop-ups).
I’m just amazed that Cecil found 1,690 pieces of spyware on his system! You’d think the leader in the Fight Against Ignorance would be a little less…well, ignorant. 
Did anyone else think it was a staff report when you first read it? 
Yes, and I have no idea why.
I want to scream NO! And for me that is true, I have never even clicked on a popup.
But we have to assume that they are effective, or they would not continue. I have often wondered how they and their ugly sister SPAM continue, because I know of no one who buys from them. And yet, they persist. Someone must be buying, or they would stop simply due to the fact that they weren’t working.
They are cheap to implement and they get many eyes, so I suppose even a few sales from them pay for them.
Goodness, everyone knows the “real” Cecil stopped writing eons ago. My current guess for most of the content of Straight Dope is CKDexterHaven; oftentimes the tone sounds similar to his answers in the staff reports and his thread posts.
“Cecil” did address the issue of whether or not the “work.”
. Companies do not spend ad dollars on advertising that doesn’t quantifiably produce increased sales. Therefor, popups and their nefarious kin must work, for much the same reason that unsolicited phone calls and unsolicited snail mail work: some people just can’t say no.
There are a few things I am curious about that are not answered yet.
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Do companies have to be complicit in spyware getting to your PC? That is, does Company A have to allow (or enable or even host) a given piece of spyware or can the spyware makers lurk around the fringes and jump on you as you pass by? For example, going to USA Today’s website for an article (linked below) saw my Spybot immunization tell me it blocked “Avenue A” spyware from getting on my system. Is USA Today shoving that crap at me or is “Avenue A” coming from somewhere else? I expect spyware from some shady places but not big name corporations (I can accept them dropping a cookie on to watch my behavior at their site but that is it).
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Does anyone know the pay model used for popup ads? I seem to recall places that would pay you for every click-through you were responsible for. So, Company A may say they want to increase traffic to their site by 50% in the next three months and hires an ad agency to work on it. Ad agency designs an ad and contracts with some internet company that helps get the ad “placed” on web pages. The internet company pays webmasters, say, $0.001 for every clickthrough from an ad they placed. Those people then turn around and flood the internet with spyware so popups galore start appearing. While people try to close them they occasionally misclick and the guy gets his $0.001 for a click through. Repeat 1,000,000 times and the guy made an easy $1,000. Now Company A looks at its internet traffic records and goes, “Wow! Site visits are up 300%! We need to get that agency to do more of this!”
So, is it possible that the money motivation behind this is not really what it might seem to many companies? Also, since aside from the initial ad design it is so amazingly cheap for these people to push it out there is only incentive to make mroe of it…not less or even better.
- Know that some spyware out there actually creates the problem so someone can sell you the fix. Ever see the popup that says your computer may be infected with spyware…just click here to get rid of it and they sell you a $30 program that pretty much just kills its own problem? The FTC just went after a guy doing exactly that:
I do not agree with Cecil’s opinion that popup ads help fund the web and if advertisers do not pay we will. First off we still pay…if someone is paying an advertiser that someone is recouping their losses in the price of their product. Secondly I remember a web devoid of popups, popovers, popunders, banners…any of it. There was plenty of web content then and if you made advertisers disappear from the web altogether the internet would still hum along just fine. Certainly some would drop off but so be it. Companies would still make web pages to attract customers, media would still post their news stories, forums like the SDMB would still charge $15/year to participate.
A naive understanding of the current state of the World Wide Web. If you think about it, a very large number of sites that exist do not belong to companies selling product, or .edu/.org sites, or media sites. And would you really want to navigate a web where you have to pay for every site you visit? On a typical day I visit this site, two or three gaming sites, and at least three or four other private, non-corporate sites. All use banners or pop-ups to help pay for the cost of running the site. If I paid for all of them, I’d not be doing anywhere near the same amount of surfing.
TAANSTAFL, you know.
Those web pages fell into two categories. First, you have all of the various websites which are still ad-free. Go to my website (hosted by the physics department where I work), and you’ll not find any ads. And a brick-and-mortar company’s website doesn’t generally have any ads, either, except in the sense that the entire site can be considered an ad for that company.
And the second category of web pages that didn’t have ads were the folks who wanted to get in on the ground floor of this new technology, so they could start making money from it as soon as they figured out how. Well, now they’ve figured out how, so they’re doing it.
I disagree it is naive of me.
I go to gaming sites too and if they want to embed an ad in their text then fine. Other places force you to watch an ad before progressing on to another page that is fine too. If I do not like it I do not visit those sites. People will vote with their feet (or clicks in this case) and the sweet spot will be found in the end.
Many sites exist without any advertising. People just want to post their thing to the web and are willing to absorb that cost themselves (blogs anyone?).
As Chronos mentioned brick and mortar businesses still have an incentive to put up web pages as their whole site amounts to an advertisment for themselves.
I remember plenty of game sites out before they had ad revenue. I do not blame them for seeking to make an easy buck but I feel if that easy buck was removed you would still see loads of content on the web for whatever it is you wanted.
As for pay sites like the SDMB I have a mixed opinion. I appreciate that the owners of the SDMB incur a cost to run the site and I can hardly demand of them that they do it for free. On the flip side I find the very concept of the SDMB undermined by making people pay to use it. Someone recently posted a thread on busiest message boards and SDMB is 43 (IIRC) and falling since it became a pay site. When free it certainly gathered more goofiness but then it was more true to it stated ideals, to my mind, than it is now. Only time will tell if the pay model supports the excellence and diversity of opinions for which it gained fame in the first place can remain. The downward spiral is already happening…where it bottoms out will determine its survival as a place to fight ignorance.
Regardless I think if you tossed it all (the ads and such) you would still see an internet that was very worthwhile. It was worthwhile in the past before the race for profit began and people just did it for free and I think it would be that way no matter what. That people seek ways to make a profit off of it is hardly surprising but to my mind not a welcome change of events.
Hello,
I operate a fair sized internet advertising company.
Pop windows most certainly do work. People visit the sites and buy the products and services offered at a rate about 10x that of banner ads.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions in a civil discussion.
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2) Does anyone know the pay model used for popup ads? I seem to recall places that would pay you for every click-through you were responsible for. So, Company A may say they want to increase traffic to their site by 50% in the next three months and hires an ad agency to work on it. Ad agency designs an ad and contracts with some internet company that helps get the ad “placed” on web pages. The internet company pays webmasters, say, $0.001 for every clickthrough from an ad they placed. Those people then turn around and flood the internet with spyware so popups galore start appearing. While people try to close them they occasionally misclick and the guy gets his $0.001 for a click through. Repeat 1,000,000 times and the guy made an easy $1,000. Now Company A looks at its internet traffic records and goes, “Wow! Site visits are up 300%! We need to get that agency to do more of this!”
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Advertisers are not that naive. They track ROI just like any other business. There are campaigns run for “branding” where the company just wants to get their name/logo/whatever in front of the public, but there are not many of them compared to normal campaigns.
To answer your other question most pop window ad campaigns are run on a CPM (cost per mille) basis which pays the web publisher a flat rate for every 1000 times the ad appears.
Also, please do not confuse “spyware” with “adware” or “pop windows” they are all very different things.
PecanSandy: Ok, so popups have a much higher conversion rate than banner ads. But what about backlash? That’s something that you can’t really measure. MidnightRadio’s post, for example, where he indicates that he’ll never patronize X10 because of their popups. My question is: Do you have any data on how much business might be lost because of annoyance at popups?
I have a small business myself, and I would never consider using popups to advertise my products. Even if you guarantee that I’ll see an increase in business, I just wouldn’t want to risk the long-term consequences of getting a bad reputation. Maybe that’s naive and short-sighted of me, but it makes me wonder if the executives at the companies that do use popups are aware that there’s even a possibility of backlash, or if they care, or if a certain amount of negative feeling is just accepted as part of doing business.
One way you can measure backlash is by tracking the traffic to a website during a test of pops. (ie measure the traffic on a 24 hour period running a pop window and measure the traffic again during the same 24 hour period the following week). We have found very, very few instances where a website lost any measureable traffic. And in the instances where traffic was lost it was irrelevant to the increase in income the site generated.
Running one pop per visitor per day will not scare off any traffic. And if it does…then, quite frankly, you don’t need that visitor. Remember, unless you’re running your website as a hobby, your primary concern should be income and not traffic counts.
You can do a simple test and divert 25% of your traffic and run a pop on that traffic, let the other 75% run normally and see what happens to your traffic counts over the next days. (Nothing will happen…but you’ll feel better.)
PecanSandy, I appreciate having your involvement in this discussion. I’ve been a user of the Firefox browser for a while, which blocks popups, and before that, I was an Opera user, which also blocked popups. Now even IE is in on the blocking action - I noticed that after I installed WinXP SP2, that popups are blocked in IE by default.
How is the Internet ad industry adapting to this?
Curt,
The methods to sidestep WindowsXP blocker are already in place. See http://www.drudgereport.com as an example.
As alternate browsers grow in popularity ways to side step the blockers will be developed for them. Their popularity is so small right now that it doesn’t make financial sence to develop the code for them yet.
The thing is, with out pops you will end up seeing MUCH more intrusive advertising ( see http://www.espn.com for an example ) like full page “pause” ads that will require you to view the ad for 10 seconds before you are allowed to continue on the site, of drop box ads that float across the screen and cannot be closed until the ad is viewed. Even I hate these ads, but they are coming because of the shrinking inventory of pops available. 
Even a very small website, say with the owner, and one employee can cost $4000 to $5000 a month to operate. If the owner can’t generate a fair amount of revenue you are going to see very good sites, the real heart and soul of what makes the internet so wonderful, dissapear. In the last year I saw a HUGE gaming forums website with 200,000+ members simply close because they could not make enough money to pay for the servers. The owner worked by himself, got members to volunteer as moderators and do the graphics, and he still could not make it work.
And you’re primarily going to be left with huge corporate sites like ESPN.com, Yahoo.com etc. and hobbyist sites.
I don’t like to brag but this is exactly what I do. I run a game newsletter site with only banner ads and we’re doing pretty well.
Note: the target market is the game developers…not the players.
I think banner ads would be so much more succesful if they were properly targeted. Which many are, these days. But when they first started appearing they seemed to have no relevance to the site they were on - so naturally the target market was missed, and they failed.
I can’t see why more annoying and incessant pop-up ads have a better response than properly targeted banner ads. That makes no sense to me.
I know I have clicked on banner ads maybe 30-40 times to actually view or even purchase the product they advertised, but I have never actively clicked on a pop-up for the same reason (Though I’ve accidentally clicked on them a lot because they suddenly appear just when I’m about to click on a regular link - I hate that).
I don’t get it… I just went to ESPN and clicked on a few links… All of the pages had a standard horizontal banner at the top, and some had a vertical banner at the side, but I didn’t see anything more obnoxious than that. Was Mozilla just sparing me from the obnoxious stuff? What else do they have?