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The Internet

Banner Ads To Become More Annoying? 174

Posted by Hemos from the growING-groWING-GROWING dept.
cardhead writes "The Washington Post is reporting that "studies found the larger, more intrusive ad formats were, on average, 40 percent more effective than the banner ad." It went on to say that ads that pop up between you and the page you're trying to read are the most effective."
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Banner Ads To Become More Annonying? More

Banner Ads To Become More Annonying?

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  • not for long (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mozilla is going to have image blocking & javascript openwindow blocking options.
    Back to the drawing board.

  • Re:Won't complain... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that isn't annoying. bend over.

  • Re:possible bias in studies (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I haven't noticed DoubleClick ads, but your question made me curious about who these folks are, so I looked 'em up and found out -- Dear God! I AM DOUBLECLICK! All these people have been flaming ME! It says it right there: 127.0.0.1 is DoubleClick!

  • What on earth is the point of the 'insert a space you didn't type into your URL' feature? it's right up there with the lameness filter.

    If I understand correctly: Some people would make posts containing lines which were hundreds of characters long. Several browers would respond to that by making the window very wide, so readers would have to scroll horizontally on each line. This got very annoying, so the editors changed the code to add in spaces at certain intervals. Since URLs are the commonest very wide thing, the problem shows up most frequently in them.


    -----------

  • How long until http://www.satirewire.com/news/0103/support_our_sp onsors.shtml [satirewire.com] isn't be a parody anymore? I give it a week and a half.

    --
  • What on earth is the point of the 'insert a space you didn't type into your URL' feature? it's right up there with the lameness filter.

    God bless the hypocritical /. admins who implement the very technologies they deride.

    --

  • Correct. Larger ads, even the big ones that fill half a screen partway through a story, aren't THAT bad (unless they have annoying animation).

    Popup ads, which COVER the story, suck. I instantly Alt-F4 those puppies.

    ---
  • Uugh. I'd rather every web page i visited pop up 50 separate popups than suffer through using Windows!

    ---
  • Actually its quite easy to find CowboyNeal in a haystack. Just set it on fire, he makes himself very easily found once you do that..

  • usually true, but not always (Score:3)

    by bobalu ( 1921 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:02AM (#74372)
    That's usually what *I* say to people who complain about porn spam, but I was on SpeedVision.com from work the other day (NEVER visited ANYTHING remotely porn-like, just CNN and the NYTimes) and got a full-size pop-up (so to speak) from www.twistedhumor.com for PIE ("Practically Illegal Entertainment") which was flush with "erotic" fare. I sent SpeedVision an email saying "Hey guys, thanks for endangering my job".

    Now I do what someone here suggested - I put the offenders in my host file and the pop-up goes nowhere.

  • Impossible! We need a new word, annoying isn't good enough even now...

    Szo
  • ...because you can disable just the window.open() function, which smears most popups. You can also filter cookies. Mozilla's ``remember this decision'' check-box on the cookie questions is also a small but exceptionally useful feature. These features are almost certainly available largely because both browsers are Open Source (Free-Software style). As people start to notice that these browsers do more stuff that they actually want and use, and less stuff that exposes them to network abuse, lesser browsers will fall by the wayside.
  • As more sites refuse to serve content unless they can set and read back a cookie, the part of the web you'll be able to surf is going to get mighty small soon. It's happening already.

    And it'll get even smaller when content only loads after the successful playback of a 30-second animated commercial, enforced by more cookies and some scripting to render the content itself.

    I give it less than a year.
  • If youre running windows, a nice solution is Popup Killer [xfx.net]

    Works great, combined with AdSubtract

    usual disclaimers, etc. etc...

  • Besides, what mainstream advertisers would want their names associated with South Park, Howard Stern, or The Man Show?

    While I can't speak about the last two, I know there's a fair proportion of people out there who really like South Park. I don't know a single person who likes pop-up ads . . .

    Go you big red fire engine!

  • Yeah, most effective at making me leave that site and never come back.

    [nod] And the bit about "statistics suggesting that Web ads boosted awareness"? Um, there are a lot of companies I've become so "aware of" that I can easily remember never to buy from them. Getting people to remember your brand name isn't so good if they associate your brand name with a feeling of annoyance.

  • You're comparing apples to oranges here...a tv show versus and web advertisement. What you should be comparing are the two ads...people don't like ads, sure, but they don't like commercials either, yet they still watch tv. If people like a site enough, it's not gonna matter if it has annoying ads. After all, how much more annoying can commercials be? they interrupt the entire program, instead of just part of the screen.

  • And the porn industry [avnonline.com] knows about it...
  • Just not the way planned...

    When I see a particularly annoying ad I make certain never to buy that product, ever.
  • Yeah, I did that. It ignored me... I still get the popups (btw why don't they lower the price if you've seen the ad 1 gazillion times and keep ignoring it?).

    It's just like those 'remove' emails in response to junk mail. Just Don't Do It(tm). Your only hope is to make/use a script/filter that kills it.

  • That is just as wierd as this strategy. If the ads get too annoying, I'll disable them. If other people find them too annoying, then Junkbuster, et. al. will be copied all over the place.

    And I don't get used to the ads. I haven't yet and I don't expect to. On sites that I value, I look at them. Occasionally one will be interesting enough to click through on (well, shift-click... I usually don't want to loose the current page). But if they are annoying, I either close them without reading them, or scroll them off the page immediately. That's what I do with all these animated flashies. I have no idea what the ad was at the top of this page, because it hurt my eyes to look at it, so I scrolled it off the page immediately. I'll make a wild guess that it was geekware, or some such, but that's just because they are often at the top of /. pages.

    When the ads get too bad, I stop patronizing a site. If I can't find a different one, I do without. Loosing TV hasn't hurt me much, so I don't expect loosing a site here and there will.

    Ads that I find effective are related to my current interest. If I'm searching a technical site, perhaps I might be interested in an editor. But I'm already using a pretty good one. Still, occasionally I'll find something that seems worth checking out. Off-topic ads tend to be more annoying than anything else, and I usually just skip past them as quickly as feasible.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • This happens whenever one group of humans decides that it is relatively invulnerable to being harmed by another group. Another name for this is power politics. It's the same thing, the same evil, just to a different degree.

    Capitalism doesn't have much to do with it. Any coherent group of humans will act that way. Churches act that way. Political parties act that way. Businesses just aren't any better than anyone else.

    The appropriate tactic is to devise strategies that decrease their power to act and their relative immunity to counter attact. But do remember that while you are doing that, they will be increasing the pressure.

    Notice, the technical community is not immune to this. ICANN has been acting this way. MS has been acting this way. etc. This is done by groups of people in small as well as in large. When a relatively powerless individual does it it's call being an egocentric selfish b-st-rd.


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.

  • Won't complain... (Score:5)

    by sith ( 15384 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:10AM (#74385)
    I'm really not ready to bitch about any kind of web advertising at this point. I'm willing to accept annoying popups if it means that sites won't go out of business. I'd rather be hassled with an annoying flash popup than go without The Register or slashdot.

    That said, if it gets to the point that it is more trouble to get rid of the ad (IE, autorespawning popups or something), I will not hessitate to complain. Just not yet.
  • Yet another reason to use an OS other than windows. Anytime I see a windows element on my screen, I know its fake.
  • bursting enlarging penis? hmm, if you had pitched this ad to new line for another markie mark vehicle, boogie nights, you'd be a rich man. :)

    complex
  • Well of course. The funniest part of this is that things like that are actually considered "effective". Clickthrus == effectiveness. This makes no sense, and I believe CBS's online division is now no longer providing clickthroughs by default to advertisers, instead pushing web ads as branding methods, like TV ads. Funny, everybody was hyping net ads because the "effectiveness" was supposed to be so easy to calculate, unlike TV ads which are vague. Now that so-called effectiveness has jumped back and bit the industry in the ass, so they're saying clickthroughs don't mean anything anymore. Amusing.

    ______________________________

  • Attention, companies and advertising agencies that might be reading this!

    I make a note of companies that have irritating ads, and I will NEVER buy from them!

    For example, those damn X10 popup ads which invariably feature women in suggestive poses... I'll never, ever buy anything from that company. And that's despite the fact that I'm a geek with a house full of electronics, and wireless cameras are right up my alley. Forget it. Ain't gonna happen. Same with any other company that gets on my nerves.

    If I wanted annoying advertising, I would watch TV. And I gave that up completely three years ago.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • I can't help but wonder if advertising works at all. Anyone know of any studies -- not by marketing firms -- that can attest to the effectiveness of ads?

    I, personally, ignore most adveritising and the only effect it usually has on me is negative. I avoid products & services with annoying advertising. My purchasing decisions are never based on an ad. Do people actually buy things because of an ad?

  • They are called "shoshkeles" (i think it's yiddish for "annoying as hell"). You can read all about how great they are from the company that invented them:

    http://www.unitedvirtualities.com/shoshkeles.htm [unitedvirtualities.com]

    These are flash-based ads that superimpose themselves directly over the viewed page and then merge into the page. Its hard to explain, just take a look. They're SO annoying that they will probably piss the "eyeballs" off so much that they will instantly decide to NOT buy the advertised product. Of couse, the copy here makes them sound like consumers can't get enough of them: "The graphic and audio elements create an intimate moment between targeted consumer and advertiser." Barf. Do they actually believe that? When was the last time you shared an "intimate moment" with an advertisement???

    The Showtime example is the best, however. It is offered as an example of "geographically and demographically targeted" advertisement, but the ad is for a Showtime pay-per-view boxing event, and show on top of a WorldBook Encyclopedia entry for Boxing Day, which has nothing to do with the sport. How they managed to let this slip through on a list of hand-picked examples for potential advertisers amazes me.

  • You are calmly surfing around, and suddenly a breathy female voice announces that she has a porn site so hot, that she can't tell anyone about it.


    Anyone buy my wife in the next room, apparently.


    One of the benefits of a deaf wife:)

  • This is just Doubleclick & friends trying to persuade people that web advertising works at all, not how much.

    <img src="HugeAnimatedBanner.gif" width=640 height=480>

    --

  • Hear Hear.. I was noticing that myself a little bit ago. The funny thing about the ads is that i just "upgraded" to IE6 to see what it was like (I know, I know, but it's what i use on my windoze partition). First thing I noticed, as the first place I went to was slashdot, was that the little privacy icon on the statusbar was on. I clicked on it and it showed me that IE6 had blocked some cookies from doubleclick.

    Cool that the default privacy settings in a MS product blocks DoubleClick, not cool that it was Slashdot that showed me this..

    On a side note, bring on the pop-ups. I usually use mozilla, and with the help of the user.js file, don't get pop-ups at all.

  • Sure, I notice the popup adds more. Unfortunately, it has the exact opposite effect the desire. I remember the company...and the fact that I'm never buying any products from them again for the annoyance. X10.com the perfect example. I've bought things from them in the past, but will no longer after having their adds popped up in my way when trying to read an article.
  • JavaScript is not Java (a better name is ECMAScript), so Windows XP will still be able to handle popups out of the box. However, the lack of a VM will probably result in a great many more Flash ads, as Flash support is still included or readily available just about everywhere. With IE 6.0, there might even be one or two ActiveX ads, but the relatively low userbase will keep advertisers away until at least a few years down the road.

    Seeing that Flash is being used to make some TV ads nowadays, it would not at all surprise me to see full-screen interstitial Flash advertisements. By building the link to the article into the Flash movie, you also prevent the user from skipping the movie entirely. (Watch a 30 second commercial, then click "TELL ME MORE ABOUT THIS AMAZING PRODUCT" or "show me article" to continue.)
  • All I see are big gray areas. Course, my squid proxy also caches stuff, so if I do visit a page that my comics-obtaining script has seen before, the non-blocked stuff loads even faster.

    Squid is harder to setup than junkbuster, but also does FTP proxying, and doesn't break certain applications (like OmniWeb on Mac OS X).
  • Actually you could probably do that by *adding* JavaScript through a small proxy app. Instead of moving the window offscreen, though, which can cause some occasional headaches, dump the pages into a 1px x 1px iframe (works in Mozilla and IE5+; not sure on Opera but iframe tag is standards compliant.) Going the iframe route has the added benefit that it spawns 0 windows.

    ----
  • Yup, turning off javascript is a good way to disable this crap too.
  • There was a time when I thought X10 was cool. Now that their ads are so annoying, I'll never buy a product from them.
  • > Impossible! We need a new word, annoying isn't good enough even now...

    May I submit the word "Shoshkele" as the word for "transcendentally annoying, transcending even transcendent annoyance, the kind of annoying that makes you want to hunt down every marketing executive and sodomize them with 20 feet of razor wire wrapped around an aluminum baseball bat":

    Or as the advertisers define it:
    Sample Shoshkeles [unitedvirtualities.com].

    (Amusingly enough, I point out that the most amazing thing about marketroid-speak is that I couldn't figure out what the fuck a shoshkele was, even after reading the "What's a Shoshkele" link on the aforementioned marketroid site.)

    This is all going to end up like the Marketing Department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who defined a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With".

    And the HHGTTG defined the marketing department of SCC as "A load of useless gits who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes".

  • Re:Annoying Banner Ads that get you busted. (Score:4)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:11AM (#74402)
    > The latest thing on the seamy side are banner ads with .WAV files attached.

    Favorite quote:

    "If I want your website to make sound, I'll lick my finger and rub it against my screen. Now fuck off while I delete the damn MIDI .DLL from my Nutscrape install."

  • Re:boycott popup companies (Score:5)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:27AM (#74403)
    > You can kinda-sorta opt out of X10 ads by going here. Although I believe the net effect is that it loads the ad, reads your optout preference from a cookie, then immediately closes the ad window. Plus, you have to re-opt after 30 days. Better than nothing, I guess.

    No, firewalling them, HOSTS-blocking them, or using Junkbuster to filter them out is "better than nothing".

    Opting-out is not a solution, because it relies on the good behavior of your adversary.

    But you can't trust your adversary -- because the reason you want to opt out is because they've demonstrated themselves incapable of abiding by the rules of polite society.

    Which makes more sense:

    1) Get down on your knees and beg "please, known-privacy-invader or annoying-ad-maker, track my movements for 30 days but promise that if you can continue to track me, you won't show me the ad until a month from now, when I'll have to jump through the opt-out hoop again?"

    or

    2) Blackhole them, so that (because you can't send packets to them, and they can't send packets to you) you're immune, no matter what the marketroids decide to do next, you remain unaffected.

    By way of analogy: You leave your door unlocked, and someone walks in, shits on your living room rug, and leaves, with a note saying "Cool shit, huh? I'll leave some more samples next week!"

    Do you lock your door? Or do you leave it unlocked, but tack up a note on the door saying "Thank you for not shitting on my rug today. Please continue to not shit on the rug for 30 days, because I just had it cleaned."

  • wha?
    When did this happen? As of yesterday, when I last checked out the state of the world, yahoo had no such shenanigans. Yahoo news has long been my news source of choice, so I am VERY suprised at your allegations.
  • remember when netscape inventing the <blink> tag was the height of distraction? Heck, even webmonkey (ah! old hotwired of yore) had diatribes against that one tag. And now we have flashy popups that... well, blink.

    The more they change, there's nothing new under the sun.
  • This could have an unfortunate reverse effect. X10 company might decide that you did not see enough of their ads, and try to increase the number of sites that popup their ads.
  • ...at pissing off users and causing more people to switch off Javascript or switch to Mozilla with its per-site popup blocking ability.

  • Mozilla allows this--see the docs [mozilla.org]. You can either globally disable window.open() or disable it on a per-site basis.

  • Which is well and good, until...

    "This page contains information of a type (irritants/really-fucking-huge) that can only be viewed with the appropriate Plug-in. Click OK to download Plugin.

    Popups spawning popups... someone kill me now.

  • Re:Mis-clicking? (Score:3)

    by jesser ( 77961 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:54AM (#74410) Homepage Journal
    if they were really smart/crooked they would make the "close window" button actually a link to their site - "oops, i guess we made a mistake in programming"

    And due to a security flaw in Internet Explorer, you actually can make a window without a real title bar [microbians.com]. The exploit is to open a "full screen" window (which a web page shouldn't be able to do in the first place) and then resize it using additional javascript. I haven't seen any advertisers use this hole, but I have seen them make full-screen windows, so I won't be surprised if I see them create a "chromeless window" and make me read the ad to find the real "close" button.
  • As people get better at ignoring ads, new more invasive ads are going to be more "effective". Of course, the audience will become better trained again, and they'll have to get even more invasive, while driving more and more people to use ad filtering proxies because the ads went too far.

    Nothing new here.
  • Intrusive ads are indeed affective. They force me to remember the suppliers I will never consider when making purchases. I can filter out most ads on the fly. Those that I can't filter must suffer the consequences. As for the psychobabble of reporters on the subject, I like the comment of a movie karate warrior,"If I want your opinion I'll beat it out of you."
  • Here's what's been bothering me lately: large, flash based ads that 'float' above the page you're trying to read. I noticed these on some GameSpy sites and on an IGN site, as well as others I think. Most of them are really jarring, like one for The Planet of the Apes which starts out with an animation of a large crack forming in the middle of the browser window. The other I saw was for Jurrasic Park 3, which featured shadows of dinosaurs sweeping across something I was trying to read. Niether of these, needless to say, enhanced my browsing experience.
  • This is only going to be a short term effect. Banners generally suck. No matter how bad they get, people will start to ignore them. Our perceptual systems are built to handle this kind of crap.

    Aside: It is unfortunate that you always have to watch out for crappy research like you see in this article. How do you know what is good and bad? Ack!

    By the way, I actually like Google's Adwords [google.com] program. Very fast loading pages are still possible, the results are not disrupted, and the sponsored links sometimes match my search. Bravo for usability!

    Resources

    What is banner blindness? [marketingterms.com]

    Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss "Obvious" Links [internettg.org]

    Commentary: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design [internettg.org]

    Usability Perspective on Banner Ads [webword.com]

    Banner Blindness: What Searching Users Notice and Do Not Notice on the World Wide Web [oxy.edu]

  • Mis-clicking? (Score:5)

    by diablovision ( 83618 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:08AM (#74415)
    Does that count the people who frantically aim for the X button and miss, inadvertantly rewarding these bastards for being so annoying?

  • Of course, the Porn Internet is ahead of the pack. The latest thing on the seamy side are banner ads with .WAV files attached.

    MAY PRE HOUSE THE SEAMY SIDE VOLITATION!!! [animejump.com]

    Sorry, I had to :)

    --

  • If you're using that beauty of web-browsing 'Lynx', just hit 'z' to stop loading, then 'BACK' or 'qq' to run away.

    If you have Mozilla or IE on Windows, then 'ALT'+'F4' does the trick. Using 'F11' on a full-screened IE, or 'ALT'+'SPACE','R' will also work wonders. (Replace 'R' with 'C' to Close instead of Restore the window.)

    There is also a settings trick in Mozilla that stops pop-up windows.

  • I'm convinced that advertising people exist only so that lawyers can have someone to despise.

    And that little gem is going right into my list of quotes ;-)


    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • My Tyan Tiger 100 happens to be a gig max (flexing muscles)

    Ummm nice try Mr. Puniverse.
    My 5 year old mac can hold that much as can, I'm sure, many other old computers.
    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • >Advertising people can be such A**holes sometimes.
    What do you mean 'sometimes'? :-)
  • Re-opt after 30 days? This is like all the other opt-out hoops we have to jump through. The recent Slashdot article regarding banks' opt-out policies for financial data sharing [slashdot.org] is a good place to start to better understand how big business and big government are working together to compromise your privacy in the name of "information sharing."

    I called my bank, Bank One, to opt-out of this travesty, and the recording indicated that my request would take 90 days to be fully processed!!! In the blink of an electron, they can charge me $2.50 for teller assistance when I deposit a paycheck, but it takes them ninety days to essentially sit tight on my personal financial data. Unacceptable!!!

    This is not better than nothing. I have written my state and U.S. representatives, Bank One, and the Direct Marketing Association (a major proponent of opt-out over opt-in policies) to voice my complete disgust with this practice.

    As one smart Slashdot poster wrote, "Silence does not imply assent." Do not let this crap go on without voicing your opinion!

  • Then it gets small. My life doesn't revolve around the web so much that I can't ignore sites that waste my time. If all sites wast my time, then I won't need the internet anymore. Simple.
  • It went on to say that ads that pop up between you and the page you're trying to read are the most effective

    Yeah, most effective at making me leave that site and never come back. I usually surf with scripting turned off so popups don't bother me too much, but anyplace that makes it diffucult for me to view the content just isn't worth my time.
  • actually, god compared his own people to sheep. read the bible much?
  • I agree with the sentiment here, but I already find pop-ups pretty annoying. I like banner ads, and I could never figure out why they were held to a higher standard than highway billboards or the sides of busses (try to click through on one of those!) The good news in the article was that even banner ads have some effectiveness, especially at raising the viewers' consciousness about a company or product. Seems obvious to me, but maybe this means that people will start paying for them again.
  • According to the article, all Doubleclick measured was recognition. Admittedly, that's 90% of the battle in advertising, but it doesn't translate into positive response.

    Consider the scenario of buying a car from a dealer whose ads are reasonable, then calling the owner of the dealership who carpet bombs the airwaves with explosions and screaming carnival barkers and telling him that his expensive ads were precisely why you didn't buy from him.

    If I learned to ignore banners, I can learn to ignore bigger ones. I hate playing Whack-A-Mole with popups, but I can usually get them before the image is downloaded--how well can I recognize an image I never see?

  • Annoying Banner Ads that get you busted. (Score:3)

    by Donut ( 128871 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:08AM (#74437)
    Of course, the Porn Internet is ahead of the pack. The latest thing on the seamy side are banner ads with .WAV files attached.

    You are calmly surfing around, and suddenly a breathy female voice announces that she has a porn site so hot, that she can't tell anyone about it.

    Anyone buy my wife in the next room, apparently.

    Donut

  • Who here hasn't had to deal with those annoyingly gigantic Flash ads at Salon or CNET? Anyone been lucky enough to avoid those X10 ads (especially those who substituted 3000 for 30 in the remove URL :))? If you said no to the above, you're lucky.

    As far as the IAB's assertion that "bigger is better," they're wrong. Sure, because of their persistent pop-up ads, people associate X10 with digital cameras. But they're also associating X10 with assholes, annoying assholes at that. People like the IAB seem to forget that there are actually some people who are annoyed by garish Internet ads. Damn, whodve thunk it?

    Banner ads used to be the Next Big Thing(tm) a few years ago, and now they've gone by the wayside. Why? Because people merely pushed them into the background, or they filtered the things out. Now we have pop-ups and annoying Flash ads. While they're not as "quiet" as a banner ad, most filtering software can summarily take care of them. In a few years, will these ads still be the Next Big Thing(tm), or will they go the way of the banner ad?

    --
  • first of all it would be a little bandwidth, for a short perios of time.(relative to most downloads).
    If no one has a revenus stream, you won't have much to download.
  • Banner Ads To Become More Annoying?

    Is this actually possible??

    ---

  • tell them so. (Score:3)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:28AM (#74445) Homepage
    A boycott only works if you tell them you are boycotting because of the ads or practice. Otherwise, they will only think that you have enough gadgets, stuff, or they just plain lost a customer.

  • You can kinda-sorta opt out of X10 ads by going here [x10.com]. Although I believe the net effect is that it loads the ad, reads your optout preference from a cookie, then immediately closes the ad window. Plus, you have to re-opt after 30 days. Better than nothing, I guess.

    --
  • Unfortunately, this won't work because they just won't hear our silence
    (Unless everybody boycott which won't happen)
    So maybe we should use some similar methods to e heard too

    We could write a plugin that catch the popup, but instead of just blocking it and having us being silent, check the link, verify if it is already a known link, then potentially ask user confirmation, parse the linked page looking for some relevant mailto: tags and automagicaly let the link owner hear us.
    Also, a mail would be sent in a central www.whatarepopupsgoodfor.org to gather useful statistics *evil grin*

    Subject: Pop-up ads side effects
    Dear ad-poper ( optional fuck you (customize your plugin !))
    did you know how much you are being ignored thanks to your own abusive methods ?
    It is my great pleasure to let you know that I just ignored you right now. I already ignored you 23 times before, so this time I actively ignored you without even having to follow your link.
    How did I do that ?
    Well, simple, I'm just using one of those new free plugins for MSIE (also exist for netscape, mozilla, etc..) that detect your pitiful attempt to annoy me ruining my browsing experience.
    I am of course a civilized person (do not check this option if you checked the *fuck you* one)
    and I wish to help you reconsider your methods by giving you a real tool to measure effectively how much you are being ignored:
    please have a look at you're there [whatarepopupsgoodfor.org]
    you'll see some nice and informative statistics about how much ou are being actively ignored by many others pissed off users
    What is it to be "actively ignored" ?
    Well, quite simple, everytime a popup window wants me to know more about you, the plugin takes care that I will not know about you at least for 3 weeks, by feeding my proxy with specific orders not to let me go to your site but instead displaying something like this [whatarepopupsgoodfor.org]
    reminding me thus that for now you tried to annoy me 24 times, and it wasn't 3 weeks ago you last tried to
    The proxy will also stop downloading less intrusive ads from your site by blocking any image linking to your site during that same period of time, puting this one [whatarepopupsgoodfor.org] instead.
    If you try to annoy me more than 10 times in a month, my friends list will automaticaly be warned about you; having them ignoring you actively as well, although they didn't have to deal with you as much as their defined treshold yet
    Thank you so much for your attention, and please note that I don't hate you, I won't boycot you, I just won't even know you as long as you try to be too intrusive
    Have a nice day...(optional *fuck you*)
    Regards,
    an ex popup_victim (WAPUGF_ID: #314159265358979)

    of course the mail should be sent anonymously to avoid privacy problems, but still, a unique "Whatarepopupsgoodfor" ID shall be provided, the same used to post statistics on the main site, just so that we do provide an effective mean to measure how much they are being ignored (how many people, how often blabla...)
    also, without privacy concerns, each registered user could optionaly give some hints about himself to te engine, that would be very useful against X10, because they would see that they are the most actively ignored on the web, and, funier, they are most ignored by most otherwise inclined buyers (geek-profile, interest in electronic devices, books, blabla)
  • ..At first maybe the newbie clicks the ad.. It doesn't take long though before the ads just annoy and the automatic reaction is to kill the popups and/or install adblocking proxies without reading the sales pitch.

    I think part of the problem is that too many ads limit the effectiveness. That is to say we are inundated with advertising, and even if there is a good offer or interesting deal in there, I assume its a stupid rip-off deal and skip it.
    bleagh

  • There are very nice debs of the waldherr version of JunkBuster here (http://www.spinnaker.de/debian/unoff/junkbuster.h tml) These along with the config file from Waldherr does wonders.

  • it'll always change... (Score:3)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:10AM (#74456) Homepage Journal
    Ads are only successful when they are annoying/intrusive. Its the like basic rule of marketing. When everyone does the same thing, it isn't annoying anymore and the marketeers have to switch.

    For people browsing the web, its now simple to just ignore the top inch of a webpage, because its an ad. Pop-up's are the new annoyances. Give it a year, and people will be adept at ignorning them, and they'll have to find something more intrusive (maybe putting the add right in the middle of the sentence you are reading?). The point is, marketing evolves with humans. They'll always be annoying. Might as well get used to being annoyed (whatever happened to my right of happiness??).

    --
  • Anyone buy my wife in the next room,

    Post a picture and a price, please. ;-)

    --
  • Studies found that ads which take over your entire screen, play obnoxiously loud sounds, and force you to click on them to get access to the website to where you were going, have been found to be 100% more effective in getting traffic!

    Actually, I find that with some ads, I am waiting for them to load their java and other crud, and while I go to click on a link, since the ad did not specify its size, when I click, suddenly there's the ad in its place, moving the link down the page. Oops. Count that as another click-through.

    Dragon Magic [dragonmagic.net]

  • Re:it'll always change... (Score:3)

    by YKnot ( 181580 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:07AM (#74461)
    Ads are only successful when they are annoying/intrusive. Its the *This comment brought to you by Zig Zag corporation* like basic rule of marketing. When everyone does the same thing, it isn't annoying anymore and the marketeers have to switch.

    For people browsing the web, its now simple to *Got Milk?* just ignore the top inch of a webpage, because its an ad. Pop-up's are the new *New and improved! Try our messageboards. Slashdot loves you.* annoyances. Give it a year, and people will be adept at ignorning them, and they'll have to find something more intrusive (maybe putting the add right in the middle of the sentence you are reading?). The point is, *Copy kills music. Support the artists. Sincerely, RIAA* marketing evolves with humans. They'll always be annoying. Might as well get used to being annoyed *W*(*A*w*T*h*C*a*H*t* *e*O*v*U*e*T*r*:* * *h*S*a*U*p*B*p*L*e*I*n*M*e*I*d*N* *N*t*A*o*L* *S*m*!*y right of happiness??).
  • What mainstream advertiser would want their name assosciated with a site like Something Awful?

    nVidia, for one.

    Besides, what mainstream advertisers would want their names associated with South Park, Howard Stern, or The Man Show?

  • I don't know why, but I've seen this ad maybe 200 times in the past 3 months, it seems to come from nowhere, just a new window open in a background with this ad for a tiny camera that can be used for spying. I have no idea where it comes from, it does not matter which website I go to, I always get it. Anybody experienced this?
  • the larger 'larger penis' ads are more effective than the small 'larger penis' ads... hurm...

  • Ads are only successful when they are annoying/intrusive.

    Under what authority do you make this assertion? You are 100% wrong. Where is that guy with the "everything you know is wrong (and stupid)" sig when you need him?

    Obnoxiousness is not the best way to catch the eye, it is simply the cheapest. Doing anything else requires creativity, and therefore manpower, and therefore $$$. I posted an example of good (read: award winning) advertising here [slashdot.org]. If you read the linked article, take the marketdroid speak with a grain of salt, but otherwise it is a good representation of the work.

    Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
  • Anyone else avoid anything on Geocities because you can't read the upper right corner of the article for a long time? I don't waste my time when looking for information waiting for the light to turn green. I take the first detour past the slow lights.

  • Re:possible bias in studies (Score:3)

    by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:07AM (#74474)
    To be fair, who else would conduct the research? I know it has become the norm to jump on the evil bias of large corporations but perhaps it's worth stopping for a moment to think about it.

    If you're totally unrelated to the field, why would you bother to pay to conduct the research? Certainly, the Irish Llama Farming Federation may be completely unbiased but they also have absolutely no reason to pay for it.

    Universities generally get flagged as being biased because they get paid by the large companies to conduct the research. Unfortunately, that's the business model of universities - perform research for cash or perform research to gain reputation so the next load of research will get cash. Much as it is nice to believe universities simply do research because it's for the good of mankind, the vast majority of it has to be paid for.

    So, that leaves companies involved in the industry either doing the research themselves or paying others to as they're the only ones with enough of an interest to pay for it. What it all comes down to is there's no source that finds the research worth paying for that doesn't have some kind of a vested interest.

    But does that really imply a bias? Why did DoubleClick and MSN conduct the research? The alleged bias is that they want to sell annoying adverts. Unfortunately, that's missing the point. They want to sell [stuff] with advertising. If the most efficient means turns out to be paying Cowboy Neal to come and rub your back while whispering soothing messages - they want to know that so they can do it. This research was done to find out what pays them best - annoying ads - then they released that information because it gets people talking about them (more advertising).

    There is plenty of bias in the world, certainly. A large part of it sits right here, moderating OhMyGodItsBias claims up to fives (must remember that for Karma Whoring). It's worth stopping and thinking though - in many cases big companies just do stuff because they want to find out an answer and make money from it, not because they want their existing answers confirmed and somehow justified.

  • That's a small price to pay for free content. I gladly look at larger banner ads when I read The New York Times for free!
  • They won't for one good reason. The advertising is finally realizing that you can't peg web ads to clickthrough performance, when the rest of the advertising industry has nothing comparable. Already, sites such CBS Marketwatch and other large sites are refusing to sell advertising space based on clickthroughs. [iwks.com] When this stupid trend of only being paid for clickthroughs is over, websites won't be nearly as desperate for you to click. We'll see more ads that are just geared towards general brand recognition, and not an instant action.

  • I wonder if the no-java XP IE will kill off autospawning ads. I always control them by leaving javascript off as an option, I would hate to lose control over them.

    I doubt it. Javascript != java. And, I don't know if you have a hotmail account but they just went to large annoying popup ads, so they would start losing more money if they dropped javascript...

    Sig: Warning The following may be illegal under the DMCA (rot-13 decoder):
    ABCDEFGH I J KLM

  • The down side is that sites that count on ad revenue for their funding are going to code only for Internet Explorer, making Mozilla more and more irrelevant.

  • I wonder... (Score:4)

    by TheLinuxWarrior ( 240496 ) <aaron.carr@nospam.aaroncarr.com> on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:08AM (#74486)
    If anyone thought about the fact that this 40% increase is due to accidentally clicking the popup when attempting to click the site the user visited instead. Advertising people can be such A**holes sometimes.
  • As more sites refuse to serve content unless they can set and read back a cookie, the part of the web you'll be able to surf is going to get mighty small soon. It's happening already.

    When I want to access that kind of site today, I momentarily un-block the cookies with AdSubtract, let the page load and immediatley delete the cookies and other crap.

    And it'll get even smaller when content only loads after the successful playback of a 30-second animated commercial, enforced by more cookies and some scripting to render the content itself.

    Good riddance. I don't mind paying good hard money for what I want or need. Napster is a perfect example. I love older comedy and "Dr. Demento style" music--much of which is not commercially available. The Napaster we all grew to love gave me what I wanted, WHEN I wanted it. I'd have easily paid $20 or even $50 a month for that flexibility and content. Now their model gives me nothing that I want so guess what? I ain't buyin'.

    I would gladly pay for Slashdot, Fuckedcompany.com, The Register and a few other indespensible sites. Anything else? If I want it I'll pay for it. I won't suffer through ads for it, I'll tell you that!
  • Well, how long before they figure out that they don't need content at all? Seems like 100% banner ads would be really, really, effective.
  • I was looking for info on Stars! Supernova (9/3/2001 BTW) when my browser seemed to jitter a little, then an ape in a transparet pop up for Planet of The Apes 'broke' through the page. It was actually a nice little effect. If I'm not inclined to see Markie Mark impersonate Charlton Heston as interprated by Tim Burton, I don't see how pestering me will increase those odds. Although if it was an enlarging penis that 'burst' through the page I probably would have bust out laughing. I bet Jurassic Park III probably has them too.
  • I considered that, but remember this story [slashdot.org]? Some fuss was raised about the web-bug on this site, though I think it was just a hitcounter. A few days later, it was removed. The bug was from the OSDN site, and the Doubleclick banners are hosted on a doubleclick ad-server in an OSDN subdirectory. I don't know much of anything about OSDN, except that the reputation that surrounds the open source community should put them above giving support to a company like Doubleclick. My thought was, if Slashdot had a role in getting the web-bug removed, how much of a leap could it be to get Doubleclick ads removed?

  • Re:possible bias in studies (Score:4)

    by Sarcasmooo! ( 267601 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:17AM (#74506)
    This seems like a good thread to ask if anyone else has noticed the Doubleclick ads on Slashdot. I've asked before and even tried an "ask slashdot" submission to no avail. It just find it very annoying that I have to block ads from a doubleclick server on my way to read stories like these [slashdot.org]. Out of all the sites that have banner ads, I would think that Slashdot would be one of the first to refuse to support Doubleclick's idea of ethical business practices.

  • possible bias in studies (Score:5)

    by regexp ( 302904 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:21AM (#74508)
    Look who conducted the "studies" (4th paragraph)--the Interactive Advertising Bureau (a Web advertising industry trade group), DoubleClick, and MSN. These organizations have a vested interest in selling this type of advertising to advertisers. Shame on the Washington Post for not reporting this "research" more skeptically.
  • Ads of the form of:

    IF YOU DON'T WANT POP-UPS, GO TO WWW.SAFEWEB.COM [safeweb.com], CLICK ON "Configure", CHECK "Block Pop-Up Windows", AND CLICK ON "Set Permanent Options".

    Added bonus: every connection is SSL between you and Safeweb (not so between Safeweb and the server you're trying to reach, but your netadmin can't sniff that).

    I also recommend "Disable Java Applets", "Disable Plugins", and "Filter Profiling Cookies".

    Then you get an extra banner ad with Safeweb's customers in it, but the ESC key still stops animated GIFs, and that's all they accept (so far).

    Only gotcha: it's a little slower than connecting directly, and every hour or so the proxy server slashdots itself, but it always comes back. Oh, and sometimes they rejigger your authentication to further shroud your identity, so you lose your login to slashdot; annoying as hell when you're posting a message it took you ten minutes to write, but a necessary evil.

    --Blair
  • All I see is conspicuous blank areas on the page. Get the modified version [waldherr.org] of Internet Junkbuster [junkbuster.com] for free.
  • Want to know why these ads "come from nowhere"? Well, search your house right now! Becuase they are spying on you! With thier little X10 camera! :)

  • In other news... (Score:3)

    by PYves ( 449297 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @09:16AM (#74518)
    A study shows that the bigger something is, the harder it is to miss it!

    They proved this by hiding a needle in a haystack and comparing the chances you would find it and comparing the numbers with the numbers from trying to find cowboyneal in a similar haystack.

    -PYves
  • I'm willing to accept annoying popups if it means that sites won't go out of business.

    You should listen to yourself.

    It's like the shortsighted people who, to this day, say, "Make sure to click on your favorite websites' banners to help them out!" when in reality all you're doing is diluting the value of an eyeball/click-through, which doesn't help anyone in the "food-chain."

    So, in other words, what you're saying is, "I'm willing to accept being increasingly annoyed by popups [and other advertising], if it means that my favorite sites' get paid imaginary-money for it! Nevermind that the annoyance factor results in my resentment of the product or service being mentally engineered upon my consumer-brain."

    Since I seek out what I want to buy, and I make it point to avoid "evil" advertiser influence, it's my point of view that by opting-out, I'm actually SAVING the advertiser from wasting money, and SAVING myself aggrevation.

    I don't need a sheepherder to tell me what to buy (*cough*or what God to believe in*cough*), so I'll continue to let the sheeple subsidize my 'net with their influenced purchases. There's WAY more than enough sheep to go around; I'm not worried.

  • Re:possible bias in studies (Score:3)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @08:51AM (#74536) Homepage Journal
    Look at what the Washington Post says about the studies: "...the research by three admittedly self-interested Internet publishing groups..." (3rd paragraph.) Shame on you for not reading the article more thoroughly.

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