From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Ream Melony

From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Saturday, April 03, 2004

Small victory to me, small loss to advertisers

A jokes site of a certain age sends out a newsletter every few days, with links back to jokes on web pages. The pages I get sent to have banners and ads all over them, and to a degree, I'm down with that. They have to keep the site going after all.
But those pages also launch poo pounder ads. You know the ones, they pop up, put themselves behind the page that called them, and bring that page back to the focus.
And no matter what justification a site tries to give for using them, I can't quite agree with any rationalisation of these stupid wastes of time space and bandwidth.
One. I multisurf, that is, I have about ten to twenty pages open at a time. Adding another five or ten popunder buttons to my taskbar is just plain clutter. Two, I'm reading an interesting article on a famous geek news site and wham! - up pops this stupid joke page, meaning I now have to minimise it and the popunder to resume my reading. I begin to associate the nasty website with pain, in a Pavlovian sort of way, and stop surfing there. No kidding, I've stopped reading some major science and news websites because of their policy. I'm not even tempted to click a link with their URLs in it.
Why? Well, that's the third and fourth reasons. Three, I'm on a very noisy modem dialup, and each page I open is a marathon already. Now add 5K of useless javascript in the web page to open the popunder, 20K for the popunder itself, and another 5k of useless javascript in the popunder and you can see how that sort of behaviour gets really really wearing after your first hour spent trying to load and read fifteen pages...
And four, there's a technique for dealing with popunders, which ensures I never even need to catch a glimpse of it - so the advertiser has wasted my time, my bandwidth, their money, and some web coder's work - all just for me to close their window without even glimpsing it...
Yes there are popup stoppers but why should I have to install one of those when the simpler alternative is just not to bother to go to the offending website? And yes the site can justify itself by saying that they need the revenue but why don't they just do the honest thing and tell the would-be advertiser that popunders stink on ice, people hate them, it costs the website a lot of traffic, and no-one retains much memory of them anyway?
People who sagely point to the number of popunders and say "well they must work otherwise Acme and BrandX wouldn't be using them" are missing the point, which is that they aren't working. Just as people point to the volume of spam and say "it must work," they're dreaming.
Spam works for about a hundred extremely hardworking spammers in the whole world. Out of some ten million people, less than a hundred are able to make spam work for them... And for the thousands of other would-be spammers, it's fines and prison terms and a lot of buying beans instead of beef... Popunders are in the same category, a lot of advertisers are paying a lot of website owners a lot of money for a negative return...
Isn't it time they stopped being so stupid? I can think of one roaring winning concept right now. "Catalogs.com" would be a site where companies could put popunders popovers popups and exit traps and entry traps and - somewhere among all the smart-arse technowhizzery, nestled in amongst the stupid banners and vertical banners and expanding divisions - they could actually put the same content, but on a flat website, where people could search and find what they wanted. Call it "we_are_GOOD_advertisers.com" if you prefer, whatever.
Put banner ads on other websites pointing to your product range, by all means. You do need to target a particular demographic after all, you just don't need to stalk them, hunt them down, and beat them to death with heavy handed advertising.
Until advertisers learn, I'll settle for the minor victory of closing their products and boycotting sites which deal with them...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

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