What colour is the sky on your world?
My tv is not free. Not even close. And I don’t pay for my tv only to be shown more things advertisers want me to buy that I don’t need overtop of the action.
Popup ads are just the newest way for networks to get around the limited commercial time they are allotted during each program. Sponsorship announcements (brought to you by SuperSoap!) don’t count as commercial time if they appear in a given show’s credits. In the 90’s, these studio announcements were replaced by 5-10 second prerecorded commercials, which still are credited as program time. In the late 90’s it became commonplace to shrink the closing credits to the bottom or side while a promo for another network show played in the remaining part of the screen. These again do not count against the commercial time as they are not paid commercials (notice that it is always promos for other shows and not for products), and they occur during the program. The once helpful transparent logo that disappeared after a minute or so has become a full color logo that becomes transparent after a minute but stays on permanently, and in some cases has become a permanent full color symbol. TNN has taken the concept to a new low; I refuse to watch ST:TNG reruns on TNN solely because of this.
Popup ads are really obnoxious, though. They’re like the ads at Rottontomatoes that don’t appear in a new window, glue themselves to the middle of the screen, and cannot be deactivated. Gotta love CrankyCritic, though. He admits that he’s been forced to use popups to support his site, then in the same paragraph links to a popup killer that will enable people to avoid them.
Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m spending more time watching the original series on HBO and Showtime. Besides being consistently better tv than most broadcast and basic cable, there are no commercials, and they look abso-frikkin-lutely fantastic on the HD channels.
Popup ads are just the newest way for networks to get around the limited commercial time they are allotted during each program. Sponsorship announcements (brought to you by SuperSoap!) don’t count as commercial time if they appear in a given show’s credits. In the 90’s, these studio announcements were replaced by 5-10 second prerecorded commercials, which still are credited as program time. In the late 90’s it became commonplace to shrink the closing credits to the bottom or side while a promo for another network show played in the remaining part of the screen. These again do not count against the commercial time as they are not paid commercials (notice that it is always promos for other shows and not for products), and they occur during the program. The once helpful transparent logo that disappeared after a minute or so has become a full color logo that becomes transparent after a minute but stays on permanently, and in some cases has become a permanent full color symbol. TNN has taken the concept to a new low; I refuse to watch ST:TNG reruns on TNN solely because of this.
Popup ads are really obnoxious, though. They’re like the ads at Rottontomatoes that don’t appear in a new window, glue themselves to the middle of the screen, and cannot be deactivated. Gotta love CrankyCritic, though. He admits that he’s been forced to use popups to support his site, then in the same paragraph links to a popup killer that will enable people to avoid them.
Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m spending more time watching the original series on HBO and Showtime. Besides being consistently better tv than most broadcast and basic cable, there are no commercials, and they look abso-frikkin-lutely fantastic on the HD channels.
C’mon Fly, don’t change your mind just because we disagree. Be wrong if you like. 
And my priest analogy was not meant to compare the ads to porn. I was trying to think of something that it was understandable a person might not want to see. The point is the priest didn’t want to see the porn in the same way I do not want to see pop-ups. Our motivations are different but we feel the same, and in both cases our power of choice was taken away.
I choose what to watch when I turn on my television. Pop-up ads rob me of my free will and right to choose what I will look at, by springing it on me without warning. That is why I find them outrageous. But it was not me who said people who engage in this type of advertising were assholes. I think they are pushy jerks, but “asshole” is going a bit far.