Engage serving pop-ups

[rcjordan]

An Engage email 10/30:

Recently , Engage Inc. has responded to the overwhelming demand for interstitial/pop-up inventory by enabling our platform to serve these types of advertisements. We see this as an excellent opportunity for ourselves and our publishers to take advantage of new technology and open up new revenue streams. The pop-up advertisements come in two different forms. The traditional interstitial/pop-up ads will be included with the existing Run-of-Network campaigns already running on your site with your 468 x 60 tags. They are more traditional because they don't incorporate a high-level of interactivity, and attract traditional CPMs.

The interstitial pop-up ads have been tested extensively by the Engage Media Quality Assurance team and do not cause any latency or interruption in the loading of your site's pages. If there is a problem serving the interstitial, our system will automatically cancel the request and only the 468x60 banner ad on your page will be shown.

The second type of pop-up is UNICAST's Superstitial advertisements. This is an incremental revenue generating opportunity. These ads are characterized by a high level of interactivity, larger pop-up windows, and higher CPMs.

[Drastic]

Very interesting, indeed.

What CPM ranges are you looking at?

Are the popups repeatedly shown to the same visitor?

Do you get credit for only 1 popup shown per ip in a given time period?

[rcjordan]

Drastic, I don't know the answers to that. I set my blocking to "no interstitials" long ago (when Engage asked to do that survey). I'm not interested in having those offensive ads kill my site, they're not paying enough to cover the negatives.

[Drastic]

I know what you mean, rc. I personally like running popups, but I have to have control over the ads and how often the visitor sees them. I don't go over 2 pops per visit.

[Brett_Tabke]

If the choice is between advertising revenue off popups and no revenue, I will take no revenue. Popups will erode site eventually - especially if you have an established user base.

[rcjordan]

When in doubt, just ask Tedster's mom.

You'll have to be a deep reader to get that one.

[Drastic]

Like many other techniques and technologies, I think popups have their place. I would never use them on a professional/business site, or any site that had over 20-25% repeat visitors, unless using extreme caution. (as in 1 popup per month, max.) The site I use them on now is just a free stuff site, where less than 10% of the visitors are repeat. (these stats held true before I started using popups, and remain basically the same.) My main use of popups on this site is to generate ezine subs, and it works very well.

[rcjordan]

> My main use of popups on this site is to generate ezine subs, and it works very well.

FWIW:
Strangely enough, 'subscribe to our newsletter' pop-ups don't offend me (though I never subscribe) IF I can kill them once and they stay dead.