In a recent post on O'Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington claims that the new, increasingly popular fake pop-up ads are about to become a plague as bad as Javascript pop-up windows were in their worst days. I agree that they are getting more and more widespread and annoying – but are they really that intrusive?

We are talking about those (Javascript-generated) additional (often semi-transparent) divs that “float” on top of a newly opened web page. (I put “float” in quotation marks because I believe, speaking in CSS terms, they are not actual floats.) You usually have to click them away to view the web page you came to visit in the first place.

However, are they really “the new pop-up windows”?

Remember how annoying those pop-up windows really were?

I think there are some differences that make them far less intrusive and, more importantly, will hinder their wide-spread adoption.

• Javascript pop-up windows left a trace in your working environment: Even after leaving the page that had triggered them, you still had those few additional browser windows open – and those were the days before tabbed-browsing became popular, so it was already difficult enough to stay on top of your zillions of open browser windows
• Psychologically, from a site owner's perspective, a pop-up window is not as closely associated with your page as an ad that occupies your own real estate, so to speak.
• More importantly, back in the olden days, it was far from obvious, especially to the not so tech-savvy, which page had actually triggered the pop-up window.
  • They often did not display immediately when a page loaded, but they were timed so as to appear a little bit later making it difficult for the user to link them directly to her own actions.
  • It is quite recent that (as an anti-phishing measure) browsers such as Firefox and Opera started displaying the URL of the triggering site in the pop-up window's title bar.
• For these reasons, it was also much harder for users to penalize pop-up-happy sites.

In-page pop-ups are easier to avoid and penalize

Recently, I was looking for a solution to some technical problem and found a forum thread that might have been helpful. However, it also had one of these fake pop-ups – and it

• broader than my screen (I like using the sidebar)
• constantly re-centred itself in the middle of the screen
• had its closing button in the upper right corner.

Got it? To click it away, I'd have had to

1. maximize my browser window
2. close the sidebar and
3. click the closing button.

Do you think I really bothered going to that much of a hassle on the off-chance of finding some potentially useful information on a forum thread? Do you really believe next time I find a link to their site on Google I will click it?

Moreover, imagine it would have been an old-style pop-up: even if I had managed to recognize which site had triggered it, I would have had to

1. leave that page
2. close the pop-up window
3. close the other pop-up window that was triggered by closing the first pop-up window
4. Find out Windows 98 has crashed in the process
5. re-start my computer.

With this in-page advertisement, all I had to do was to

1. click the my browser's back button
2. and done!

Also, let us not forget what I said earlier: To my user subconsciousness, this was not just “some random pop-up window that came out of nowhere because they are all over the Internet nowadays or I may have picked up a virus or something” as it would have been in the old days, but it was a clearly linked to one particular site that had undertaken overtly to annoy me.

In-page ads tarnish the site owner's brand

Each web site is a brand in a way. The average user will look at an intrusive in-page ad and instinctively associate it with the website he came to visit. In many cases, in terms of marketing, the damage done to the site's brand will not outweigh the financial gain.

Hey, this is Web 2.0

Notice? We're already blogging about it. Imagine what happens if a major content provider makes excessive use of intrusive divs – will it really be worth all the negative buzz? I doubt it. Luckily, user emancipation has made the Internet a different place than it was five years ago.

There is no convincing technical solution

I don't believe that browsers could come up with a convincing mechanism to block these ads. After all, preventing pop-up windows from opening without explicit user action is one thing. Preventing a site from generating an advertisement in the form of an additional div that might just as well be an alert from my brand-new shiny Web 2.0 application is another thing and might do more damage than good. (And it would also be very easy to circumvent, at least for people who don't care about users that have Javascript turned off.)

I believe it's more efficient to combat them psychologically by consciously exposing and penalizing sites that over-use them.

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Categories: Web Development and Programming

Keywords/tags: advertisements ads css javascript marketing webdesign

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