At stake is the future of a form of online advertising that many ad executives say is among the highest performers for Internet marketers -- despite severe negative reactions from a majority of Web users.
Research shows the ads have only become more predominant since the rise of pop-up guards. In the last two years, the number of pop-ups and pop-unders delivered to Web users has more than tripled. (Pop-ups appear over a Web page, while pop-unders appear behind one, but otherwise they function the same way.) They made up 6.4 percent of all online ads in April of this year, compared with 1.8 percent in the same period of 2002, according to data from researcher Nielsen NetRatings.
Publishers willingly allow pop-ups or pop-unders because they command higher prices, and they're in high demand by advertisers. Ad executives say they can cost advertisers about $10 per thousand sent for top-rated sites. That compares with between $2 and $3 per thousand for a static banner ad that appears on the same popular site.
The Web sites that sold or disseminated the most pop-up ads in the month of April include CNN.com, ESPN.com, Excite.com, Weather.com, and The New York Times.
Click rates, or the number of times people click on an ad, could explain the growth of pop-up ads. Marketers say between 2 percent and 5 percent of the people who receive them will respond with a click. That compares with less than 0.35 percent for the most widely used ad on the Net today, static banners, according to an ad server report from DoubleClick.
"Pop-unders still yield the best performance," said John Enghauser, business development manager for TrafficMarketplace, an ad network and one of the biggest distributors of pop-ups. He said that his company does not do any workarounds to deliver the ads.
Blocking software typically suppresses a new window. It detects a command known as "openwin" for opening a new window, which would be written into the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) of a Web page. That command calls on a third-party server to deliver the pop-up or pop-under.
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Talkback
If you have a lot of pop-ups, try this cure: Mozilla's Firefox.
7 Jun 04 13:19 ReplyVote with your money, if a company uses pop-up/under ads, don't buy from them.
7 Jun 04 16:38 ReplyIt just depends on how bad you want them to go away.
Agree with the above post. Use Mozilla Firefox.
27 Jun 04 16:57 Reply