Feb 23
Aggressive advertising techniques fair?
2005 at 02.47 am posted by Veerle Pieters
By surfing some sites lately I’ve noticed that Safari’s pop-up window blocker sometimes fails. So after some closer examination it seems that it is not only Safari who is suffering. Most of the time it’s not pop-up but pop-under windows that get through. The first site where I noticed this behavior was macosrumors.com (they have disabled the perpetrator now). It seems that this is the result of new ad delivery techniques that seek to subvert traditional blocking systems.
I can understand that some sites need advertising to keep everything free but all I can say that it is a slippery slope. An example is the response from "Popuptraffic.com" that is directly promoting their ability to subvert pop-up blockers to a MacFixit reader.
The MacFixIt reader wrote: "I am writing to complain about the fact that you are intentionally trying to subvert web users desire not to view pop-under ads. This is a very poor business practice, and I consider any impression from an unwanted advertisement to be an inducement to boycott that advertiser."
Popuptraffic.com's response: "How dare you? Let me teach you a little something that you obviously never were able to grasp. If you go to a website and in exchange for taking what that website is providing, you are shown a popup ad, you allow the owner of the site the to recoup some of the very real costs involved with keeping a site online. By using a popup blocker, you are essentially stealing their work. You're nothing more than a common thief."
As said above a slippery slope! I'm not against advertising in general but I don't like these aggressive methods like those full screen Flash ads you sometimes see. Speaking of Flash, many of the new ad delivery mechanisms use JavaScript embedded in Macromedia Flash elements to force the ads through. An example of such code can be found here.
A way around this would be to remove Flash from the computer but that seems a bit too drastic in my book because Flash can provide a richer web experience. That new pop-under thingie is not that wide spread yet so let's hope that this isn't spreading like a dirty disease. Flash is used a lot in advertising lately as you may have noticed. I always thought that pissing of users wasn't a great way to advertise a product. Luckily for us most big brands know this.
However there are some things you can do to prevent this from happening. For Firefox you can use FlashBlock it enables users to have control over all flash ads and whether they show or not.
Another solution could be Privoxy since it provides filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups. It has a web-based configuration and it multi-platform.
Mac users can also try Internet Cleanup because it blocks banner ads, pop-ups/under. You also search for spyware and protect your privacy. Another Mac tool is called PithHelmet. It blocks image, javascript, Flash ads and GIF animations. It can also collapse blocked content so that it is hidden from view.
There are more tools out there but you get the idea. So what are your thoughts about those advertising techniques? Had any bad experience lately?
16served
1
Pop-up/under ads are dieing off in my opinion. All of the major browsers (IE, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Netscape) have pop-up blockers as standard. Even if the user doesn’t have a pop-up blocker they will click the close button on the pop-up before it loads.
The only people that actually click on these pop-ups are internet newbies, because the rest of us know that they usually lead to spyware or adware or some sort of scam. The pop-up can also be quite dangerous as shown here http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/kodiak/popup.jpg
I think that pop-up’s do anything more than drive users away from the site.
The internet has matured since the late 90’s and as the internet has matured pop-up’s have slowly disapeared. Good Riddance.
I think the future of the internet is text ads and small 120x60 image ads. The modern internet user doesn’t need to have huge flashing animations to make them want to click on something. The modern internet user wants to know what the’re clicking on before they click.
2
Nothing quite as annoying as pop-ups/unders or any kind of unnecessary, unwanted (large) ads. I’ve got nothing against the standard banner on a site, but what is going around nowadays almost borders down to harrassment. I’d really like to see some figures on success ratio .... ?
3
There’s nothing you can do to this. AFAIK the browsers (all!!!) seem to interpret Flash’s javascript popups as if it were you who clicked.
In fact it was you. normally yuo write this in Flash: getURL(’[removed]popup(’300, 200, etc.’)’); and since the browser does not parse any swf linked in a page, he/she cannot know that it was not you, who clicked on a link.
4
I don’t think this type of annoyance is solely the preserve of adverts but they are certainly the main culprits. I interpret ANY popup/under that I didn’t prompt as a violation and kill the window immediately. That’s presuming the Adblock extension for Firefox hasn’t caught it already.
As you say, the big boys know this is bad practise, but then these kind of annoying adverts are in the same league as spam. They sure ain’t in it to make US happy.
5
Popups, Popunders, rank as high on my list as those commission based salespeople trying to sell you hand lotion from a kiosk at the shopping mall.
saleshound- “Ma’am, you would like to test our $50 hand lotion? It’s full of perfumes and dyes that will dry your skin out.”
me- “STAY AWAY FROM ME!!! And if you follow me to my car like you did last time, I won’t be held responsible for the tiretracks across your backside.”
lol..
:0D
6
http://bhg.com
I work for the above site. We argue about popups everyday. The designers hate them and ad sales loves them. The bottom line is they perform. Popups are the best performing ad we have. As soon as people quite clicking on them they will disappear. Until then us designers have to learn to like them :)
7
I would love to be able to respond to Popuptraffic.com: “If you let me know ahead of time that you’re going to serve a popup on a site, I’ll be perfectly happy to ‘take’ nothing at all from them! I can find what I want from someone who won’t harass me.”
8
I was beginning to wonder if was just me, of if Firefox was being more lenient in the amount of pop-up/unders it was allowing through.
Personally, I subscribe to the school of thought that if I’d wanted to see it, I would’ve clicked on it. Don’t force it in front of me, I’ll simply close it and not visit again. I stopped going to macosrumors.com because of that.
Thanks for the links to the programs to help this Veerle. You’re the best :)
9
A note about bhg.com:
I hate visiting the site just becuase of the pop ups, it would be okay if there were only a couple or even give me the choice to click on them, but there is an ungodly amount.
I’m sure the sales might be up, but isn’t there another way you could get the message across?
10
<<By using a popup blocker, you are essentially stealing their work. You’re nothing more than a common thief>>
What an attitude these guys have! Imagine that you would be a thief when zapping to another television channel in a commercial break.
Most of the time I find advertising rather anoying… even though it’s my job. :-S
I can’t believe that these agressive advertising techniques really work. Same goes for spam.
This reminds me of that company who made this TV hard disk recorder that was able to skip the commercials. There were rumours to make this device illegal. Imagine!
I’m very happy not living in USA. Every 10 minutes a commercial break and when the program continues they always tell you again what went on and what to expect after the break. Terrible…
11
Hi Veerle,
Short time reader, first time poster :-p
I love privoxy and popfile (both sf.net projects, first for www, second for email; both for spam whether eyecandy gifs or textual emails).
I am in the major minority (paradox?) in that I surf w/ images set to cached only (i use opera). And when I surf w/ firefox, I definately use flashblock.
The thing I hate about animated ads is that they /have/ to be sooooo busy to attract your eye. So when I call up a site on a colleges computer, I cant even read the d@m# content because of those gnomes jumping up and down trying to get me to buy toothpaste (ok you got me, not a real ad but just almost as bad as the real thing).
I sometimes wonder how the heck the other people get anything useful out of the web at all. I’d never be able to do it.
If browsing w/ DSL in cached mode seems distasteful, most sites using good markup and/or CSS look great in cached mode (colors, fonts, sizes, everything looks great). And since I surf my email, bank, and of course veerle.duoh.com the most (like the plug?), the cached images kick in and I get the full experience. When I hit a site that I *want* images from, I simply hit “g” and there they are. Try it, you might like it, first ones free tell your friends.
P.S. since https sites seem slow already, encrypted images only slow them down. Set cached images on https sites and the improvement (even via broadband) is significant.
P.S.S. this post is from firefox. You site doesnt allow posts via opera+privoxy. I see “Your comment could not be posted at this time.” instead. That is due to either the user agent string, cookies, or referrer string being filtered by privoxy. Maybe you should say “Your comment could not be posted at this time; please enable cookies in your browser”, or some sort of more meaningful message.
Thx for a great site, love the CSS tips; keep up the good work.
12
Hi, its me again,
One more handy thing ... if your browser supports it. Set the JS privileges to:
No resizing of windowsNo moving of windows
No raising of windows
No lowering of windows
No changing of status field
The first 4 help stop popups. The last helps stop those ticker tape marquee scrolls at the bottom of the page (keep the content in the content area!!!).
But do allow “Change images”, this is important for a lot of galleries and does not (yet) seem to do any harm.
See also Viewable with Any Browser Campaign
13
MacFixit’s answer is somewhat typical. I remember when the whole site was free and driven by the fixes and howtos of the people reading the site.
Then all of a sudden MacFixit decided to take all the information it has been collecting for free over the years without adding much value, and make it only available to paying viewers.
And they have the gall to tell us we’re stealing, because we use pop-up blockers?
Yet another reason never to go that site again.
14
@Kilian: I think you have misread the article. This article wasn’t about the advertising on the MacFixIt site. The purpose was to speak about the rising trend in popup blockers not working any longer for all sites. One of the perpetrators responsible for this behavior is “Popuptraffic.com”. So to be clear MacFixIt never used any of the techniques. It was a quote from a MacFixit reader who mailed “Popuptraffic.com”.
15
Yeah, this is a touchy thing. It is very two sided and each side in it’s own right is correct. I prefer not to have in your face advertising in fact I have even told clients I would not invoke pop up windows and such in their sites for certain things. I like many will boycott spam mailing companies and simply ignore any pop up/under ads. But they do also have the right to try to display them.
The best method for handling this I have seen is sites that simply put a button that says “Please support this site by visiting our sponsors.” then if you are so inclined you can see all the sponsors ads.
16
I don’t care much about the good old small banner but why not stick to that?
Just add annoying adds because most users have become too smart to click on the original ones?
I too hate these new flash banners. Well, they’re not exactly “new” but they’re being fairly overused at this point.
One of the most irritating ones is the “crazy frog” of Jamba. Hovering on one of these will result in your music being disturbed by some childish song 12yr olds use on their cell..
Don’t you have a program for internet explorer to disable flash banners veerle?