• by Tom Hespos , July 6, 2004

Like many of my colleagues in the industry, I've become "the computer guy" to a lot of my friends - the "go to" for software and hardware questions. While this can be a pain sometimes, it also gives me some anecdotal insight into how friends and relatives use their computers from a pure consumer perspective. Hanging out with several friends this weekend, one thing I heard loud and clear was that several of them were upset that their pop-up blockers no longer seemed to work very well.

I heard complaints about the various pop-up blocking tools - how they worked so well for a few months but now miss pop-ups on certain sites and let them through - how the pop-unders build up in the taskbar and force the occasional break from web surfing to close them before they litter the entire screen.

The question I hear most often concerning pop-ups, besides "How do I get rid of them?" is "Why do advertisers buy them?" Most of my friends wonder how such advertising can exist when the format is almost universally reviled. Every time I hear the question, I have to talk about the fraction of an audience percentage point that will occasionally click on a pop-up and buy something - the only possible reason why pop-ups can exist.

As many pundits predicted, we're now in a full-scale pop-up arms race. Pop-up blockers debuted and many consumers lived pop-up free for a while, until technology providers were able to circumvent the ad-blocking technology and allow providers to continue to serve up their irritating pop-ups. Will it be too long before the pop-up blocking technology providers fire their next salvo?

Meanwhile, technology looms on the horizon that tends to block nearly all forms of online advertising, and our industry is at risk of having tech-savvy consumers fall off marketing radar screens altogether. It's not unreasonable to assume that with pop-up blockers becoming somewhat inconsistent in filtering out pop-ups that consumers might upgrade to software that blocks not only pop-ups, but banners and rich media as well.

A question worth asking is whether banner inventory is being put at risk by the mere existence of pop-ups. Consumers are not going to want to participate in the pop-up arms race for much longer. Will they ditch their pop-up blocking applications in favor of things like Privoxy, which can block most forms of online advertising and wreak havoc with cookies?

Perhaps it's time to re-examine the risk equation and think long and hard about what's tolerable by the average consumer. Ultimately, our entire industry exists as a function of the consumer's willingness to tolerate it. Ad blocking technology exists in new forms now, such that pushing the consumer past their willful tolerance could have disastrous effects. Are those effects worth the sliver of response we get from pop-ups?

Another question worth asking is whether we can improve the pop-up and pop-under ad formats so that the consumer won't perceive them as annoying any more. We know that we could eliminate the most popular consumer objections to the format by frequency capping pop-ups, as well as by targeting them so that the consumer won't consider them irrelevant.

One thing's for sure - we can't continue to make money in the long term from something that more than 9 out of every 10 consumers can't stand and have the technology at their fingertips to eliminate entirely. I think the pop-up needs to undergo significant change before a full-scale revolt takes place.