• by August 3, 2000

Unicast, the creators of the SUPERSTITIAL, have just redesigned their website, so I thought it might be appropriate to talk about all those things that pop up on your screen and are rumored to be some of the best ways to capture someone's attention online.

Interstitials is a blanket term for pop up ads and up until a few months ago you'd be hard pressed to find a wide-enough array of sites that supported Interstitials. However, as more sites and ad networks are accepting various interstitial formats, it's important to differentiate between the many types of these lively creatures. They include:

- Daughter windows - open like a second browser when the user clicks on a banner. - Pop-up windows - appear automatically when a user enters a new page. - Splash screens - appear within the browser, reinforcing the message or introducing the site. - Intermercials - use rich media to entertain or provide interaction. - Superstitials - load in the background in the browser's cache and play after the user has seen a Web page.

According to the International Data Corp., all of the above account for only about 3% of U.S. Internet ad revenue (banners account for 58%), and those numbers are not likely to change radically in the near future because the majority of consumers find pop-ups so annoying, some (25%) actually avoid sites that carry them.

And that's according to last summer's survey findings from Jupiter, the same company that back in 1997 predicted that one-quarter of all online ad dollars in 2001 would be spent on interstitials.