Forum Moderators: skibum
As an advertisement media they are cheap, annoying but effective enough that most popular magazines use them.
Pop-unders have the same characteristics so I am afraid they will just be a fact of life that we will learn to live with.
Is anyone using them? Are they good revenue earners? Has site usage slumped since you began using them?
Has anyone found a method to only serve them them to 'drive-bys' or 'bounce-offs'? Those are the people that only get to you first page and leave before going deeper into your site.
Have you seen some of this stuff? Ads that come flying in blocking your view of the page.
A competitor ran some about two months ago. That week our page views were up an easy 20% ;-)
Done well they can be amusing but some of them are annoying. They seem to be doing well so I expect we'll see more of them.
In my mind, they ARE. They are imprinting negative feelings due to intrusive advertising.
I've seen those darn "take-overs" on some very prestigious sites. What ARE they thinking?.. Grasping at straws, methinks.
Taking a chance on ANY gimmick. "Punch the monkey" on Steroids. I think some of the clickthru is folks trying to close the window, and misclicking.
How long before someone writes a script that send you to the site when you click the X or control w to close the window? This is not the way to high conversion rates.....
I watched a client do that last week, he wasn't very happy with the whole experience, he said "they are tricking me".
Here the idea is that the more flesh put before a person eyes the more likely they are to click on something.
They invented the 'circle-jerk' where each popup begets the next one sometimes ten or 12 deep or even endlessly, by having the last one pop-up the first one.
Most sites that employ this technique are run by amateurs enamoured with purveying porn. They are the 'suckers' who think they can get rich.
Needless to say they can't but have been sold a line. They are as guillible as the make a million with 2 hours of effort a day opportunity marketers.
The big money in the adult industry is in getting the suckers to invest in sites and to buy the porn that the big guys vend, to rent the mailing list and buy the 'marketing secrets'. The overwhelming number of these sites lose money.
Much of the undesirable traffic and emails can be traced to the suckers (both porn and non-porn) trying to break even.
The site that I was referring to is a major daily newspaper.
I spent a lot of years in the print industry and have found that what applies to print really doesn't apply to the web, they are totally different animals.
Blow ins may be an inconvenience, but they don't normally cause someone to throw the magazine in the trash or cancel the subscription, just look at all the mess that falls out of the Sunday paper. Pop ups, takeovers, popunders or whatever you want to call intrusive advertising can cause a site more harm than good; it's called "backbutton".
No trip to the trash can neccesary.
My experience is that a well placed print ad can draw .2% on average and a well placed Internet ad a full 2% Conversion rates (sales) are slightly better for print ads about .7 vs. .5.
The print media have rock solid statistics and the Internet has mediocre stats with lots of spin in them.
The print media see advertising as natural part of the media. (When I was in newspaper production advertising made up 60% of the paper and the Advertising Department did the daily layout. Editorial filled the remaining 40% and accepted the ad forecast so they knew how much space they were required to fill.)
Internet sites mostly see advertising as ugly and annoying. The techie’s layout a more or less static site and babble endless about layout and content. A 100-page newspaper’s daily layout takes about 4 hours to complete.
My joke with newspapers was always this..."If we get it wrong, we can always print another one tomorrow."
Ads are sold to go in the various sections like sports, womans etc. Within each section ads are tracked by size i.e. 6 columns full or 5 x 125. The larger ads are on the bottom of the pages on the outside not in the gutter. Smaller ads are piled on top of larger ads or alongside them.
The blocking out of the pages where the ads will sit doesn't take much effort at all. An example is an automotive ad that is 6 col by 280 lines. All you need to decide is if it will be on a left hand page or a right.
Remember the layout of a new paper must be done 6 days a week. Sunday editions are worked differently. My production experience was on a newspaper with 100,000 daily circulation.
