Nope, not evil. Don’t even care since I haven’t seen one in ages, ever since I installed that nifty blocker software. The Tivo does a good job of getting rid of the television ads as well.
Popup ads are not annoying for the following reasons:
- Websites don’t come cheap, the world isn’t free
|
| Want a bigger penis???
| CLICK HERE!
|
|________________________________
4. Sometimes popups have interesting products.
|
| Free Porn Click Here!!!
| 100% Free!!!
|
|___________________________________
So inconclusion from the 8 points listed above, i have proved my argument!
With TV ads you were just sitting there watching the show passively without having to click anything to move on to the next scene, it does it all itself so nobody cares if it interrupts itself and its nice to have a bathroom break every so often. With websites you are actively going from site to site and/or looking for information and bam! You hit the popup speed bump. and they come back again and again and again every time you go back to the previous menu to check another section of the site. Claiming that disliking popups is hypocritical is quite pointless since they still annoy.
SenorBeef said:
Then you haven’t seen the flashing WINNER ads that are currently quite popular. I’ve gotten more complaints about those than the pops on my sites.
Gosh, thanks. Just on making enough money to actually survive. I just checked my advertising stats to get some real numbers for you. On my most popular site, only 25% of my ad revenue comes from my banners. Almost all of the rest comes from pops – and I use only one pop-under and one “Invue” ad (in other words, although I could make more money doing so, I don’t have the pop-ups that spawn further pops).
I could not run my sites on 25% of what I’m making.
Which is a different issue entirely. If you want to complain about those, then complain specifically about them. But they are the minority of pops.
Sock Munkey said:
Well, that’s the advertiser’s problem, not yours. The fact is that they must work somewhat because advertisers pay more for them than for banners.
DrLizardo said:
I know the feeling.
Like you, I tried other things. I tried the donation route. I tried pay per performance (per click and per sale). None of them made the cut.
Incidentally, DrLizardo, I was going to e-mail you with some private advertising suggestions from my own experiences (stuff I’d rather not post for the whole world), but I see you don’t have your e-mail address available. So if you want to e-mail me, please feel free and we can discuss it further.
The most evil of the popup ads are the ones where your phone line is connected to some internet porn provider in Guinea-Bissau without your knowledge, thus increasing your phone bill by approximately $100 per 15 minutes.
All the others are just as disgusting and unethical as any other kind of spam is.
Monty said:
What? I have never even heard of such a thing. How the hell does a pop-up ad connect your phone line somewhere?
Pop-up ads and spam are two completely different animals.
People complain about pop-up ads, obnoxious blinking banner ads, and spam because the net is still very much a new communications medium, and such things have not yet become entrenched in how the medium works. Comercials on the radio and TV, ads in magazines and newspapers, have become part of the expected conventions of those media. With the net, there’s still a sense that if we complain loud enough, if we boycot enough, that website operators will find a less obtrusive method of earning their dime.
It’s the exact same as the 10 minutes worth of product comercials that have started up before movie theaters roll the coming attraction trailers. It hasn’t always been like that, and people feel if they complain enough, they can keep it from becoming the expected norm.
I suspect they’re counterproductive. I’ve clicked on a few banner ads, but I have not, to the best of my recollection, ever knowingly clicked on a popup. Being suckered into a link because I thought I was closing it is a different matter.
I see it in terms of an analogy. I go to a bar for a drink, and I’m surrounded by advertising. It’s on the walls, on the shirts of the servers, over the urinals, everywhere. Those are banner ads. A popup is the guy who jumps in front of me when I sit down and asks if I want a Duff. I say no. I turn and shoot the bull with the guy next to me for a few minutes, and when I reach for my beer there’s that guy again, asking me if I want a Duff. I say no. I go to the bathroom, and when I open the door there’s that guy asking me if I want a Duff. I say no. I come out of the bathroom and there’s that guy. Again, no, I don’t want a Duff. I get back to my stool and there’s that guy. If you can’t see how that gets annoying, then you need more help than can be found in this post.
Television ads show up in groups at times that the show is written around. Advertising sections in magazines don’t reappear before every story. Ignoring them once is enough.
With the exception of deceptive or re-spawning ones, I don’t hate popups with the kind of fury that some do, but I don’t respond to them either, and if a site has enough of them I just don’t go back there.
What I wonder about is the future of popups. It seems that on the internet the fact that people are ignoring your annoying ads means that you should make them more annoying. People are blocking them? Well, let’s find a way around the blocking software! People are ignoring them? Let’s find a way to make them unclosable! Nobody’s responding to a message from growamassivecock.com? Let’s claim to be Theresa! It’s a redoubling of the effort after the goal has been lost, if the goal is to sell the advertised product.
Of course, the goal isn’t to sell the product, at least not for the webmaster, it’s to get the clicks and make the money. Seems to me that if the popups are going to make me avoid your site, then you’re probably not helping yourself.
David B: A friend (nope, not a friend of a friend–an actual friend) just had the experience of that. A popup ad appeared and the friend clicked the “x” in the upper right-hand corner to clear the popup. Problem, though, was that the offal who designed the ad made sure that only clicking on the “no” would not connect you.
Actually, I think I’m misdescribing what happens. Your telephone account gets charged as though you’re connected on an international call.
If you’re interested, you can do a search for, oh just about any old thing, and click on the inevitable porn sites that appear in the results.
As for my friend, the telepone company was damn nice about it and deleted the charge.
p.s. As far as I’m concerned, a popup ad is merely spam delivered in a different manner. It’s still unsolicited and unwanted. It’s an irritant and gets in the way of me doing whatever it is I’m doing online.
To avoid the problem, I have to buy a freaking program to prevent it? BS!
They might be different animals, but they’re just different species of skunk.
2trew is 100% right. The syndrome he describes is why I refuse to visit tripod and geocities sites. To hell with them.
Actually There are porn dialing programs a place called vannutu (sp?) Seems to make most of them althouhg the only ones ive seen are ones you have to down load …
Its like 1-900 number for internet porn … and there expensive too and very annoying ot get rid of
Yeah, I’ll go with 2trew on this one as well. What’s worse is not only does the Duff guy keep coming back, but each time you tell him you’re not interested, 10,000 more of his buddies come up and try to hustle their products on you. No hyperbole. Ten thousand.
I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate popups. Even more “hates” than that.
- They occasionally crash my computer.
- Often they spawn more of themselves ad nauseum.
- They are often for disgusting things like online casinos.
- Sometimes they fill the whole screen and I have to use task manager to kill them.
- They repeat the same ones over and over and over. Certain travel sites which I boycott because of their use of popups are particularly guilty of this. As is the “University” of Phoenix.
- They get in my way. They waste my time. They make me mad. They reduce my enjoyment of the internet.
- Certain otherwise useful sites are rendered unusable due to their high popup frequency, e.g. About.com - where every time you click on something the same popup appears.
As a result:
- I automatically boycott any company that advertises through popups that appear on my computer.
- If I was visiting a site that sells merchandise I was considering purchasing, I will not, because of their use of popups.
No, the popups make often make the computer freeze up. It won’t do anything until the popup window is finished loading. Fucking lame!
I don’t know what you mean by “simple”, but the popup ads I encounter will not close immediately. My computer gets “stuck” trying to load them. I click on the square to close the window, and nothing happens. And no, I’m not talking about porn sites. And then there are the geocities ones that won’t close at all.
I keep seeing people complain about pop-ups that spawn other pops, or pops that take forever to load or this or that or the other thing. I’d like to know where the hell you guys are going. Seriously. I only rarely encounter pops that spawn more pops – they are certainly not the norm where I surf. And I have never even HEARD of one that can charge your phone line for an international call (how the hell does it know what your phone number is?) or those that take forever to load (what kind of computer do you have??).
I have seen some sites that have tons of pops. There is one in particular that I’m aware of that wants its users to switch to a pay-for-service no-ad version of the site. So the free site is loaded with pops that spawn pops, as a way to push people into it (from what I’ve heard from regular site users, instead it just pushed people to other sites).
But the fact here is that all of you are not just raging against pop-ups, but against things that go BEYOND pop-ups. To go back to the TV commercial aspects, it would be like if I started saying commercials suck and then go on to complain about commercials that take up half an hour or automatically turn my TV off or the like.
There are unscrupulous advertisers that use pop-ups that spawn two more every time you kill one. Guess what? They know that irritates. They’re unscrupulous advertisers. They’re a minority. What sites are you looking at when you see them, those of you who get them? I bet it’s not CNN, or MSDN, or whatever “reputable” companies you’d care to name. The practice is called ‘circle jerking’, designed to trap newbie web users into a panic-stricken purchase just to get the damn windows out of the way. It’s not representative of all web marketers.
As for the international calls, that has nothing to do with pop-ups. Those are executable files known generally as ‘dialers’, that you either download after being misled into expecting something else, or occasionally – and I have no idea how – use Java/Javascript to force a download in IE browser versions. They disconnect your dial-up connection and alter the settings. Those are equally unscrupulous, but as well as being unrepresentative of advertisers as a whole they can be launched from any webpage or hyperlink, not just pop-ups.
I don’t mean to sound snappy, but I see ‘pop-ups’ being blamed as the source of many evils, when they are generally fairly harmless forms of advertising that contribute in some form to paying for the content you’re reading.
I really don’t see why people complain about popups. If you really want to never deal with a popup again it is pretty easy through various programs. I use http://www.proxomitron.org/ and it gets rid of the ads, but it still allows normal popups to go through. It does take a little bit of effort to install though.
I do think that popup ads are going to go away. They produce hits, but they don’t address the real problem. Whenever I look at popups or banner ads I don’t see anything that interests me. Untill there is actually targeted advertising that actually makes people want to click on ads popups buisnesses are going to go the same way of the dot com burst. People are ok with commercials because they are actually entertaining or interesting to an extent. Popups are just annoying.
- …they are generally fairly harmless forms of advertising that contribute in some form to paying for the content you’re reading.* ~ Crusoe
You are a kind, kind, man, Crusoe, but I’ve yet to see a pop-up in the content I reading here on this board. Oh well, maybe someone else will fight the good, good, fight.
These pop-up people are inconsiderate, time-robbing, pushy, greedy, arrogant, low-life roaches. I hope they rot in hell.