Almost everyone. The mushrooming of pop-up ads recently is a fallout from the dot-com bust. Surviving sites are desperate to generate income.⁽¹⁾ One way of doing so is to multiply the number of ads seen by their visitors. Still there are others who have always been shameless. Since its beginning, AOL has shoved pop-up ads in your face the minute you sign on. In fact, you must pass through this barrage before you can access the features of the program. It does not stop there though. They continue the entire time you are online.

Gator.com is another large company that uses similar shameless tactics. They supply a program that keeps track of your login ID's and passwords on all sites that you visit. It also stores your personal information (name, address, phone number, e-mail, credit cards etc.) to be filled in when you enter a site that requires any of those fields. However for the program to work, it must always be running when you are online. The company takes advantage of this by backpacking software that monitors all Web pages you visit and when it can offer a substitute to your current site, an ad pops up. For example, visit e-bay and it will pop up an ad for other auction sites. Visit 1800-Flowers.com and it will bring up ads for FTD.com. This form of advertising is not as unpleasant as standard popup ads because it can serve more of a benefit if you are trying to find a particular item. It is also less annoying because it will only pop-up one ad which is easily closed. This tactic seems to be more effective for these reasons. Real Networks uses similar tactics as Gator.com, but tends not to give you useful information. "Download the latest version of Real Jukebox or Player and your computer seems to take on a will of its own with flashing icons, pop-up boxes and a terminal case of screen clutter."⁽²⁾

These are only the big name companies though. Almost every site these days has some sort of pop-up window. Some companies use them for their own "surveys" which they use to send you spam mail. Other sites thrive solely on their pop-up ads.

PopUp Network is a leader in delivering targeted pop-up messages. It empowers Web users to select the sources from whom they encounter pop-up ads. All other ads are filtered out. It is commonly known that targeted ads are more effective. As is the case with Gator.com, this effectiveness is the reason that these two companies have survived the dot-com fallout. The company's president Peter Winston adds "We are successful because we have developed a service that returns control back to the user."⁽³⁾

New marketing tactics are being implemented all the time. Most recently is BMW North America LLC. They have created a new site http://www.bmwfilms.com which describes the ad as a short film. BMW spared no expense in making these short, five to 8 minute "movies" by recruiting Famous Hollywood directors like Ang Lee of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Guy Ritchie (Madonna's husband) of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. These short films even include a plot. They use a different BMW in each of the films. In every case, the purpose of these films is to show off the abilities of the Cars.
 
 

How Effective Are Pop-Up Ads?

There is no doubt that pop-up ads are very effective at what they do, just ask anyone what one of the most frustrating things they encounter while searching over the Internet. It is probable that the issue of pop-up ads will come out of their mouths. Just as people hate to get phone calls from telemarketers, for the most part, Internet viewers dislike pop-up ads. However there is a different angle to this view of pop-up ads that many people do not see. The issue is that pop-up ads are just another form of advertising for a company. We see and hear commercials for products every day on our TV's and radios, and we do not really pay much attention to them, but when we get online and the first pop-up comes up we get all bent out of shape. Internet users need to realize that pop-up ads and advertising need to happen for the Internet to function. When people are searching through a site, that site is working for the user and that work costs money.

Pop-up ads are descendent from the old banner ads that are still present today; however, their effectiveness saw a dramatic decrease in the late 1990's. In late 1999 the rate of click-throughs had dropped to the low figure of .39%.⁽⁴⁾ Advertisers then looked for another way to attract their audiences and they came to pop- up ads, which have stepped up and filled their shoes. Making the biggest difference in their effectiveness was the fact that no longer did the user have to click on a banner to see the advertisements site. Now as soon as a user clicks on a link in a site an advertisement pops up automatically up for the person to see. In a recent study done by Jupiter Communications, they concluded that "online ads contribute to 17% of a Web sites traffic.⁽⁵⁾ However studies performed on Internet advertising are difficult to get a concise opinion on because many count any ad box viewed by surfers on the site.

An example on just that effect is the up-shot Internet camera and electronic company X10.com. By their use of pop-up ads and counters that use any ad box viewed they rocketed in the past year from nowhere to being one of the highest viewed Internet companies. According to Jupiter, "X10.com reached an amazing 32.8% of the Web's entire audience."⁽⁶⁾ The relatively small X10.com is now among the much larger Internet companies such as Amazon.com and Ebay. While that number would normally indicate a successful ad campaign, in this case, that is not reality. As a whole, X10.com failed to convert viewers to buyers. According to the same study 73% of those who saw the ad or who are taken to their site leave within 20 seconds. In the end only 4.2% of the sites 28 million viewers monthly, spend more than three minutes on the site.⁽⁷⁾ Three minutes was the minimum amount of time Jupiter felt was necessary to be considered a shopper. Not all ad campaigns are that unsuccessful. The less flashy campaigns run by BizRate.com and Unicast both saw smaller drop-off rates. BizRate.com had a 37% reduction while Unicast had a 64% reduction. Experts blame X10.coms extreme drop-off on the fact that they have no cap on the amount of advertisements a person can receive while on their site. In other words, it is not the amount of advertisements that a person receives while searching, it is the relevance of the ads themselves.⁽⁸⁾ That issue leads to the new question of using narrowcasted messages to make pop-up ads more successful.

It is much easier to advertise to an audience if you know what interests them, which is the point of registration, but that is also one of the hardest ways to obtain information about shoppers. Most people feel worried about giving their information online because they distrust what companies may do with that information. Even giants such as AOL and Microsoft have suffered from user distrust. A survey by Gartner showed that 37% of online deeply distrust AOL and 29% distrust Microsoft.⁽⁹⁾ This lack of trust for AOL came from the use of pop-up ads and the receiving of unwanted emails. Besides consumer registration the use of "cookies" from a person's browser is also a good means of receiving consumer information, because that information gives the ad company ideas of the users interests. However that practice brings up many questions of consumer privacy. In the end consumer registration is the best means of obtaining consumer information but in the lack on registrations, pop up ads are the next best option as they can often capture viewer information.

Previous Section | Home | Next Section