AOL Increasing In-House Pop Ups
from the sleight-of-hand dept
AOL got a bit of good press last October by announcing that they would stop serving third party pop up ads since they realized they were annoying to their customers. Of course, as we pointed out at the time, this didn’t mean they would cut back on pop up ads for AOL-Time Warner products and services. What no one expected, though was that they would anger their customers even more by increasing the number of those ads. Basically, what they said was a lie. They clearly didn’t do it to decrease the annoyance their customers felt when dealing with the popups, or they wouldn’t have increased the number. The best excuses AOL can muster up are that (1) they have to run through existing inventory and (2) they were just doing so to let people know about new AOL 8.0 features. Neither of which holds much water. If people tell you they don’t want pop-ups, generally that means they don’t want pop-ups.
