Pop Up Blocker Blocker

from the uh-oh dept

Just what we needed. Only a day after writing about how online advertising is looking for ways to get more intrusive now that pop-up blockers seem to be doing their job, comes this news of an anti-pop-up blocker system. It doesn’t get around pop-up blockers, but simply notes whether or not the user has one, and then dumps the ad on them within the current window instead. Clearly, someone is missing the point. The reason people install pop-up blockers is because they don’t want to be bothered with these intrusive ads. Getting around that doesn’t make them more interested in anyone’s product. It just pisses them off.


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Comments on “Pop Up Blocker Blocker”

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8 Comments
aNonMooseCowherd says:

ads

Clearly, someone is missing the point. The reason people install pop-up blockers is because they don’t want to be bothered with these intrusive ads.

Well, advertisers seem to go on the assumption that the more people see their ads, the better. I don’t know whether there’s any evidence that this is true, but it seems to be an axiom of the business.

Lew Payne (user link) says:

Clearly, someone *is* missing the point...

“Clearly, someone is missing the point. The reason people install pop-up blockers is because they don’t want
to be bothered with these intrusive ads. Getting around that doesn’t make them more interested in anyone’s
product. It just pisses them off.”

Yes… clearly, someone _is_ missing the point. Many web sites are “free” to the surfer due to pop-up and banner
advertising. In other words, they’re advertiser-supported. Those who don’t want to be bothered by the “intrusive”
ads should seek their content elsewhere (probably via a paid subscription to an equivalent site).

Subverting the site’s only source of income does not make for a better surfing experience… it makes for one less
individual site that can’t meet its monthly obligations. Grow up. Learn to think from outside the box as well as inside.

Jonadab the Unsightly One (user link) says:

Not really missing the point entirely

There are two separate classes of people who block popups. There are people like you, who don’t want to see any advertising, period, and then there are people like me, who aren’t bothered by in-band advertising. By in-band, I mean stuff that stays in the web page’s designated canvas area. I occasionally am annoyed by something in-band because it is garish or blinky or flashy, but regular banners and whatnot don’t bother me; I have occasionally even been known to consider purchasing a product that I saw advertised in a banner, such as the Colo hosting I saw advertised in a pair.com banner on Perlmonks.org. (I didn’t buy it, but I might have if other circumstances had transpired differently. Granted, this is an example of an ad that was fairly targeted; people on perlmonks are *way* more likely than average to be looking for colo hosting. Google’s ad program has caught onto this principle in a big way.)

Popups are a horse of a different color, because they interfere substantially with my computer and the way I have things set up. In-band advertisements don’t do that: they don’t place windows in places I don’t want them, at sizes I don’t want them to be, forcing me to reposition or resize them; they also don’t create windows that are missing important bits of chrome, such as the status bar or the menu bar. In short, in-band advertising is much better behaved than popups, and so it doesn’t (usually) bother me. (When it does bother me, I right-click and choose “Remove this object”, courtesy of the NukeAnything extension to Firefox. But I don’t have to do this very often — although I suspect it would be more often if I had Flash installed.)

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