New IE may burst pop-up bubble
Published: 25 Nov 2003 15:35 GMT
Mark Ryan, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, estimates that as many as 20 percent of Web surfers have installed anti-pop-up software, and that the number will be as high as 25 percent by the end of the year.
"That number could increase dramatically if you give the average consumer" a way to block the ads within IE, Ryan said.
Despite the efforts of ISPs, software makers and publishers against pop-ups, advertisers just keep on buying them. From April to June, pop-up and pop-under advertisements made up 3 percent of all online ads. But in the following three months, they made up 7.4 percent, according to market research from Nielsen/NetRatings.
The rise was in part due to the zealousness of a few advertisers such as Orbitz. In the third quarter of this year, its pop-under advertising accounted for 14 percent of the total ads, versus 4 percent from the same period a year before.
Orbitz, the biggest pop-under advertiser on the Internet, would not comment for the story because it said it was not aware of upcoming changes to IE. But it said that it evaluates its advertising mix all the time and that its pop-unders are effective.
Blocking the blockers
Technically, publishers deliver pop-up windows by writing a command into their Web page that's triggered when a visitor requests it. That command is sent to the browser to launch an additional window, and it typically redirects to an ad server to deliver an image. Pop-up blockers work by simply looking for that command and blocking those windows. Because of the black-and-white nature of pop-up blocking, some legitimate windows can be blocked too. That's why several anti-pop-up tools let people create "white lists" of Web sites they want to accept the windows from.
Browser-based ad blockers are not always effective in stopping pop-ups delivered through "adware" programs, which may come attached to free downloads for trading computer files over the Net, among other things. People who have installed adware programs from companies such as Claria (formerly Gator) and WhenU.com will likely continue to receive pop-ups or pop-unders despite browser blocking technology because these programs reside on the PC, and generally operate independently of the browser.
At the latest gathering of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, at least a few Net publishers discussed ways to withhold their content from visitors that were using pop-up blockers, Jupiter's Ryan said. Sites that set tracking technology called cookies onto visitors' desktops can detect that the visitor is using a pop-up blocker, for example. If the blocker is detected, they could prevent that person from viewing their content.
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