Popups are crap. And sites the have them are loser sights. If your favorite sites have lotsa popups.... well, they don't deserve to stay in business... and it makes the rest of us wonder about you. heh heh.
The NEW SHAKEDOWN that is coming regarding the emerging internet structure is going to drive a lot of the pseudo legit web sites OUT of business... Good riddance. And the legitimate ones that are hanging on to the geo cities/America Off Line type of popup "free web accounts" are going to dump their loser status or get out of the business.
Lots of folks do not realize that AOL is not really the internet... as much as a proxy internet... AOL censors and restricts your content by default. And geo cities is not a REAL website host in the purest sense, unless you pay to get rid of their popups. Just lots of stupid "personal" web pages, created by pre teens, and scoured regularly for ignorant "fish" by identity theives and cops, just like fishermen at the not-so-"secret" fishin' hole, during salmon season...
We need to do what we can to get all freepers liberated from the non-internet, pseudo internet money sucking vacuum cleaners.... all of em.
Co-location with a mirror and fixed dns in your own office that supports private networking and high privacy level technologies... now THAT is a real website. Anything less is becoming "web lite" as in; compuserve, aol, or prodigy internet service (arghhhh!) providers.