Annoying Customers For Money

from the stupid-business-practices dept

News.com is running a feature about the latest company from former "spam king" Sanford Wallace. The main point of their article is that he's using exit transfers (popping up a new window when you close your current browser) to increase traffic to his other sites. This sort of thing has been popular among porn sites for a while, but now might be catching on with other types of sites as well. Already, a number of well known sites will at least pop up an ad window on exit. My problem with every one of these is that they are annoying to the user and generally a nuisance. I have trouble with any business model that relies on pissing off your customers in order to make money. It just suggests you really don't have something of value to offer them.
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  • identicon
    Ed, 5 Feb 2001 @ 12:15pm

    Let Him Try

    Fortunately, there are programs like webwasher that filter popup windows. Unlike spam, he needs the cooperation of the web browsing client to request his ads, and that gives the good guys (us) a chance to intervene and maintain control, and there's not a damn thing he can do about it. Let spamford try this all he wants -- all he'll manage to do is decrease the validity of impression counters and make software filters more prevalent, both of which will serve us in the long run.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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