Posted on 11/14/2003 9:07:50 PM PST by JoJo Gunn
Microsoft confirmed it intends to add pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer as part of its Service Pack 2 release, due the first half of 2004. Meanwhile, agencies, advertisers and publishers suggest they'll be ready to kiss the ad units goodbye -- when the time comes.
An important question that remains unanswered is whether IE pop-up blocking will be turned on by default. Microsoft said only that it plans to include the feature, and will gather user feedback before announcing further details.
"If they turn it on by default, that would effectively kill pop-up advertising on the Web," said Nate Elliott, an associate analyst with Jupiter Research, which shares a parent company with this site.
On the other hand, if blocking the ads is not the default setting, pop-ups will probably continue to be served. "Consumers already have plenty of access to pop-up blockers," Elliott said. "Nearly half of people online at home have free access through their ISPs," but only a small percentage are using them.
Pop-ups' share of the online media pie is more than double what it was a year ago. Nielsen//NetRatings found they accounted for 7.4 percent of all online ad impressions in Q3 2003, up from 3.0 percent for the same period last year.
Despite increased use, publishers and advertisers say they're unconcerned about the prospect of an end to pop-ups.
Jason Krebs, VP of ad sales for New York Times Digital (NYTD), said his company and the majority of online publishers would not be affected.
"I think this will continue to stimulate creative minds in the ad community to find quality ways to reach an audience and communicate with them," he said. "You can't stop technology and innovation, so you continue to adapt."
Krebs claims NYTD serves very few pop-ups compared to other content, and suggested good could come of their demise in that the company's ad offerings might be seen as "less of a commodity."
"The half-page ads were an attempt to get people to embrace quality," he said.
Rich LeFurgy, head of new media consultancy Archer, and co-chair of the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) pop-up taskforce, concurs. "Rich media and search are the drivers of where we're going in the future."
LeFurgy, charged by the IAB with preparing publisher guidelines governing pop-up use, said he doesn't anticipate the end of pop-ups would have an impact on publishers' bottom lines.
"I don't think it's going to matter," he said. "Pop-ups are a part of the mix right now, but if they were to go away, I don't think it would impact the revenue outlook."
Jeff Lanctot, VP of Media for Avenue A, observes many publishers he has spoken with are singing the same tune.
"Pop-ups have been a good source of revenue for [publishers]," Lanctot said. "But most publishers I talk to feel pretty confident about the rest of the inventory they've got now. They're experiencing growth in high impact brand units and other on-page advertisements, and their need for pop-ups will diminish in 2004 and beyond."
Speaking from his agency's standpoint, Lanctot said there's even less cause for concern.
"A pretty small percentage of our media billings go to pop-ups. Over the past two years, it's been well under 10 percent," he claims. "If they went away tomorrow, we wouldn't miss a beat."
Other agencies and advertisers are similarly unruffled by Microsoft's announcement.
"I don't see it as a bad thing at all," said Sarah Faye, president of Carat Interactive. "A very low percentage of what we do are pop-ups... maybe five percent. We're highly sensitive to the fact that they're not a good user experience."
Among the most prolific marketers using pop-ups is Orbitz. The company declined to comment on the implications of the Service Pack update on its advertising strategy. Marketing Director Geoff Silvers said, "Our strategy has always been to evaluate things on a daily basis, and optimize based on what's performing and what isn't, and we'll continue to do that."
Silvers noted the industry, "continues to evolve, and it may be that a new technology will appear," as a replacement to pop-ups, were they to disappear.
Ever heard of probs with firebird and windows XP?
There are plenty of programs out there that block ALL ads, not merely popups. (Well, they're 90-95% effective.) I have it set to block all Drudge ads until he stops the popunders. He can put fifteen ads on his actual page for all I care, but until he stops running ads that take longer to load and render than the entire content of his actual page, I'm blocking them all.
Unfortunately, your outlook on these sorts of ads (which I agree with) only hurts the advertisers if every single other living human hates them as much as you do. The problem is they don't. These sorts of ads cost next to nothing to serve up, so even the tiniest response makes it worthwhile for the company.
This is why the amount of spam just keeps on growing even though 99.99% of the people getting it are enraged by it. The cost is almost literally ZERO to send; anyone with a broadband connection can become a spammer. (And if you want to be ultra sleazy, you can just use one of those five zillion AOL disks you get every month, sign up for the "45 day free trial" using a fake name and address, send your spam and then never access the account again. Then your cost is truly literally zero.)
Generally, a *cough* "legit" spammer will only charge you about $100 or so to shoot out your ad to several million different email addresses. At that price, you make a profit if only four or five people actually respond and buy your junk. (And out of several million people, you will always be able to find four or five who dumb enough to fall for your pitch.) If your spam goes to 3,000,000 people, five hits is a 0.000166% response rate. There's no other form of advertising on earth that can reach so many people for so little cost and guarantee you a profit on so few responses.
This is why spam is destined to get worse than it already is, much MUCH worse, to the point where it will start having a serious effect on the ability of legitimate internet traffic of all sorts - email, web pages, audio streams, everything - to get through ... because you'll never be able to eliminate from the gene pool that 0.000166% of the population that makes spam worth it for sleazy companies. Spam already makes up anywhere from 60-70% of all email; the estimates I've seen say it'll probably grow big enough to start causing serious slowdowns all over the net by next summer.
They suggested getting Hijackthis
Downloaded and ran it, it gives a list,after scanning your system, of suspicious executables and registry hacks which affect IE's toolbar,homepage, etc. and you can check off the suspicious entries to delete them. The trick is knowing which entry to delete. After trying a few entries I found these three files in my Windows folder:
1. DNSErr.dll
2. iedll.exe
3. loader.exe
After getting rid of these, I set my start up page back to Yahoo, got rid of the unwanted favorites it kept placing in my bookmarks, and ran spybot. I rebooted my system and restarted IE and lo-and behold, it worked!
IE is now clean. I just wanted to thank MS and the spammer/hijackers for making such a wonderful experience possible. It's the last time they'll get away with screwing up my browser since Mozilla Firebird will be my browser of choice from now on.
I'm still not exactly sure why these hijack writers aren't treated as hackers and hauled off to jail. This insidious scumware behaved just like a virus on my system. The only difference is these hackers have found a vaguely legal way to make money.
I'm frankly surprised that somebody hasn't snapped and tracked down and murdered a spammer. When you offend millions of people day after day, a few of them are going to be six sigmas below the mean in self-control....
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