Changing The Debate On Pop Up Ads

from the it's-not-about-the-frequency dept

A bit of a rant from Robert Loch concerning a bunch of recent articles saying that pop-up ads aren't so bad, they just need to decrease in frequency. It seems that the advertising industry is trying "change the debate" on pop ups. Instead of responding to people who find them annoying, they're trying to say "oh, they're not so bad, it's just that there are too many." Robert's right in his basic point. Pop ups are flat out bad. They hijack the user's computer, and they make for a bad surfing experience (they also have a habit of crashing my browser at least once a day). Robert's argument is that they don't fit in with the "flow" of surfing. I'd take the argument even further. Advertising that pisses off people who see it is not effective advertising. It's stupid, uncreative, wasteful advertising. If a company thinks the only way to get their message to me is to interrupt my surfing plans, then I don't think they deserve my business.
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  • identicon
    Steve Snyder, 13 Sep 2002 @ 4:23pm

    Should be irrelavent

    Browsers will (and are) adding in the option to disable pop-ups. Opera for one gives you the choice to push pop-ups to the back or disable them completely. I don't know if MS will follow suit but I'd bet Mozilla will if they haven't already. And IE doesn't all the better. I say more pop-ups the better. People will get more and more mad at them and switch to another browser. So I think the issue is quickly becoming moot.
    steve snyder

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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