A new ad series will start running on Monday, 4/4/16. The type of ad is called a “leave behind.” It doesn’t take the reader off the focused page or site, but rather opens up another tab or page containing the ad behind the page currently being viewed. When the user leaves Straight Dope and closes the tab, the ad will be visible.
The ad dept. tells me the ad is unobtrusive and will not pop up on the user’s computer. It will be shown only once per user per day. Nonetheless, out of consideration for regular visitors who see plenty of ads already, we will NOT show this ad to registered users (including guests) PROVIDED YOU ARE LOGGED IN TO THE SDMB. Stay logged in and you’ll never see this ad.
That’s it. Thanks for visiting and we hope you enjoy the SDMB.
The ad department told you wrong. These are exactly the same as the much reviled “pop under ads” that were a scourge of the Internet during the 90s. They were rightly reviled and died a merciful death after browser manufacturers universally built in pop up protection.
All else aside, this is a contradiction in terms in this context: The majority of ads must be obtrusive to work.
The only unobtrusive ads I can think of are the ads in the classified ad section of the newspaper, or their modern equivalent, the ads on Craigslist. They work only because people have an incentive to seek them out and find them, even to the point of wading through two-dot-nothin’ point text in smeary cheap newsprint. Since nobody has any incentive to seek these ads out, they must be obtrusive to some degree to be effective at all.
And, yes, they’re pop-unders. They’re better than pop-ups, in terms of not immediately pissing off the people you’re trying to advertise to, but modern browsers have been coded to block any attempt to automatically open new windows for a couple geological eras’ worth of Internet time.
So what’s the difference between a pop-under and a leave-behind? Intent?
Both are extremely offensive, but I don’t plan on seeing any, except to test. Either my membership or my ad blocker will take care of it, but I pity the innocents.
The other type of unobtrusive ad is the targeted ad. Now, most people will disagree with this, but that’s just because most ads that claim to be targeted really aren’t. For any given user, there are some products and services that that user is genuinely interested in, and if you can figure out which products and services those are, you can serve them ads that they actually want to see.
The problem is, this is really hard to do, and it’s so much easier to instead serve ads that are only slightly targeted.
As an example from back in olden times: I used to subscribe to Scientific American. Now, being a magazine subscriber puts your name and address on a lot of lists. So I got ads in the mail asking me to subscribe to other magazines. Some of the advertisers targeted well: A reader of Scientific American is likely to also be interested in subscribing to Science News. Those ads, I didn’t mind. But some did only the bare minimum of targeting, and assumed that anyone who read one magazine might be interested in other magazines, no matter their subject matter. So I also got ads asking me to subscribe to Newsweek, or Forbes, or Playboy. Those ads were annoying, because I had no interest in any of those magazines. They weren’t targeted to me well enough.
You can say that again. Computers think that if you subscribed to one magazine, you like to subscribe to ALL magazines. That’s the same product, isn’t it?
And Ken Ham thinks I am a good prospect to hit up for a donation to his pet project, the Biblical Ark construction, because I watched the Ham/Nye debate.
As part of a work project, I needed to look up some information on a large piece of construction equipment. Now the Internet thinks that I am interested in buying tractors, loaders, bulldozers and other assorted equipment. Thank you, no. I live in a small apartment in a large city and currently have no need of a steam shovel.
I stay logged in, so this shouldn’t apply to me in any case, but I’m curious about the assumption that I close my tab when I’m done with the SD. Is that majority behavior? When I’m done reading the SD, I generally just go to another website on that tab–so would the leave-behind ad just stay, lurking in the background, waiting for that moment when I finally do close the tab and it can then strike, like Jaws or the Spanish Inquisition?
’This is the kind of idea that makes bad ideas stand up and take notice.'
I know I’m not affected - being a member and using ad-block - but these are never ‘un-obtrusive’ and hiding them in ‘secondary tabs’ or pop-unders don’t make them in any way acceptable - in fact, make them more so since now they have handles on primary window and can be used for XSS vectors among other things.
Pop under ads are nowadays only used by porn and pirate video sites. You are definitely not going to endear yourself to new visitors with this move. Sure hope they pay you a lot.
That’s the advantage (from the publishers’ standpoint) of pop-unders: it’s less clear which site opened it. “No, really, I was reading the news! I wasn’t watching porn!”
You’re right that true news sites rarely use them anymore. But all kinds of shopping sites do (travel sites are particularly bad), and the more gossipy sites have a lot.