Fuck you evil advertising coders.
And fuck you to the websites that sell space to evil advertisers.
Understand this vendors! If I’m not interested in your product, forcing it onto my computer screen sure as shit ain’t gonna make me buy it! If anything, it’ll make me buy your competitor’s product.
[sub]although I’m sure some sneaky company is secretly buying obnoxious ads on their competitor’s behalf just to play reverse psychology spending[/sub]
Service Pack 2 for XP includes a popup blocker for Internet Explorer, and Firefox has one built-in. That being said…
At a previous job, I tangentially worked on a web store that featured two popups. One appeared when you first arrived at the webpage, and it advertised a recent product. Another appeared if you left the page without buying anything - it was a “Hey, come back and buy our product, use this code to get 10% off”. I was and remain opposed to popup advertising, and griped about it outside of work to a friend who worked in the sales department.
He observed that the sales volume for the product in the first popup increased dramatically once it became advertised, and that a significant number of people who saw the second popup did return to place an order within 24 hours.
Popups work. For every person who vows to boycott the company, there are enough other people who buy the product to make up for the righteous crusader. I hate popups and wish they’d die a horrible death, but as I can’t enforce that, I block them and go about my day.
The problem with pop-up blockers, at least the one I had, was that I couldn’t open new windows that required pop ups-some for sign ins, or whatever. Legitimate stuff I wanted to open-was blocked.
lno, I see where you’re coming from, but I put a HUGE distinction on the difference between, say, going to CNN and getting that fucking annoying Netflix popup and going to Eddie Bauer and getting a popup that says “Hey, jeans are on sale!”
In the first example, you’re just tooling along, minding your own business, trying to read the news, and you have advertising forced on you that’s completely unrelated to what your original goal was in visiting the website. That’s obnoxious, and the sole reason I have a popup blocker installed on my PC at home…I wish I was allowed to install it at work, too.
In the second example, I’ve already chosen to visit a retail website, and they’re taking the opportunity of your visit to let you know that there’s some sort of promotion going on. I don’t mind someone I’m already interested in doing business with using a popup to tell me about their products, I don’t see that as an intrusion at all.
Some sites now have popups that worm their way through popup blockers. Unless I am missing something this just shows how braindead the producers or financers of these things are - If a person has taken deliberate measures to stop popups then how do you think they are going to react when one gets through…
“Oh look, a popup. I like those. I think I’ll buy the product being advertised.”
Guinastasia Try holding down the ctrl button while you click.
My pop-up blocker was keeping me from being able to send e-mail from one of my e-mail services because the compose window was a pop-up. Ctrl + click let it pop up anyway.
Yeah, it’s a new twist – the popup (pop-under, anyway) JavaScript code is apparently buried inside a Flash animation.
Lobsang: most sites charge for ad space based on the number of advertisements they serve. Getting around a pop-up blocker lets them show more ads and charge more money for them, even if there’s no chance in hell the advertisement will cause you to buy something.
Especially evil is the delay pop-up. It waits until the page has loaded and I’m clicking on something in the middle of the page and it pops up right where I’m clicking. Arrggghhh, I didn’t want to click you! Now I have to close another browser window…
Yeah, I’m bitching about the new pop-UNDER code that apparently blasted its way into the world this past week, and that seems specifically designed to target those of us using pop-up blockers in our browsers.
That’s what FlashBlock is for. Between the built-in Firefox pop-up blocker, the AdBlock and FlashBlock extensions, and the Proxomitron proxy program, I never see any advertising unless I want to.
Didn’t Geordi save the Enterprise using this once?
Maybe. Mostly I save my eyes from ads. Though it’s great because it will read the incoming HTML and strip anything you want. Unfortunately, it’s no longer under development, but I can’t imagine surfing without it.
I used that at my previous place of employment, but my current workplace doesn’t allow us to use proxies-- or any browsers other than IE, or even let us update Ad Aware for fuck’s sake.
anybody got a site I can test my ability to block these recent pop-unders at? Wanna see if I’m lucky or good.
The problem, though, is that it doesn’t really matter what distinction you see between the two different types of pop-up. The fact remains that lno’s more general observation is fundamentally correct—websites of all types use pop-ups because they work.
It’s just like telemarketing. If all the morons in the world stopped actually buying the shit that telemarketers and pop-up ads are selling, these intrusions would be much less commmon.
I’m sure i’m preaching to the converted here anyway, but i just want to tell people never to click on a pop-up, even if the product looks interesting. If you see a Netflix pop-up offering a free two-week trial, and you think to yourself, “Hey, maybe i’ll give Netflix a go,” then go to the Netflix homepage yourself. Don’t click on the pop-up, because chances are it is monitored for clicks, and the website with the pop-up will know that you’ve used it, and will have even more reason to continue using them.
Guin, i remember that you’ve been having computer spyware problems recently, but i can’t remember whether or not you’re using Firefox. In case you don’t know, Firefox’s pop-up blocker can be set to allow pop-ups from certain pages, so you don’t run into the sort of problem that you describe here. My web-based email account opens a pop-up window for message composition, and i have to set Firefox to allow pop-ups from that site. It works fine, and no unauthorized pop-ups get through.
It could be that the Google toolbar has a similar feature, but it’s been a while since i used it so i don’t know.