Pop-Ups : the continuing saga.
By Rik Tairea

A while back (at the time of writing this) I read an interesting report about pop-ups. It was about an ISP that will block pop-ups and pop-unders automatically for it's customers (I'm sure some of you have read about this). I read another article that reported pop-up blockers are being downloaded and purchased at a very high rate (I won't give out statistics because 62.34% of stats are made up).

Obvious conclusion : people are sick of pop-ups.

I've known this for quite some time but it wasn't until recently that it was drummed into my skull. I've been reading some threads at A Best Web that touched on this topic and there are quite a few other webmasters who despise them.

Personally I can live with one pop per site, but anymore than that and I kind of get annoyed. I recently visited a site that had three pop-ups per page and in order for me to get to the information that I wanted I had to dig through six pages of unrelated content. I had to go through a total of eighteen pop-ups in order to reach one page of info, in the end it wasn't really worth it.

Some of you may know that I used to utilize a popup at Groundzero and in my opinion it wasn't too annoying and was only "one" popup

I followed these guidelines when utilizing this popup :
- it's not the first thing to load on the site
- it only loads when exiting the index page
- it doesn't take long to load
- it doesn't consist of any flash
- it doesn't generate any direct revenue
- it only advertises the newsletter

I've used pop-ups to generate revenue through CPM ads with Popuptraffic (PUT) and to advertise lead programs. Earning revenue with PUT was ok for a while because I used it on a site that generated a nice amount of traffic, it was nice to earn something on a content site that doesn't sell anything. I then stopped using PUT and utilized custom made pop-ups that consisted of lead generating programs. I also used the same guidelines that I used in the newsletter popup

So why did I use pop-ups?

Because they work and I figure as long as I don't over do it they will continue to. But I do understand why a lot of surfers hate them and I wouldn't be surprised if they and/or companies that sell popup ads disappeared in the future.

Use pop-ups in moderation (if you have to use them at all).

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The above article was written solely for Groundzero and may not be reproduced in anyway on print or other media. This article was written by the webmaster, creator and owner of this site.
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