|
A small window that appears in front of
a web page when it loads or closes, usually in the hope of selling something
to the Page's viewer. Pop-ups and their relatives are still popular ways of
forcing website visitors to look at advertising or subscribe
to services they do not want, despite the fact that almost all web surfers
find them highly intrusive. Online marketers say that this is exactly the
point. A variant of the pop-up known as the pop-under lessens the irritation
somewhat by appearing behind the page being viewed, and is thus only seen
when a web browser window is closed.
Some advertising
agencies have reported that well over one-third of their revenue still comes
from pop-ups, which they say are twice as effective as the less annoying
banner ads that can be more easily ignored. Effective or not , they are
still unpopular: 78% of respondents to a January 2003 survey by GartnerG2, a
research company, described pop-ups as "very annoying". According to Nielsen
NetRatings, over 5 billion pop-up ads were served in the second quarter of
2002, prompting hundreds of thousands of users to download software
generically known as pop-up killers, which is widely available and often
free. Some isps now distribute pop-up killers to their subscribers in
a attempt to appease them, and perhaps even prevent them from defecting to
other bandwidth suppliers; and some browsers, such as opera
and mozilla, allow users to block pop-ups. In 2002, aol
announced that it was removing pop-up advertising from its sites altogether,
replacing them with more lucrative and effective alternatives based on
rich media formats. |
