Popping Off on Pop-Ups: Just Show Me the News!
When I log on to a news website, pop-up ads inevitably invade my screen before I finish reading the first headline. They appear without permission, clamoring for attention, shouting at me with their best pickup lines. “Considering an online MBA?” “For proof of Jesus. Click here.” “Hit the weasel. Win a prize!” Hitting the weasel is one of my favorites because the cursor turns into a hammer and I can whack the little sucker. But my prize: another pop-up.
Sometimes I curse and seethe because I end up spending more time closing pop-up windows and navigating around the crafty placement of ads than reading the news.
At home, on my computer, I should be the one playing God, choosing what I see and don’t see. With pop-ups, I feel I’ve lost that sense of control and power. Will someone get rid of the weasels and online proselytizers? Just show me the news. Yet other times I grudgingly accept these ads as part of the cross I have to bear if I want to read Washington Post stories free. One man’s annoyance is another man’s business, and someone has to pay for the news. For now, it might as well be Orbitz and its interactive ads instead of me. News is what I want, so I’ll suffer through the ads. And, besides, now I can get a pop-up blocker.
When a friend heard about the Google toolbar that includes a pop-up blocker, he downloaded it right way. “I despise [pop-ups] because they take me away from other important things I’m looking at,” says Jaime Clevenger, a graduate physical therapy student at Cal State Northridge. Google’s blocker also includes a tally of the number of pop-ups stopped. In two months, Clevenger’s blocker count says it had blocked 734 ads.
But the advertising-versus-editorial wars also wage battle across placement and layout. With a momentary setback from blockers, persistent advertisers have added embedded ads to their arsenal. Page designers, and intuition, will tell you that relevant graphic elements should be close to the story. Hence, a breaking story about the latest Middle East suicide bombing would probably include a photo of the carnage near the body of text. But when I surf one news site online, stories will often have ads for Viagra or Oracle in the space where I reasonably expect to find a photo. Multimedia elements such as maps and graphics are left hanging off to the side like motherless children.
It may be a losing battle. I know advertisers will continue to pitch their products and services. Internet advertising revenue totaled $1.69 billion in the first quarter of 2003. This is an 11% increase over the same period in 2002. Just the other day, I received a system error message on my PC, but it turned out to be a pop-up ad, complete with a fake “OK” button. It wanted to know if I knew Jesus. So much for my new pop-up blocker. I’ll be praying to stop the pop-ups.
