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Studies

by Mike Masnick

Thu, May 29th 2003 3:39am





Pop-Ups Work?

from the but-for-how-long? dept

A new study done by the (somewhat biased) Advertising.com says that pop-up ads work great. They're even recommending pop-up ads as "the best creative format". I'd want to look in a lot more detail at the methodology used to determine these results, and I wonder if "click-through" is really the right measure of how good a pop-up is. I know that I've (all too frequently) clicked on a pop-up accidentally while trying to click on something within a browser window. Personally, the most annoying thing about pop-ups are how they switch the active browser window that I'm using. I tend to have many sites open at once, and often click on something to open in a new window, which I plan to visit later. Then I go back to what I'm reading, only to be rudely jerked over to either the pop-up or the site that pulled it up. I've recently installed some pop-up blocking software (which helps), but I'm also doing my best not to support any business that uses pop-ups for advertising. There's simply no reason to support a business that thinks annoying potential customers is an acceptable way to drum up business.

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Pop ups

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, May 29th, 2003 @ 7:19am

    Use Mozilla or Opera--both of them allow you to block pop-ups

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: Pop ups

    identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, May 29th, 2003 @ 8:12am

    Of if you prefer the compatability of IE, or just don't want to load two different browsers on your system, try CrazyBrowser (http://www.crazybrowser.com) which is a free front-end for IE that gives you tabbed browsing and pop-up ad blocking. I just checked and it shows that it has blocked 2259 pop up ads since I installed it.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, May 29th, 2003 @ 8:58am

    If popups worked as well as they say they do, there wouldn't be an entire cottege industry dedicated to blocking them. And people wouldn't be wailing about how annoying they are. Popup ads are a crime against good taste. Advertisers need to understand that an annoyed user isn't going to buy their product. That's just the way it goes. They might report high ctr to load rates, but the load rates are signifigantly reduced due to blcoking software. So you're not really getting an acurate picture to begin with. I use mozilla. And it's been great. I have popups on white list, and haven't seen one in months.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Why live with pop-ups?

    identicon
    Doug, May 29th, 2003 @ 12:05pm

    I find the situation with pop-up ads amusing. Every browser except one has a feature to block pop-ups, but people insist on using MSIE. I wonder when Microsoft will simply start building advertising into MSIE?

    A few forward-looking sites have recognized that not everybody has pop-ups enabled. When I go to read a Roger Ebert movie review, I get a page that says that the site uses pop-ups, and if I have pop-ups blocked, there's a pop-up-free link. And to my amazement, it actually works.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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