Yes, but you’re not paying them for their bandwidth, you’re paying for your own.
Actually, pop ups (or banner ads) are analogous to this situation. You pay your cable company because they provide the infrastructure and equipment to get those channels to you - but you’re not paying the channels for the programming they supply. For that, you watch advertising.
On the internet, your ISP is like the cable company - you pay them for providing the basic equipment required to get on the internet. But you’re not paying all the sites (channels) out there for their content. In order to do that, they often use ads, which are analogous to TV ads in this situation.
Personally, I hate pop ups. I much prefer banner ads. I even click on banner ads sometimes, but never pop up ads, as a matter of principle.
And come to think of it, banner ads would piss people off less AND have more viewers - so many people have pop up blockers now that you’re more likely to have your banner seen than a pop up.
I’m surprised no one has touched on the banner ad vs pop up angle. Everyone is justifying the principal of web advertising in general when defending pop ups, and seem to ignore that there’s a legitimate type of ad - the banner - that gets the job done and doesn’t piss people off.
On the thread before, someone says basically every sites is switching to pop-up ads because there is virtually no way to ignore them. I, on my part, agree that Banner ads are fine.
My stance is quite simple - one or two pop-ups is fine. But three or four ads which keep popping up whenever I load a page, or ads which spawn other ads when close, is frustrating for the user. Moderation of pop-up ads is better - a site which frustrates the user will cause the user to look for some other alternative.
Worse than pop-upads are pop-up installers. Ever got one of those “CometCursor” stuff which are actually spyware? If you set your sercurity level on IE to low, those things will be automatically installed on one’s computer just by surfing to the site. And those things eat up bandwith (the user’s) and resoruces (RAM) because they actively keeping track of the user’s surfing patterns.
Some sites have more than just pop-up - they have a full-fleged Flash presentation on your screen with sound (which really messes up my MP3, let me tell you that) and they are on major game websites (Can’t recall, but Gamespy seems to be one of them).
Some sites that handle ‘pop-up ads’ differently and are quite successful are Yahoo and Gamespot. Instead of popping up on a seperate window, the advertisement ‘intercepts’ your normal surfing as a full webpage (go to Gamespot.com and hit REFRESH a couple of times and you may see what I mean). I find those less annoying than pop-ups. Yes, it’s more or less the same thing, but I think it lies with the perception.
I don’t see pop-ups going away soon - before the E-commerce bubble burst, pop-ups and ads were what kept the ‘free’ part of the Internet going.
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I heard on NPR’s Morning Edition today that there is a group trying to sue to bar this practice.
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One poster mentioned how this site has no popups. That’s because, as I understand it, the board is underwritten by the Chicago Reader. Therefore, no advertiser support is necessary for the board itself.
I hate all forms of advertising. I hate how advertising is getting more and more intrusive, from blatant product plugs inserted into TV shows and movies to cardboard ad pages in magazines. However, while I complain about their pervasiveness, I understand their purpose - getting products to market, increasing market share and subsidizing media.
Er, actually, we have touched on it. In fact, I cited my own income stream to note that banner ads make up only about 25% of my advertising dollars. In other words, the site would disappear if I had to rely solely on banners. Why? Because although you may consider it “legitimate,” as others have noted here, they are too easy to ignore. And advertisers don’t pay much for something that is easy to ignore.
This argument makes little sense if you are only arguing about pop-ups. Why didn’t you also mention banners/buttons/tiles etc that are also on the site? They take up your bandwidth as well.
So I take it you tend to ‘exercise your choice’ against sites that run banner ads as well?
And what about sites that have content you enjoy and are seeking out, but also have large graphic imagery that you don’t need or like? Is the webmaster stealing your bandwidth there as well?
I’m not defending pop-ups. I work in digital marketing myself, but really dislike pop-ups immensely. But some of the arguments here that rail solely against pop-ups really don’t cut it.