Pop-Up Ads Lead to Consumer Revolt, Ad-Blocking 697
securitas writes "The New York Times' Saul Hansell reports on pop-up advertising and the consumer backlash against intrusive advertising. It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form. The article discusses the boom in ad-blocker software, with AOL, Yahoo and Google getting into the game. Microsoft says that it will include pop-up blocking in IE when it releases WinXP SP2. According to one pop-under ad agency, 20%-25% percent of Web users have pop-up blocking enabled, double the rate of a year ago - Earthlink's numbers bear that out, with 1 million of its 5 million customers using its ad-blocking software 18 months after release. DoubleClick says that it is 'developing technology that will enable pop-up ads to evade the blocking software.' Why isn't that surprising?"
not a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like "No shit" for $1000 Alex. (Score:1, Interesting)
We do not like being inundated with crap.
Those that say well, they must make something off of it or they wouldn't do it:
I say horseshit. I think it's one giant dumbass ring of spammers and scum bouncing
money for lists off each other.
yeehaaa.
From the Duh department (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Does advertising have to be annoying? (Score:4, Interesting)
I will never buy anything from X10 or any other major pop-under company (Orbitz, I'm looking in your direction...)
They'll sue MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Poor Windows XP users... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeh it makes me laugh too. I've been using mozilla for a pretty long time, and recently I was at my parents house and used their computer to check some of my regular sites...holy goodness I was flooded. I wasn't even expecting it, as I had begun to almost forget that pop-ups happen while I'm surfing.
The most annoying thing is when my parents or grandparents complain about things popping up, and I tell them that I don't have that problem because of my browser. They, of course, don't want to change, simply because they want the browser that everyone uses. sheesh
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
My View (Score:3, Interesting)
That's fine and dandy but it obviously works against us in cases like these where pop-up ad's are able to circumvent and/or bypass our attempts to stop them.
Imagine for a moment that there was only ONE browser to use, one language to program in, one way to view the web (excluding the fights that ensue over who currently controls those types of things). If there were only one way to do things, we'd be able to block these pop-up/under dicks without a problem. Unfortunately with an over abundance of tools available it becomes a (and forgive the analogy) game of push-down/pop-up. We stop them in one area or with one tool and they find a way around it.
Granted we do the same thing in other industries and sectors but I wonder sometimes if maybe the technology world has gone overboard with it's developing of choices.
I think choice is fundamentally a good thing, it's necessary and has it's function in the grand scheme of things... but I think it's high-time people organized and started trimming down some of those extranneous choices, not that there has to be *one* way of always doing thing or even *two* or *three*... but for christ's sake, when is it all enough?
Where's the facts? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always thought of keeping a pad and pencil beside my phone, and write down on it every single company which trys to telemarket to me on a Saturday morning. But do I ever do it? No. I'm too lazy. I figure this is what the pop-under advertisers count on. Divide and conquer us, hope we never talk to each other and rise up as a consumer "union," and hope to god I never get around to writing down company names on that pad.
As people always point out to me, if they actually make more money than they lose doing this, then they'll never, ever stop trying to do it. They'll always find ways to get around the technology, and, knowing, Microsoft, they'll always leave a year-long window open for those advertising mechanisms to work.
But then, I'm preaching to the choir.
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:4, Interesting)
I want that plugin to work for *all* forms of plugins. I mean, I love Java and Flash, but they are too damn easy to abuse.
I live in Calgary (Canada, eh?) and the city has Transit schedule information online. However, their main page has a small Java applet that displays the time. That's all it does. I don't want to load the JVM just to hit that page. And I don't think I should have to disable Java in my browser, either.
Make this work for Java, Flash and Quicktime and I'll be a happy camper!
Re:Poor Windows XP users... (Score:2, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
There oughta be a law (Score:3, Interesting)
pop-up bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
The toolbar on each pop-up window is often disabled and the window itself just displays a large image which doesn't allow the average web surfer to easily close it. I think most people just click on it by accident or because they don't know what else to do. I am curious to know what the percentage is of people who click on the ads and actually purchase something. I suspect it is less than 1%.
This is bullshit.
Unfortunately.... (Score:3, Interesting)
How long did it take the government to act "against" spam? More importantly, how effective has it been? Apparently, not very.
How much longer will it be until they take notice of popups?
Certainly something is being violated if users intentionally install software to intentionally block popups, yet these companies persist in developing circumventing measures to bypass the will of the users. At least with television you can change to another channel without getting flooded with ads. With some of these websites, closing one popup results in 3 more, which subsequently results in 3 times 3, and so forth.
The result is a dramatic decline in quality and content as the ratio of usable information to advertisements online shift, and it's moves like this (developing methods around popup blocking software) which tip the scales towards the ads, and a less usable medium to transfer valid information.
Re:Does advertising have to be annoying? (Score:5, Interesting)
In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, adverstising is ubiquitous. Ads are absolutely everywhere, even on chopsticks! One person in the book has her whole body and the strands of her hair tattooed so that she is a walking advertisement. Other people would just sit in their homes mesmerized by the ads everywhere, never really carrying on a conversation or anything else.
Basically, in that advanced age with nano technology and all, advertisers had basically settled on three things to get people to notice their ads amongst the clutter: tits, cars and explosions. The more in-your-face, gratuituous, outragous, or just plain wierd, the better. They even had ads that played with your peripheral vision, making it look like you were about to be hit by a car, or they'd have to 3d-esque phantom bull-rush you, attempting to get you to flinch.
Also, some people had special optical implants in their eyes, giving them overlays of various screens of data or something. One person in the book had one of those, and some people in India (I think) hacked into his vision system and ran an ad for a roach motel or something in the bottom right corner of his vision 24 hours a day. He couldn't get rid of it, even when he closed his eyes. He killed himself.
Advertisers.... Wise Up! (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about you, but pops up that block my view only piss me off. I'd venture a guess that I'm not alone here. The ads which get my attention, and the ones most likely to elicit a positive response, are the unobtrusive ads to the right or top of the screen. I wish Internet advertisers would wise up to that.
Internet Banking sites which make use of pop-ups (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Does advertising have to be annoying? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No pop-ups with Google Toolbar, Firebird/Mozill (Score:3, Interesting)
int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
LPSTR lpCmdLine,
int nCmdShow)
{
HKEY hKey = NULL;
char* szKey = "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\ActiveX Compatibility\\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540
char* szValueName = "Compatibility Flags";
const DWORD dwEnable = 0x0;
const DWORD dwDisable = 0x400;
LRESULT lresult = RegCreateKeyEx(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, szKey, 0, NULL, REG_OPTION_NON_VOLATILE, KEY_ALL_ACCESS, NULL, &hKey, NULL);
if (ERROR_SUCCESS == lresult)
{
DWORD dwValue = 0;
DWORD dwType = REG_DWORD;
DWORD dwSize = sizeof(DWORD);
lresult = RegQueryValueEx(hKey, szValueName, NULL, &dwType, (LPBYTE)&dwValue, &dwSize);
if ((ERROR_SUCCESS == lresult) || (ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND == lresult))
{
if (dwValue == dwDisable)
dwValue = dwEnable;
else
dwValue = dwDisable;
RegSetValueEx(hKey, szValueName, 0, REG_DWORD, (LPBYTE)&dwValue, sizeof(DWORD));
}
RegCloseKey(hKey);
}
return 0;
}
Compile this as a standard Windows EXE. Use the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) to add this as a button to the IE toolbar. Click it once, Flash disabled. Click it again, Flash enabled.
You can probably take this and make it fancier (error reporting, toggle notification or whatever, right now it's silent), but that's basically how it works.
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, I have a popup blocker because they are opening up unrequested windows, but I still allow the flashy ugly adds to be shown on my pages. It's not illegal, but it seems like the least we can do for all the free content these sites give us, even if they do get annoying sometimes.
Now there are web site going around pop up block (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:5, Interesting)
It also makes it possible to block annoying content using regular expressions.
I'm using these ones for getting rid of annoying ads:
And this one to not load those annoying 1px-spacer graphics nobody needs anymore:
Maybe they'll be useful for some of you fellow advertising victims. (But make sure to remove all the spaces which Slashdot automatically inserted.)
Re:Does advertising have to be annoying? (Score:2, Interesting)
I launched into a rant about how the net has been ruined by annoying advertising but I'd lost her at "opera"... Note: tearing apart someones business plan is not the best pick-up approach.
Re:Its getting worse, Television AD's come to the (Score:2, Interesting)
This could easially be good for you. As other customers start using more bandwidth, your useage becomes less and less extreem. It could easially happen that you get a much larger bandwidth cap because the average user is using so much.
Re:A message to advertisers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:5, Interesting)
I can block any advertising that I choose. Edit the
Cookies? I don't need no stinkin' cookies except from sites that I choose. Granted it sometimes can be tough telling where the cookie is coming from, but I feel that it is a small price to pay.
Doubclick finding IE vulnerabilities... (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually this is more like fishing for MS vulnerabilities that allow unauthorized code execution. Exploiting such a thing for commercial purposes is trespassing and against DMCA isn't it?
It's one thing to use cookies for tracking (they are there and accessible) quite another for a corporation to "evade" and "break" security measures put in place by consumers to keep unwanted code from executing on their boxes, to execute unwanted code.
An analog would be picking the lock on someone's front door, and deactivating their alarm system to put a flyer on their coffee table.
Doubleclick will lose that court battle; )
Re:Poor Windows XP users... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not just pop-ups,and not just on the web either (Score:3, Interesting)
On the web, you can at least do something about most of these animated pop up ads. But I've seen them on TV as well! They haven't appeared here in Europe yet, but I've seen them on some episodes of Southpark and Futurama that I downloaded. In the middle of the show, a small blue backdrop appears in the lower right corner, and in front of it a man in a suit promotes the next show that will be on. It's soundless but animated and extremely annoying. You can't click him away, or even skip over it (if you have a Tivo) if you don't want to miss part of the show you're watching!
I really hope this sort of thing will not become more pervasive in television programming...
Re:DoubleClick Violates DMCA? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, what we are trying to run is ad-blocking software, so we are taking it upon ourselves to re-author copyrighted information ( i.e. a web page content ) on the fly.
So, to me, they have the same right to try to force me to see the ad as I have to try to not see it. The ultimate decision is : do I even look at that web page or not.
I think this whole condrundrum is just like the RIAA's condrundrum. Yeh, you can pull lawyers into the fray and spend lots of money, but I do not think that will alter much of anything in the outcome. People will do mostly what they want, technology permitting. There will always be the cat and mouse game.
I am noting some sites fighting back against pop-up blockers by making content as well as ads as a popup. And hosting the ad on their server in the same directories as the content so you can't rely on your cached list of ad-servers to cull it out for you. Frustrating, as you really can not really identify until you have personally inspected the content if you wanted it or not.
I normally run java off because of all the annoyances ( and crashes ) I get as webmasters find sneaky javascript tricks to slip onto their pages. Although these tricks may work for some browsers, they may have quite different results on others. Especially older ones such as mine. From reading this article mentioned, a lot of people are running some sort of blockers, so it behooves the commercial business webmasters to steer clear of things on their site that mimic or use extended techniques.
The most recent example I have is I was looking for some data on washing machines. I visited www.sears.com [sears.com] to see the latest in Kenmores. Hmmm. blank page. I wasn't in the mood for examining source code and fishing the addresses from it, so I just visited Google. I ended up with lots of alternate sources that worked. I note that a lot of large businesses use weird stuff on their pages which trips up my system. But not all. Wal-Mart [walmart.com] so far has had very clean pages that don't send me funny stuff that trips me up. I flat do not know why commercial webmasters slip funny proprietary stuff in that trips up peoples stuff. Its kinda like having a parking lot full of dog shit.
And while I am on this, why do commercial sites use proprietary stuff like .ra audio files or .rm video, when just about everything out there happily plays .mp3 or .mpg formats?
Re:But look how FEW people few use it ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Contrast this to computers, where people are similarly ignorant about what's under the hood (quite understandable for a non-expert), but are also ignorant of the computer equivalents of cruise control, odometer trip measurements, and the presence of both FM 1 and FM2 on the radio presets. In computing a lot of people are ignorant both above and below the hood. So while there are plenty of bad drivers out there, I don't think it nearly equates to desktop computing.
I'm sure even bad drivers use cruise control. My point is, why don't bad computer users use pop-up blocking? Why is computing somehow different?
A worm that installs a pop-up blocker? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the flash, it has a flash killer that will replace a flash animation with a link to the flash animation that lets you see the animation when pressed.
And throw it up on a p2p app if you do find a download. It's in need of hosts and bandwidth.
Some popup blockers are not implemented correctly (Score:5, Interesting)
So people want to block popups. That's fine. I block pop-ups. It just irks me that some of the blockers are not implemented properly. As a designer, I want to be able to detect that the popup has been block and and provide feedback to the user in the form of a message or an alternative. Popups are not appropriate in all cases and some folks don't like them at all. I'm willing to work with blockers. Some of the blockers just don't want to work with me.
Detecting blocked popups with Mozilla/Firebird this is very easy. It throws an exception that you have to catch. With the Google toolbar it isn't that bad, you get back a null pointer from your window.open call.
Hower, I can't for the life of me figure out how to deal with either Earthlink or AOL's popup blockers. When they block something you get a window handle back that looks very legit. It has all the field filled in (width, height, content, screen, etc) but the window just doesn't show up to the user.
Somebody needs to sit down and bitchslap the developers who did the AOL and the Earthlink blockers. They are making the web a mess. Tell them to look over the shoulders of the Google/Mozilla folks.
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:2, Interesting)
Blocking integrated into the browser is great, but an independent blocking proxy is better.
Not only can MS IE "(l)users" use it too, but it means that you can write one set of rules that apply no matter what browser you're using -- including browsers built-in to software, and software that does http downloads.
I use Proxomitron, so that all* my http connections -- whether from Firebird, my main browser, or IE, a backup for sites that don't play well with Mozilla, or from within Winamp -- block the same way.
And since Proxomitron can accept connections outside of localhost, it even provides blocking for the browsing I do on my Zaurus handheld -- without any additional overhead on the slower, more memory limited handheld.
And Proxomitron allows the conversion of any arbitrary html to any other arbitrary html, using regular expressions. So if it doesn't already do what I want, I can (usually -- as we all know, regexp's aren't Turing machines) write a rule that will do it.
* All connections, that is, that read IE's proxy settings, which is most.
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:3, Interesting)
There is just not enough time in the day or incentive for me to do that. I have no interest in educating thier advertising department. Better for me to just filter them away and vote with my wallet.
Re:If adblocking gets too effective (Score:3, Interesting)
My tasteful, non-obnoxious banner did worse by a fair amount.
Re:Not just pop-ups (Score:2, Interesting)