• by Tig Tillinghast , July 11, 2002

I’ll make no bones about it: I hate those indiscriminate pop-up ads. Surfing around various news sites, I find myself seeking out the various extra windows that spawn left and right, clicking them away before they start loading bandwidth-eating graphics.

It used to be that these “daughter windows” were used mostly as extra navigation tools, but now some sites seem to have lost all sense of propriety, allowing windows to multiply based on a desire to increase ad inventory rather than improve the user experience. This is especially maddening given that none of these sites sells out the media it had in the first place.

But pop-ups sell at a higher price; thus their increase.

Some of us surf with multiple windows. I take a page full of headlines and option-click the ones I want to read. This lets me open up 10 or 20 new browser windows at once, allowing me to read in peace, without clicking the back button after each story. This has become rather impractical, though, as more and more sites spawn new windows with each page. Worse still, some people surf on computers that tend to get balky if too many windows open. I’ve heard of friends having their computers crash due to pop-ups.

But I save my greatest derision for those who use the deceptive tactic of popping under the main browser window. These people deliberately try to hide the origin of the ad. While I can avoid sites that I see spawning pop-ups, I may well not be able to tell which one caused a pop-under that I find at the end of my session.

This is fundamentally dishonest. It is about as bad ethically as those search engines that were recently chastised by the FTC for pretending some ads were actually search results. It is a deliberate misrepresentation to the consumer, and possibly a copyright infringement against the innocent sites that readers erroneously blame for the ad.

Pop-ups don’t have to be such an ordeal. Provided that the messages are targeted enough, I don’t mind advertisements. And provided that the ad clearly denotes from which site it was spawned, I know what content to avoid if I find them insufficiently tailored to my interests.

Gator gets a lot of flack, but it does a good job of both of these, sending only useful offers to relevant people and making sure that each ad is branded as a Gator-spawned window. I’m not likely to make the mistake of blaming another site for their ads.

A good guideline for the industry would be for advertisers to insist that the sites brand their pop-up windows. This way, the advertisers will find fewer users clicking them away in disgust.