Tue. Jul 31, 2001
War on Popup Ads
War on Popup Ads – If there were a Book of Revelations describing the End of the Internet As We Know It, one of the Seven Signs would surely be the appearance of popup ads at Yahoo. Well, the End is Near: X10 pop-under ads at Yahoo. I’ve whined about this before, and then whined some more. I’ve solved the problem on my personal machine via software, but I intend to take Charles’ advice, and I hope you will too:
”I’m going to send a very strongly worded letter to Yahoo today. Maybe several letters. If you’re concerned about the spread of obnoxious marketing techniques derived from the porn industry, I urge you to do the same. Business owners everywhere are going to be watching Yahoo’s experiment. If they perceive it to be successful, the whole internet will soon be infested with these tools of Satanand they won’t stop there.”
Indeed. It’s time to send a message. Or three.
Published 05:17PM, Tue, Jul 31 2001
Category: Internet
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Peanut Gallery
Sigh. It may be getting to the point where we'll be grateful for ads as unobtrusive as the X10s. Take a look at what's currently running on Blue's News (yeah, so I love action games) - a Flash (evil enough in itself) ad about 1/3rd the size of the screen that *sits on top of the content*. I'll take a dozen X10 windows over that monstrosity.
Wow. The first time I went to that page, my popupstopper blocked the ad. But I refreshed holding down the CTRL key, and boom, 2/3 of my 800x600 screen was covered with that Flash ad. That's incredibly obtrusive, as they don't even give you basic window controls to close the ad ... you have to wait until it's done playing. I would assume gamers have flooded that site with complaints. I can't imagine any audience that would be very tolerant of that.
I think intrusive ads will die a slow death as sites realize that they're driving away their traffic. Pop-under ads may last longer, though, as well as those truly evil ones that pop up only as you LEAVE a site. A lot of people blame the next site!
Well, it's been two years, and the cretins are still doing it. The Internet Movie Database just started using those horrible Flash popups--with sound, yet! And AdShield won't stop them. I'm thinking of uninstalling Flash. It really isn't useful enough to justify putting up with this garbage.
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The best windows filter is definitely Proxomitron -- available from proxomitron.cjb.net. I've been using it for over a year and the pop-ups/pop-under stuff has just passed me by. I don't know how people can surf the net without a filter these days...