So What Annoying Ad Technique Will Replace Pop-Ups?

from the adblocked dept

Pop-ups and other “interruptive” formats now represent just 0.7% of all online ad spending (BugMeNot required), which the head of an internet ad trade group says reflects their relative uselessness since people ignore them, or simply don’t see them thanks to blocking software. It’s hard to tell if the number of popups has decreased that significantly — and we’re not willing to turn off our blockers to find some anecdotal evidence — or if they’ve simply become so worthless that prices have fallen through the floor, making them represent such a minute share of overall ad spending. But the bigger lesson for legitimate online advertisers is that these sorts of interruptive ads don’t work, while well-targeted, useful and compelling online advertising is proving to be very effective. There is plenty of inventory for online ads, but the challenge now facing the ad industry is figuring out how to effectively target users, and how to offer them advertising they want to see, rather than ads they’re simply forced to tolerate.


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Comments on “So What Annoying Ad Technique Will Replace Pop-Ups?”

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25 Comments
Yet another Anonymous Coward says:

Suggested Firefox feature

Mode button – to easily switch security setups. If you want to see the flash and do games or view neat creations, use mode A. If you are expecting to read news, use mode B. Use mode Z (just the basic HTML, please) for dangerous sites, such as hacker code sources which is the main source for raw socket programming info.

Anonymous Coward says:

Flash Overlay

Yep, it’s the persistant flash overlay. God I hate that. The only way I’ve found to get rid of the one that constantly hassles me, the one with the talking woman saying something about something that I’ve never listened to (I can’t remember which site it’s on, probably Wired), is to actually click on it and then close the tab that opens in its place.

It’s more annoying that a flashing popover.

Chris says:

Someone needs to create a domain stricly for advertising. Let any company who wants to post an add do so for whatever service they provide. People looking for good deals could then read customer reviews etc about any company that posts through this service. Comapnies can advertise to people actualy looking for relative content and would create more competition for their industry. However this would be far too practical, so dont expect to see it anytime soon. And if you do please notify me ASAP so I can sue someone for stealing my idea.

leroy says:

blocking ads

try “guidescope” to block any content you want, it works great for me. I do have one question about firefox, can I tell it to block everything from a particular domain, like nextag.com I would like to block everything from that domain, all the time. Can this be done with firefox? I tried to do so with:
TOOLS, OPTIONS, CONTENT, EXCEPTIONS, BLOCK but they still come thru. Perhaps I misunderstand the function of this setting. If we could block domains we could block a good portion of ads easily.

L

Anonymous Coward says:

How about websites that force themselves in place of the location you are going to? Example: IGN.com – however, instead of being done through the website, have it be done through ISPs.

Ie: Comcast/AT&T get together w/ companies – and every time you go through their network you are rerouted to receive a page w/ the add and a link at the very top to continue the path to the site you were going too.

Everythings’ possible, anyway.

/got nuttin’

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

Not sure if this is the same thing but I have been to some websites that seem to do just that. You click on a link and it takes you to an advert page before taking you to the link you requested, with something like a 10-15 sec delay.

I’ve yet to find a way round this even with noscript, adblock, flashblock etc.

Anonymous Coward says:

In Minority Report Tom Cruise walked into a dept. store, and automatically got bombarded with personal ads. I think that is the next level. Tailoring ads to specific indivuduals. With the talk of a national ID card, RFID chips in driver licenses and even embedded in the skin, I don’t think it’s that far off.

Imagine you walk into… say Banana Republic. You buy a pair of jeans and a sweater. A few weeks later you sit down at your laptop or pc… you get a pop up… tailored specifically to you… about not just the brand of jeans and sweater you bought but the size and color too. Some evil mastermind somewhere has to be working on it.

Solo says:

Good luck getting back the users that were so annoyed that they sought and installed good (and improved every day) solution to rid themselves of ALL ads, good and bad, targeted or not.

Just as advertizers have killed real-time tv watching for me (record show, play it later and skip the ads) they killed all chance that I ever see another ad. Flashing moving animation that compete for my visual attention is really unbearable when the content is text (and 98% of the content is text on the Net, figure excludes porn)

Adblock. Filterset.g. No Animated Gif.

The inventory maybe there, but it won’t touch me.

Slet Varthash says:

Annoyances

What I find particularly annoying are the adverts that are “busy” with activity; particularly those stupid mortgage ads. You go to a purported news website; and you find the article is really quite small and is bounded on left and right with adverts with repetitive motion activity going on. Such a pain in the arse !!

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