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It reflects my attitude that pop-ups are not as hated as a small number of webmasters may like you to believe. All advertisement is intrusive to some extent. The vast majority understands its need and buys into the concept that free content needs to be paid for somehow. That's my take, read the article and see his take.
I have a problem with the study.
Representativeness - the data was collected September 2001. I was frozen - I do not know about the rest of you, but the last thing I was going to do is fill out a survey on pop-ups. So, I am suspicious of the quality of the sample.
Sample size 413 responses are not a real representation of the web community. This is clearly drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes.
Observational selection As mentioned, I would like to see the actual question and the available responses.
Confusion of correlation The study compares pop-up adds to TV and radio adds. Although all three are advertisement, web surfing is an active activity, verses TV and radio are a passive activity.
I conducted a very similar poll of my community members (you can view a member list if you follow my profile). My result? 95% of 400 said pop-ups are annoying and immediately turned off.
I shall limit my postings in the future.
I thought I was dealing with a real issue. Pop-ups are increasing and site after site is reporting a better ROI than for banners (but not as good as email). As a consultant I am telling my client what works and pop-ups are working on a lot of big name sites for large advertisers. That's why there is a market for them. That's conspicuous evidence and nitpicking a study won't make pop-ups go away.
Your whole argument rested on that study, but now that I review and provide an alternative I am nitpicking? You clearly indicated that we JayC should be careful because there is no "opposing" study, therefore it should be taken at face value. Flat Earth syndrome - if we don't have a differing option/opinion, then the first option/opinion must be the only truth.
I have also presented a slice of a long study to you which clearly find just the opposite results.
Pop-ups indeed work. Also having the competitors CEO killed also works, but at what cost? Since you keep mentioning that you are a consultant, I am confident you must be aware that you cannot look at statistics, polls, and studies in a vacuum.
Pop-ups might generate money in the begining but it has a extreemely steep downward curve of return. In the long term, pop-ups not just alienate potential new customers, but also existing customers. We ran the study three times already and the results are amazing. Initially people were intrigued, then annoyed, now hostile.
And you know what, the software industry is responding by tools to disable pop-ups. I propose that my small group of nobodies are correct, and the software industry is a validation of this.
That's not the way many people behave when they are conducting a research or simply trying to find some info.
I hate About.com popups and popunders (they are annoying and appear in pairs upon every link clicked) but if there is some info I need located at that site, I'll be returning there to get it.
I'm pretty sure that most of us found ourselves searching some info without luck trying lots of keywords and phrases and when something is finally found, we don't care whether we are shown popups of any other promotional method, we just go right there to get that info. And if we need to return for more, we do. At least that's the way I do.
Best regards,
Enrique Flouret
Essentially they are like junk mail... whether there is something useful in them or not, I have to act to dispose. That is intrusion. That is theft of my time.
Now people can skirt around this and talk about effectiveness and so on, but the bottom line is that they appear without warning and perpetrate this theft. There is simply no excuse.
I think Amazon does well with unsolicited popups.
Sites that insist upon opening some (or all) of their pages in pop ups are terrible. There are exceptions. For example, go to <edit> url snipped </edit> and click the "HELP" tab at the top. That's useful and nonintrusive.
Oh, and if you don't like popups AT ALL (looks in Napoleon's direction) get Opera and turn them off.
[edited by: NFFC at 5:37 pm (utc) on Aug. 24, 2002]
[edit reason] Need to keep URL's out of this thread [/edit]
Then if it benefits the webmaster then many visitors must be reading them and find them useful.
I have my newsletter subscription box very visible at every page of my site (aprox 70 pages with 50,000 monthly visits and 200,000 page views) and only 5 or 6 subscribed per day.
Two days ago I placed a popup window promoting my Photoshop newsletter. It opens once per visitor per day. Perhaps it should open only once per visitor and nevermore. I have to test that. If it works then I'll open it only once per visitor per lifetime.
The point is that on these two days more than 120 visitors subscribed.
I've used this technique last year with similar results, but stopped using it because I thought that popups window could hurt my growing google pagerank due to some comments about popups windows made by google that I misunderstood.
I will continue using this technique until I find that my overall traffic and returning visitors stats are falling. I that happens, I will take them away forever and post to this forum about that.
Best regards,
Enrique Flouret
What I am against is visiting a site which purports to give me information about, for example, a children's toy. On arriving, I have a pop-up for a camera, a pop-up for a casino and on leaving, a pop-up for closeups of Britney Spears' nostrils. This is lowest common denominator advertising, as practised by doorstep salesman, cold-calling telephone sales and street touts. The only reason it works is that a few people are duped into falling for the scam and the costs of providing the advertising are so low.
- GOOD: Popups used as an aid for the site (help or terms and conditions popups located at certain subscriptions or purchase FORMS)
- NOT SO BAD: AMAZON, ADOBE or any non annoying one-time showing popup for relevant content, surveys or promotion.
- BAD AND UGLY: ABOUT.COM as the worst example of a major site I could find two popunder windows upon any link clicked, with non relevant content.
So it is not about popups but their usage.
Raise your hands those who never visited amazon again because it started showing popups! :-)
Best regards,
Enrique Flouret
eflouret: I'm not refering to your popup in the above comments...your pop up is well done and non-intrusive and beside it's giving me something that you know you're visitors are probably going to be interested in (not some off the wall get-rich-quick sceme).
On a ecommerce site then prehaps advertising popups aren't that great, the site has a revenue stream and shouldn't really need to run them. But popups detailing the stores new special offers are fine in my opinion.
I do feel a few sites go a bit overboard though, 2 or so popups/unders a page is far too much! 2 a session max.
So I banished the popups, and it took a few months to get my visitors back. Now I stick only with banner and text ads for my revenue. Even if I'm losing money some months, it's better to have a website with happy visitors than a website that earns a whooping $3 CPM.
"Most people understand that advertising is necessary to support the sites they like to visit"
A self-serving myth perpetuated by some big media sites struggling to find a business model.
