"Pop-ups eat up valuable bandwidth, slowing downloads from the Internet because they activate a stream of other browsers that often go unnoticed."⁽¹⁾ Most everyone at one time or another has come across a site that pops window after window until the original window is closed and all pop-under ads have also been closed. Many of these sites also implement pop-up triggers linked to the browser's 'back' button. It seems that the majority of these sites are from unreputable pornographic sites trying to earn extra money by sending traffic all over the Internet with no destination.

John Zuccarini of Andalusia, Penn., operated more than 5,500 Websites that diverted Web surfers from their intended destinations and exposed them to pop-up ads. He registered many misspellings of popular sites, such as cartoonnetwork.com with hopes of drawing traffic from sloppy typists. Zuccarini had registered 41 variations on the name of pop star Britney Spears.⁽²⁾

Ford Motor Co unveiled an ad on Yahoo! in which animated birds perched on Ford's pop-up fly around the Yahoo! Website before eating away birdseed to reveal Ford's new Explorer vehicle. New types of ads like these will likely make you stick around to watch the entire ad. Best of all, for Ford, you will probably invite your colleagues over to watch and even e-mail your friends to alert them about this cute ad you've just seen.

Of course any one ad will get tiring after a while, but that's what Cookies are for. They can make sure you see a different ad each time or ensure that the ads don't appear again for a day so it slowly becomes ingrained and doesn't wear itself out as quickly. This tactic is often used to make the ads more effective.

How Pop-ups Can Affect Children

While the effect on children is not a high occurrence issue, the fact that it is an issue at all presents a problem. This topic is also one that is hard to put any numbers to. Fortunately, this is only an issue with the Adult/Pornographic industry. Unfortunately, it has been said that they are the largest industry on the Internet with 13% of all Web traffic. Marketers often do not intend for their advertisements to reach children under 18. However, the problem stems from their devious tactics. Search engines such as Altavista are set up so that the pop-ups are based off of the search criteria to make the marketing directed at the user's interest. For example, searches for a cologne will bring up ads for Fragrance.net and other online vendors. Issues arise when children are running searches such as 'breast cancer', 'oral care' or 'Britney Spears'. The pop-up ads respond to trigger words (in this case breast, oral, and Britney Spears). These searches will bring up ads for pornographic sites. The largest group of these are searches for well known females. The positive side to this is that the number of trigger words is minimal which reduces the number of these occurrences.
 

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