New Ultra-Intrusive Pop-up Ads Introduced

CrashRide writes "According to this story at AdAge.com, Unicast is attempting to introduce a new on-line ad format that takes over the entire screen of the PC for about 15 seconds and must be closed by the viewer. "The ultra-intrusive new format opens when a user is on one page of a Web site and clicks a link to go to another page on the same site. Instead of seeing that new page, the user sees an ad that fills the entire screen.""

Re:pop up killlers

Mozilla [mozilla.org] is a good choice.

Seriously, this is nothing new...suddenly changing the size of the popup ad makes it innovative?

Re:pop up killlers

"Seriously, this is nothing new...suddenly changing the size of the popup ad makes it innovative?"

That's how these people "think".

They also think annoying people will get them to buy their advertizers' products.

For the good of society, I should be allowed shoot whoever I see fit.

Re:pop up killlers

They also think annoying people will get them to buy their advertizers' products.

This is more effective than you might think - look at x10. They were the first company to carpet-bomb the web with popups, everybody hates them, yet they are pretty successful at selling their product. Also consider loud, annoying TV commercials. They are universally despised and hated, yet everybody remembers that Crazy Eddie has the best prices on electronics.

commit yourself to being ad-free

Is it really asking too much to insist that we not be bombarded with advertising everywhere we look, everywhere we listen?

why should the bombardment stop? don't demand advertising silence from the advertisers - they're making too much money to give it up - demand it from yourself.

for the last five years, i have been persuing a policy of personal advertising exposure reduction. my formula for it is simple:

1. kill your television. if you haven't figgured out that programming is just the coating to get you to swallow the ads... well, you're not paying attention then! donate yr tv to the women's shelter or something. if you must get the content (say, 6 pm buffy) nab it from bittorrent.
2. commit to ad-free radio there are ad-free and ad-reduced radio stations out there such as your state provider (cbc, bbc &c). your local university probably has a good radio station (the one in my town is awesome! [cjsw.com])
3. don't be a billboard, eschew visible branding you pay $20 more for the shirt with the nike swoosh on it. why pay them to be their billboard? de-logo-ize your stuff and avoid purchasing items with large, visible logos. (you may argue about band tee shirts now, if you wish :>)
4. avoid points programs does every store have to have a points card now? don't play! the "savings" and bonuses you reap do not represent a decrease in the retailer's profit but, rather, an increase in the median price of services and products offered. the primary purpose of the campaigns is to gather data on you for future marketing and advertising campaigns. don't participate.

obviously those aren't hard "rules" (who the hell am i to tell you what to do?), but if you want to live with less advertising, it's a good way to start. the most important suggestion i can make is to spend a fair amount of time deciding how you classify different kinds of advertising and what you want to achieve. what do you think of classified ads? band tee shirts? the chrome logo on your car? think this stuff through early on!

Re:commit yourself to being ad-free

There are a few other things you can do if you hate advertisements, advertisers and general sales-people...

1. Telephone sales:

- Leave person waiting. That is, first ansver, let him/her start up then say "oh, just a sec..." and go take a bath. I'm not talking quick shower here, take a real long soaker. Then go back and see if they're still there. I have actually never experienced a person calling back after this treatment. It also works great for busy people as you don't have to waste time on the phone.

- Blow off some steam. I know this isn't nice to the poor people on the other end of the line, but hey! They called me!

2. Advertising material and catalogs:

- The bin-trick. Have a special bin available near your mailbox or wherever you get your mail. Now simply shake your newspaper over it before you read it. I also use it to sort out the other folders and stuff dumping in unaddressed. I don't recycle this, I use it in my fireplace. Hey, it's free!

- Readdressing. In many cases you can readdress the material and dump it back in the mail. "Return to sender" is my favorite. Be sure it ends up at a real mailbox and not in some no-go end address or the work will have been for nothing. If you don't accept the mail, the company sending it will have to pay for the return postage!!!

There are tonns of other stuff one can do, if one has some energy to waste... Maby someone has some ideas I haven't thought of? Post em!

Oh, and don't say shooting at the mailboy with BB-gunns or stuff. I've tried that, and it hurts to be shot at. (I was doing the delivery...)

Re:pop up killlers

It may work for some people. But not me. I've always been interesting in wireles cameras (for RC vehicals etc). But if I ever get into it. I will never get it from them. Hell, I'll never visit their site, because I don't want to show support.

Re:pop up killlers

Innovative enough to get patent protection, according to their home page! Good ol' US patent office. ;)

"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time. "

Unless you're using Opera with pop-ups disabled. And their examples don't download completely before playing anyway.

They must be so proud of themselves.

Re:pop up killlers

Can't pop up killers take this out?

The average Joe User really has no clue.

Yesterday, I sold my 10th $50 service to "remove Gator [gator.com] and its associated crap" in this month alone. The customer was complaining that their AOL connection had slowed down substantially. Little did they know that Gator (and it's friends) was sucking up the bandwidth in order to install all kinds of crap. This particular user had installed a popup blocker in order to simply use the PC. When I turned off the popup blocker, I was astounded at just how many popups they were getting. Phenomenal.

Someone needs to develop a DNS/hosts update service that will allow automatic updates to the hosts file in order to block these sick companies. Until then, I'll be happy charging $50 to "fix it".

I love rich, non-technical people.

Re:pop up killlers

Use your hosts file. Make a list of all bothersome ad-serving hosts and redirect them to whatever IP you choose. Like running your own DNS services, it works like a charm for me, and works for Windows NT and Linux.

I even keep a current copy on my website right here [7deadlysins.ath.cx]. Really makes a difference in page loading times.

Re:Trouble with hostsfile

try 0.0.0.0 it pretty much kills any traffic going to it.

Re:pop up killlers

Go here [lavasoft.de] and download AdAware. It'll do the work for you.

Re:pop up killlers

I noticed the other day that some sites seem to be catching on to people using popup-killers. Take this [venkydude.com] site, for example, which I happened to be browsing. It seems to use DHTML to move a popup window onto the screen. Because its just part of the page and not a seperate window, the popup killers dont catch it. And worse - the window slowly scrolls onto the screen in the most annoying fashion imaginable.

Re:pop up killlers

Nope the site is not using DHTML it is suing java script and galeon blocks it just fine

Yeah, and I didn't drive my car ttoday, I just got into my automobile instead.

Javascript+CSS=DHTML.

Re:pop up killlers

I don't think popup killers will deal with this type of threat. I do a lot of web programming, and if my boss told me to build something like this (well, actually, I'd deliberately screw it up and declare it impossible, but just for the sake of argument...) I'd take the following approaches:

Approach 1: If the ad is an interstitial, the user is clicking a link. So it's not an unrequested popup -- it's a requested popup. Many popup blockers won't prevent requested popups. Also, since the user is clicking a link, I'd put this page in between the main page and the requested page, so the user HAS to see this page on his way to the other page -- people with popup blockers will have no choice but to permit the popup. I'd open up a new, maximized window, stripping out all useful browser controls, and I'd use Javascript to time a redirect to the new page, probably using a form post so I could track info about the click-through. Then, I'd have a close button on the new page (but not on the interstitial!) for when the client is done viewing the content.

Approach number 2: Let's say that isn't gung-ho enough, and we figure out that some people are still figuring out a way to wiggle around the interstitial. No problem, we use Java, and the new Swing tools which let you pop up windows that look like normal system windows (even if it's a web app). Then, we proceed to take over the whole screen and capture all mouse input for the fifteen seconds. Since it's a Java window and not a popup, the browser doesn't interfere. For people using IE, there's probably a way to do this with ActiveX although I'd have to read up on it. I'd choose one or the other based on the browser the person is running. Clicking the link would call a function in the applet or active X control which pops up the ad. When the ad is done, it could interact with Javascript and let the calling page know it was finished, and forward the user on to the requested page. I think I'd do this using a requested popup window with the applet/activeX object embedded in it. Then, that window would be the one that got forwarded.

Basically, I think that any company that can hire a sufficiently talented, unscrupulous (or starving) developer can open up a can of popup whoop-ass whether the rest of us like it or not.

Pretty much the only thing you can do is ban sites that resort to such sleazy bullshit.

Unicast should be Unicastrated

Anyone else worried about the quality of the net degrading? How long until peopel are so fed up that they just stop using it?

Ok So I'm not going to stop using the net, I will continue to do what I always have done. When a website resorts to these Ad tactics, I either a) give them money to stop as is the case with slashdot. ONLY if the content on the site is worth the price they are asking though b) use the handy features of phoenix to make the site usable, block ads from this server, nuke this image, dont allow pop ups or javascripts. or c) stop using the site all together.

I imagine these ads will piss off users and confuse the hell out of net illiterate types, to the point where they just stop visiting that site. What good is running a website and selling advertising space if NOBODY is watching anymore? Seems to me if sites are so desperate for advertising dollars, there is a better, less intrusive way to do it. Or maybe they should call it quits.

I like my slashdot subscription, but im curious if they makes more money from me removing the ads or from me viewing the ads?

This article said the ads would be 300k. Imagine some poor sap on dialup who has to download that crap when he is quickly clicking through links and subjected to 4 or 5 of these stupid things.

If I ever get one of these awful ads shoved in my face, I assure you I will not be coming back for seconds.

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

If I ever get one of these awful ads shoved in my face, I assure you I will not be coming back for seconds.

Hehe, yeah, I would wait at LEAST 2 to 3 seconds before coming back. ;)

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

I really just wish that Mozilla would implement a "block flash crap from this server" option along with the "block images from this server".

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

It's already possible, simply install a user stylesheet that turns off flash by default and turn it on for those(that?) page you want to use flash on, I use this one:
http://dion.swamp.dk/dl/userContent.css

Read a bit about it here:
http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff.html

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

My first child has just been renamed to Dion.

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

Here's a better user stylesheet rule [squarefree.com] that blocks all Flash but lets you click any blocked Flash animation to play it. It's compatible with your idea of completely unblocking certain Flash (so you don't even have to click)... I think "-moz-binding: none" will undo the binding.

Unicast Superstitial - Slashdot em here!!

They call the Superstitial ads. They're very proud and excited about them. You can see them here [unicast.com].

Basically it looks like a full screen java script pop-up with flash content. Fortunately, Konqueror immediately complained about java script wanting to open a new window (I have it set to prompt), so it looks like these won't be much of a problem for the clueful user.

Still, the fact that a company is expending effort in the development of more intrusive advertising is reprehensible. Therefore....

Slashdot them here [unicast.com]

Hehe...

I get a large window with the "click here to get the plug in" link :)

Pays to browse with just about everything turned off/not installed.

I think the best defense against this sort of thing is to email the company in the pop-up add telling them you saw the add and because of it you are instigating a 6 month boycott of their product. Company gets enough of those, and they might rethink their adverting methods.

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

It almost hurts to see an ad company not get the medium so profoundly. The Internet is not TV and they should stop trying to emulate TV ads on a web browser.

TV ads work, even in an age of remotes and Tivos, because TV is a passive medium. To flip to another channel or hit the "Skip 30" button takes effort from an non-interactive individual (even as small of an effort as using the remote is.) I've been known to watch commercial breaks on taped programs just because I'm too zoned out to notice, which says as much about the program as it does me. Inertia works against active ad avoidance on the TV.

The Internet, however, is a very interactive medium. Since the death of push, the only time I'm not interacting with the browser is when I'm streaming audio or video. Since I'm so interactive, it take very little effort for me to alt-tab to a new browser window or alt-f4 to kill the pop-up (if it even makes it that far with Mozilla.) Since I'm already interacting, inertia actually works for active ad avoidance.

Ultimately, this ad format will fail, not because it's too intrusive, but because it's too annoying. It's annoying enough that people will find a way to block the ads. Internet advertisers need to find a way to make their ads intrusive without being annoying, and full-screen pop-ups that steal focus are not the answer.

A while back, I compared the ratio of ad space to editorial content on Slashdot as compared to other media. For example, magazine ads are relative benign, you don't see people rising up demanding ways to get around magazine ads. But where /. has less than 1% of it's space devoted to ads, a magazine might have 33-50%. Those ads are intrusive, in that they're always there in front of the reader, but they're not too annoying. It helps that they're also highly targeted, you don't see ads for bridal dresses in a video game magazine.

Re:Unicast should be Unicastrated

For example, magazine ads are relative benign, you don't see people rising up demanding ways to get around magazine ads... Those ads are intrusive, in that they're always there in front of the reader, but they're not too annoying.

I find them quite annoying. I can't easily leaf through a magazine, because different weight papers are used to divert my finger to certain pages (never the ones I want). I can't find the contents because it's hidden behind some random number of ads in the front of the magazine. And once I do find the contents, I can't find the article because only about half the pages have numbers on them (since ads don't have numbers) -- worse when the magazine decides that some ad section is special, and isn't included in the page count, so there's fifteen pages between "page 94" and "page 95".

So there, I can bitch about all ads, all the time if I want to! I can't do as much about the magazine ads, though...

Really, though, let's not pretend that ads in our real life aren't without their cost.

Sounds Like

An absolutely fabulous way to absolutely positively guarantee that I will never visit that website again. Good luck with that one, guys...

Intrusive Ad Business Model

1. Do something really obnoxious to people who surf your site
2. ??
3. Profit

Makes sense to me.

"Ultra-Intrusive" my ass

no seriously - like the subject says - until they develop a digital technology that invades my ass without my permission - then they best lay off prepending "Ultra" to that shit.
otherwise you leave yourself no room once they do develop ass prodding software in ads.

It's too late for that...

RealMedia has cornered the market on "ass penetrating" software for the past several years.

People ask me about realplayer all the time...

"Hey, I need to see this on the 'net. It says I need to install this thing called RealPlayer to see it... how do I do that?"

I am not the IT guy so I cannot tell them what to do, so I simply discourage them strongly. I tell them that, "RealPlayer is broken. It doesn't work anymore. The company died in the dotbomb. It is dangerous. It is created by terrorists. It destroys computers. You should never install it, and tell your friend that they should not use it. We can't play RealPlayer on our system. It was used on the old C-3PO operating system. Our computer doesn't support it. It is full of viruses. IT WILL KILL YOUR COMPUTER."

I hate lying to people. Hate it. However the urge to play anything, and I mean anything, no matter how inane, by their corporate buddy in another cubicle is SOOO STRONG (I mean moth to bug zapper strong) that they simply cannot exsist witout RealPlayer. After all, you are telling them not to do something, and they want to see that guy light his own flatulence. You see why you lose in that situation.

However, if you don't tell people a thousand reasons IN THE MOST EXTREME TERMS why they should not use RealPlayer, then the little moron will dodge your advice and install the danged thing. Then they will come to you with a computer that is half the speed that it was before and screws with you at all times. Then THEY START THE REAL LYING.

"I didn't install RealPlayer! No I didn't! You told me I shouldn't so I didn't!"

-TWO MINUTES LATER-

"Okay... Well, I just HAAAAD to see that baby dancing video! I saw it on an Ally McBeal rerun and it was soooo cute!"

It amazes me how many people have come to me for casual advice and then utterly bypass it to their own detriment. It is one thing to not know and accidentally install RealPlayer. It is another thing to ask, and then after hearing "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" from a person who knows, and still install it.

Re:"Ultra-Intrusive" my ass

Nah, you have:

Ultra-Intrusive
Ultra-Wide-Intrusive
Ultra-Fas t-Wide-Intrustive
Ultra-Fast-Wide-Intrustive160
and coming soon:
Ultra-Fast-Wide-Intrustive320

Re:"Ultra-Intrusive" my ass

"Nah, you have:
Ultra-Intrusive
Ultra-Wide-Intrusive
Ultr a-Fast-Wide-Intrustive
Ultra-Fast-Wide-Intrustive 160
and coming soon:
Ultra-Fast-Wide-Intrustive320"

Anybody else expecting the phrase 'with wings' to appear in that one?

So?

So what? This works for TV and Newspapers, why wouldn't it work for the web!

Oh wait... i'm a marketer and i'm also an idiot.

Re:So?

It doesn't work like that in a newspaper at all... Do they hire some guy to force you to stare at ads in between articles?

Now *that* would be ultra intrusive...

I remember popups ...

I used to see a lot of popup ads before Mozilla could block them. Are the advertisers still using them?

Re:I remember popups ...

Plus newer builds of Mozilla can block pop-ups on a per-site basis now, too (and enable on a per-site basis), so if your bank just INISISTS on opening up a popup for their site to work properly, you can let it and still have an ad-free environment. Wonderful stuff!

Re:I remember popups ...

I dunno, I've got the same thing. Today one of my co-worker's sons complained about all the popups on the net. I tried to demonstrate how Mozilla blocks popups, but I couldn't remember a site that uses them, it's been so long since I've seen one. He was happy to supply a URL for me and sure enough, no popup in Mozilla. The boy's now thinking his daddy works with a real wizard (daddy's our help desk guy, and does everything the MS way). I told him to get Mozilla, the browser of champions.

I'm still not sure if popups actually exist out there. I guess I have to go fire up IE and check it out sometime :)

Thanks, team Mozilla!!

Set mozilla script permissions

Disable page moving, page resizing, and bringing page to foreground.

Requested popup?

"The ultra-intrusive new format opens when a user is on one page of a Web site and clicks a link to go to another page on the same site."
hmmmm...since you have to CLICK on it, would this be considered a "requested popup," something that pheonix, and mozilla allow? I'm sure the great team of programmers will still beat it,but until they do, this will be annoying!

I can just see it...

While surfing around at work during some downtime and all the sudden you land on a questionable site and BAM a big vagina pops on your screen for 15 seconds...

You begin freaking out but that doesn't compare to the reaction your boss is going to have when he walks by...

Re:I can just see it...

Porn sites already do this sort of thing.... I mean, I've never even heard of this sort of pop-up before...

Re:I can just see it...

While surfing around at work during some downtime and all the sudden you land on a questionable site and BAM a big vagina pops on your screen for 15 seconds...

Almost happened, I just looked at the demo gallery for unicast.com, and a Volvo popped up on the screen.

Re:I can just see it...

If a big vagina popped up on my screen for 15 seconds, I don't think it would be the only thing popping up in the vicinity :D

Disabling JavaScript window resizes

I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control, just like we have pop-up control now.

If it gets obnoxious enough, people will find ways around it.

Re:Disabling JavaScript window resizes

Mozilla already allows you to turn off all of those things.

Nice one with no thought.

This one will work quickly to do two things.

1. make sure a user of a website is forced to see at least one ad for 15 seconds.

2. make sure the user goes "wtf is this shit?" and go find a better site without that kind of crap.

even if it becomes pervasive, and 90% of sites use this kind of 'feature' in its ads, it'll force people over to the sites who don't... which will in turn increase their traffic and own ad revenue.

tards!

Re:Nice one with no thought.

I completely agree. What advertising exec believes that annoying people is good for business? Somewhere someone had to think this up and decide it was a good business move. I'm flabbergasted why they think this way. As a consumer, I know what I want, and I know how to find it. I mean I'm grinding my teeth here completely devoid of any reasoning as to who would think this practice would yield positive results.

Here's a great story. The other day, I realized it was high time I ran ad-aware and cleaned up. It found about 30 spyware apps that had found their way on to my box and proceeded to clean them up. I rebooted. Nothing. It would load 2k all the way, but nothing would start. Rebooted safe mode, ran my boy Norton through there, no errors found. Reboot normal mode. Nothing. To date, I've NEVER had a 2k problem this bad. Visual C++ programming, 3d studio, a ton of other high profile, system-hogging programs, and nothing this bad, ever. I'm 100% sure it had something to do with the spyware removal. Something deliberate and malicious. The basic, underhanded message seems to be "wipe our spyware, we'll make your machine unusable"..

So..reinstalled 2k, updated, patched, drivers installed..about 2 minutes into use..messenger service message comes in..oh fuck, forgot to block that..the message is an ad..telling me I can, for $29.99, buy a program that will BLOCK MESSENGER SERVICE ADS. At this point I'm so full of rage that I'm punching the cat. I don't know what to be more furious over..the delivery method they employed..or the fact that they're charging $29.99 to bust out at most 10 clicks of a mouse..I send them a STRONGLY worded letter..and offered them my "change your background image" software for $49.99 and that I'd throw in my "boot up sound changer" for free..still no reply.

This was ours..all of this..before they took it and raped it and bastardized it. This was our geekly little hobby and now I'm ashamed of it. I question if it's even worth fighting for.

I'm not worried

Power users won't have a problem with this. Either this will be easy to block with Mozilla or only work with IE or people will get so fed up that it'll peter out quickly. I've been using Mozilla so long it's always a harsh shock when I use IE and pop-ups start cluttering everything. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who get used to sitting through this crap and it'll catch on.

Don't the game sites already do this?

I think it was IGN or one of the giant networks... not a pop-up, but an interstitial page that appears between pages.

Don't see the point of a pop-up. However I have set my Mac to emit a large belch every time it smacks down a popup for me. I like that.

Re:Don't the game sites already do this?

Mozilla 1.3 has an option to play a user-specified sound when a popup window has been suppressed. It can also display an icon in the status bar (the default).

Great, now I'll Need a TiVO to Browse the Web...

..for me when I'm not sitting at the computer, so I can replay "my" browsing session without ads later on. Just delightful. I just can't wait until the whole world is super-broadband so these delightful adverts can feature full video and sound. Sigh.

Flickering, too?

That's certainly one way to discourage traffic at your site. Maybe they should make sure it flickers through a whole bunch of colors really, really fast just to make sure that no one will come back. Oh yeah, and don't forget really loud obnoxious sound either. The advertising trifecta of annoyance!

Old News

These have been in common use in porn sites for years.

Of course, this is not through personal experence.

Of course.

This is wonderful

No, seriously. I'm not trolling.

Garbage like this just makes b0rken browsers like IE less and less tolerable to Joe User. Making Joe unhappy with IE is good because the sites the rest of us need to use will be less and less able to count on IE as some "universal standard."

As the French Revolutionaries put it, "The worse, the better."

EEK! That's too big

A pop-up ad is one thing. It's small code and content-wise. It probably takes 3-4 seconds to download, but the article states that these new ads are 300K!!! That's almost a full minute to download at 56K modem speeds.

If their going to force people to spend 1 minute to download an ad (plus a forced 15 seconds to view the ad), they had better come up with a way to reimburse people, either financially, or with MUCH better content.

the victim

The real victim here is going to be the ability to use scripts on web pages. It's almost to the point where I'll turn off scripting entirely just to get away from these terrible things. It's like the ability to put macro things in emails. It could provide valuable new capabilities, but it's ruined by abuse.

Re:the victim

Advertising makers, please don't read this or use any of the ideas in here!

The insideous part of this is that it doesn't require any scripting on the client side. In todays database served web pages, all that has to happen is that each link is really a link to an ad, and passes to the ad a reference to the actual content that should be displayed afterward. That reference may be an actual URL, or just a symbol that only the server can decipher.

This will all be taken care of on the server side. Ex: Slashdot main page is displayed. Instead of a link taking you to an article, it links directyl to a full page ad, but as part of a hidden form the real destination page is passed. So you click the link to see the full article, you first see a full page ad, then the ad sends you to the article page.

All the client ever sees is standard HTML, and a header with a "refresh content" directive with a 15 second delay.

The best you could hope for here is that a browser, upon recieving an HTML header with a reload directive would immediately jump to the new URL and not display the ad's URL. Of course, the web server could have an extension that would literally lock you out of the content until the 15 seconds were up. To be more malicious, the server may be set to lock you out of the entire site for progressively longer periods if it detects you are bypassing the ads. You might find that you are barred from a site for 24 hours because you refuse to generate a revenue stream for them.

The short of it all: This may very well be the Internet killer that everyone has feared.

We can block pop-ups. we can filter images, we can block most spam, but we can't get around this ad scheme, at least no completely.

Freedom

I think it is a good thing, it will speed deployment of mozilla, and other browsers with pop-up blocking features.

The most dissapointing thing is I think adult sites have been doing this for a while now. So it really isnt new.

Anyways this technology doesnt really affect me as I dont have the features enabled to take advantage of their new ads.

They're free to do what they want with their sites but we're also free not to view their sites.

I think that with AOL reducing pop-up ads that you wont see too many of this format.

i've seen this...

My coworker was fuming after a full-screen ad took over his screen after while he was going to msn.com.

If he's any indication of whether or not these things work, well, I think this won't go over well with people at all. It may turn some people off of the advertised products. In any case, use mozilla or netscape with pop-up blockers...and don't set msn.com to be your homepage *sigh*.

Note to self:

1. Find out who does these ads. 2. Do not buy products or services from these places.

And this is new?

How is this different -- or worse -- than sites that stick an interstitial between pages. Even Yahoo makes you view an ad after reading more than a few Groups postings, then you click "Continue on to the next message" or the like.

At least if this is a genuine pop-up, you can use a pop-up blocking utility to kill it. With the interstitial ads there's no way around it because they're actually integrated into the page.

Full screen advertizing

I'm sure this is just a natural progression of advertizing and

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it will go away eventually as it is deemed ineffective. Unfortunately all the IE users are going to be stuck in the meantime. Another plus for mozilla.

Nothing new

This is nothing new. Porn sites have had these full screen pop-ups for years. The worst ones are the ones with sound. Nothing worse than trying to masterbate quitely at night when one of these pop-ups take over your screan and plays at a volume load enough to wake up your roomate "Ooooohhhh! Hi, my name is Candy and I have a secret web site." That's intrusive.

The Pornification of the Net - thanks Unicast!

Wonderful. So, in essence, Unicast is attempting to bring the lovely porn site advertising model to the entire internet.

Except that there is just one tiny problem... porn sites have a carrot that can entice their prospective patrons into looking past such distractions: PORN. Most web sites don't offer anything that has such a powerful and nearly universal appeal. ;)

I predict that this new advertising paradigm will have a half life measurable in weeks...

Eventually, people won't visit your site anymore

I quit visiting CBSMarketwatch (mentioned in the article) and MotleyFool simply because of those types of ads. When Weather.com got pop-ups, I nearly quit going there as well, but I guess I can live with pop-ups. What I can't live with is something that zips accross my screen and makes all kinds of sounds WHILE I'M AT WORK! But I'm sure no one visits CBSMarketwatch at work. Yeah, right.

You use, you lose. Would Google be search engine king if it had pop-ups, flash animation, things zipping across the screen, or 15 second full screen ads? I refuse to sink to the level to even answer such a simple common-sense question.

Those ads probably cost more and therefore generate more initial revenue for anyone visiting the sites that use them. But if you make enough surfers annoyed (as this will), eventually they won't come to your site anymore.

--
Slashdolt

Been there

Already at use over at Wired.com. Which is why I stopped reading Wired.com. I'm all for adverts but that was a bit too much, especially because the first few times I saw the ad clicking on the 'Skip' button would simply hang the connection and never bring up the main page.

Talk about killing the goose and all that. Piss your readers off. Maybe Wired should go with the Salon model (view an ad, get a few pages).

Hacking?

Didn't read the article because it's apparently /.ed but if from when the blurb says is correct, then these ads effectively take control of the user system without their permission and prevent the user from doing anything for 15 seconds. Could this not be construed as hacking the user's system?

Now more than ever, you'll need this...

Since they'll probably do this crap with flash..

How to Uninstall Flash Manually (for Linux users) [macromedia.com]

Direct link to Win32 Uninstaller [macromedia.com]

It's your computer...

Pick your poison:

Phoenix/Firebird - blocked [texturizer.net]
Opera - blocked [opera.com]
Mozilla - blocked [mozilla.org]
Netscape - blocked [netscape.com]
IE - oh thats a feature.

Eep!

Let's hope no one combines this pop-up technology with.. THE LINK. (you know which one I'm talking about.)

Having that image full screen for a mandatory 15 seconds.. *shudder*

Gallery of Examples at Unicast...

Unicast has their gallery of examples here [unicast.com]. See the examples for "full-screen superstitials" -- Unicast's name for their format.

Unicast claims these ads will be *less* annoying than pop-ups, because, rather than open new windows you have to close, this ad format temporarily takes over the existing window, and people are used to this style (think TV commercials).

And, for those posters who wonder what types of sites would consider using this...Unicast has a list here [unicast.com].

Indeed.

From the article:

"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing, Unicast.

Heh. I agree wholeheartedly on the point of technology not getting in the way--if what they do annoys me, I'll work around it, regardless of whatever technology they employ to keep me from doing so. The marketroids may not yet realize it, but computer geeks know how to use technology, too!

I'd say that this is like biting the hand that feeds you, but it's really more like biting the ass that flaps at you from a passing car's window. It's a really, really bad idea, the execution is almost guaranteed to be ugly, and in the end, the marketer's face is gonna be in a whole lot worse shape than the geek's ass...

One more time?

"...the creative you build is what gets shown,..."

Run that by me again?

How can this POSSIBLY be thought to be new?

I first saw porn sites that popped up an ad page, hid all the window decorations and then maximized the window about 5 years ago. Of course I haven't seen popups at ALL since I learned how to turn off javascript about 3 days later.

I guess I'll just have to alias the entire unicast.com domain to the good old 127.0.0.1 IP address in /etc/hosts now ...

Microsoft already has such an advert....

It's a screen with a blue background with some text on it, can't find a way out of it though :)

Surely these adverts can be killed on Windows by pressing ALT F4 or CTRL ALT DEL then kill the window.

Evil ads

Forget popups, even worse are those Flash ads that pop up, make all kinds of horrible noise, and cover what you are trying to read. I almost stopped going to wired.com because of those. After a visit to CounterExploitation [cexx.org], I discovered the Proxomitron [proxomitron.org] and tried it out...It has eliminated 99% of ads. It even lets the "good" popups though, such as when you are shopping online and your cart pops up. Sometimes it causes problems with legitimate sites that require certain Javascript commands to operate properly, but it's easy enough to temporarily turn off Proxomitron to see those sites.
It basically works by acting as a local proxy on your computer. As web requests comes down, it rewrites the http stream on the fly to get rid of objectionable commands (blink tags, status line scrollers, background midi music, popups, etc). All filters are 100% customizable, but the ones it comes with do a great job.

Not as easy to block as you might think...

Remember that these aren't just popups -- they're pop-up inters...intestin....er, pop-up intermediate pages between where you clicked and where you were going.

A simple pop-up blocker that blocks ALL pop-ups won't help, cause you'll click on the link and nothing will happen. A pop-up blocker that blocks unrequested pop-ups but allows those you "asked for" with a click won't stop them, they'll show up ('cause they appeared as a result of a click).

Finally, something that recognizes, even for "requested" pop-ups, that it's a fiendish full-screen hijacker pop-up, won't help too much if it simply resizes the window, shoves it into your current tab, etc. It'll still have to dig into the pop-up data to figure out what link to go to next (which might not be obvious, could be randomly obfuscated, etc.) Plus, they could put a bunch of links into the pop-up, for more information, to get on a mailing list, etc., and only one of them (which one??) would continue you through to the original link.

Basically, you can turn 'em off, but you can't get to the content w/out living with it. And there are LOTS of ways they can prevent you from getting there, automatically, without seeing their ad.

(at least, this is what I'd expect, as I haven't seen any of these yet. but I haven't yet seen anyone come up with a way to skip the interstitials (there's that word again!) on, say, salon.com.)

Be thankful for Privoxy...here are some nice rules

This just makes me more thankful for Privoxy [privoxy.org]. As an example, here are some fun rules I created. (Note, the regexps should be all on one line, regardless of what your browser displays.)

Remove IGN interstitials: this skips them for the most part. I'm sure it can be modified for other places. (I pay for IGN Insider and shouldn't be subjected to this. Granted recently they've introduced a feature to switch off ads for insiders, but this is still a useful example.)

FILTER: ign Remove IGN ads, including interstitials
s%<!--Injecting.*%<html><head><META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL="></head><body> <P>Skipping interstitial...</P></body></html>%gims

Just add +filter{ign} to your default.action.

Here's another one that makes a certain site you might be reading look considerably nicer:

FILTER: thissite Remove thissite's ad code
s/<!-- advertisement code. -->.*?<!-- end ad code -->/<!-- Privoxy Filtered -->/gims

Of course, you should support any sites that you like. As I said, I subscribe to IGN, as they provide a great deal of extra content for insiders, in addition to an already great site.

But ads still suck.

Does anyone else see the irony here?

"we are looking at a variety of ad formats -- including Unicast -- that advance advertiser interests without in any way negatively affecting the member experience..."

Like that's ever going to happen.

Then again, we are talking AOL customers, here...

Text ads are the best

Like the ones from Google - they actually work, I would know, I clicked on them. I never clicked on any other ads before in my life.

This kind of ultra-intrusive advertising is a TV style advertising that will not work on the web, since the web user is not expecting to accept information pushed onto him like a TV user does.

Will advertisers stop at nothing...

...to piss off potential customers? I cannot imagine this doing anything positive for an advertiser. Then again, 90+% put up with IE, so maybe I just have too high regard for the masses.

Seen this before

In the UK the online version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire used to have full screen adverts. If you used IE a new window in kiosk mode would open and a flash animation would play out. Whats bad enough is the huge obnoxious advert, whats worse is that the task bar is hidden. For me that wasn't a problem, I just hit Alt-F4, but for less computer literate users they must have been annoyed/panicked when this happened.

I might be wrong, but surely covering the taskbar and denying the user the means to control their computer must break some sort of law? Even if it is only for a few seconds?

These ads didn't seem to be used for too long, so that must say something about how effective they were. Thank goodness for Mozilla!

Did you read the "whitepaper"??

http://www.unicast.com/pressroom/whitepapers/full_ screen.asp

According to their "research" 78% of people find pop-ups annoying, but only 30% of people found the full-screen interstitials annoying. 59% found them "entertaining"...

The sad thing is that with our culture, I am starting to believe those numbers...

-sker

Just like television, eh?

"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way..."

- In television, we pay $26 + change per month for basic cable, so that we can have clear reception on the two channels we ever watch. We pay $64.95 per month for "Enhanced DSL" so that all our computers have their own IP addresses.

- In television, I usually have a pretty solid 10-15 minutes of show viewing between commercial breaks. Interstitial ads will be entirely subject to reading and interpretation speed... faster is worse.

- In television, I am almost always watching for entertainment. I use the web to get news, learn, shop, and a variety of other things I find a bit more important than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as important as Buffy can be).

- In television, content is scheduled and periodic, and the commercials are built into that. On the web, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to read this story or catch up on the day's events, so adding in 15 seconds hits harder.

- In television, commercial breaks are usually around 2-5 minutes. That's enough time to go to the restroom, grab a snack, tell an amusing anecdote. 15 seconds is not enough time to do something else, and too much time to stare at the screen.

- I sit farther away from my television than my computer screen.

So it's not just like television. Any chance they'll figure that out someday?

NOT NEW

Porn sites already do this all the time.

As do many other sites, including yahoo groups, when you click on reading the next group, they first take you to an add and you have to click again to go to the real site.

This article brought to you by UNICAST

People already hate advertising, they'll do what they can to block it or otherwise mentally ignore it. The advertisers know this, they've made it their quest to make the ads even more intrusive annoying and otherwise harder to ignore, as if being forced to watch the ad is going to make us buy the product. If anything it's going to make me boycott the product and probably the sites supporting this new ad format.

The problem with current adverising is really that they're either in your face annoying or suspicously attached to a glowing review of their product. Targetted advertising is good in the fact that it's actually related to something you already use, but you trade off personal privacy.

There used to be websites where upon registering you'd get a whole checklist of marketing categories you were interested in, which were then reflected in the advertising. It's still targeted advertising but better in the fact that you have control over what the adverisers know about you. Unfortunately you don't see this much anymore.

Of course, the way I look at it this whole article is just an advertisment for UNICAST's ad format...

Re:Just another case of Marketing being stupid.

"37% lift in purchase intent" my ass.

I've worked in product marketing and know firsthand that such "research" can be highly misleading. Generally, these results come from focus groups where you bring people in (for pay) to evaluate an ad or campaign or whatever. When being asked to view an ad, then answer a series of questions, people invariably tend to be more favortably inclined because of the context of their experience--i.e. "I'm at a focus group to look at ads."

If they are on their own time, and attempting to access whatever content and are delayed by an unexpected ad which hinders them, the effect is almost universally negative.

And I'll only mention the psychological desire to please the questioner in passing (ever notice how they always pay for focus group participation and ply you with tasty goodies before showing you the "exciting new ads that our client wants to share with you").

If you've ever wondered why so much marketing seems so blatently stupid, a lot of it has a lot to do with the ubiquitous "focus group" system. it's a classic case of the "Emperor's New Clothes." Market research firms tend to wind up being supportive of the hypothesis as a simple matter of survival. They usually don't cheat the numbers per se, but they stack the deck ridiculously in their favor.

If I were to set up an objective test for these ads, I'd tell the participants that the objective is to "read all the slashdot articles of interest to you" (or whatever) and then interrupt them with the ads. Although even this method is flawed (most people are savvy enough to know what's being tested), I would bet that the results would be different.

Most focus groups are a scam. They exist to cover Marketers' asses and rubber stamp their ideas because they're too gutless to innovate. /rant

Sheep.

I've just spent the past fifteen minutes perusing peoples' comments about about what makes these ads suck and whether or not Mozilla could be made to avoid these things... But I haven't seen anything about this:

There are places in the world where people pay for their Internet connection based on the amount of bandwidth they use. In other words, their service providers know how many megs of information was sent down that person's line and charge accordingly. Now imagine for a moment that you live in one of these places and you receive all kinds of ads. Not just web site ads, either. I'm talking about all ads... banner ads, popup ads, and even SPAM mail. Sure, your email program might be configured to erase SPAM mail, but it still has to get downloaded to you. Which leaves you doing what? Paying good, hard-earned money, our of YOUR pocket, because some jackasses in China or at some CBS site are sending you JUNK.

Online advertising simply sucks, especially when you can just go into Google [google.com] and punch in what you're looking for. (Here at Harvard we do not end a sentence with a preposition. Alright, punch in what you're looking for, asshole.)

Why is this happening? Because too many people are sheep.

Yes, an enormous number of people are sheep, just following, unconciously, what the herd is doing. And guess what? Consumer mass-marketing is simply a science devoted to pulling sheep around by the strings. People are unconscious. See, in Spanish, we have a way of saying that someone is unconscious such that you would understand what I'm talking about... if you say that someone está inconsciente, you mean that he/she is medically unconscious, as when a big hammer falls on someone's head or something. But if you say that someone es inconsciente, you mean that he/she is unconscious as in Orwell's 1984, where the people don't think that the Party is unfairly controlling them simply because they don't think. The world is passing them by like some kind of television show and they're just letting it carry them along for the ride. This is the audience of sheep that we're talking about. There is such an alarming number of these sheep that it is going to reduce our world to a piece of shit. Legislation that doesn't really bother the sheep, but takes away real, useful rights of intelligent people like YOU. Television programming that sucks and is filled with commercials made for stupid people. So, you have technology that removes ads from webpages? Oh, well, we've already patented that (tomorrow), and we've already made it federally illegal with jail terms of at least 500 years (the day after tomorrow). And that pisses me off.

This is caused by shitty education systems that get people used to following directions and not thinking for themselves. Oh, there's an ad I have to look at for 15 seconds... oh well, maybe I'll buy their product so I can put it in my already cluttered beyond recognition house, so that my car has to be out on the driveway because the garage is full of so much shit.

SHEEP!

They work fine in Safari

If it turns out that Camino doesn't block them, it looks like its time to go back to Lynx.