ABC.com – the purveyor of free online content… and pop-ups?
Over the last few months, I have been a regular visitor to ABC.com – primarily to watch awesome ABC shows such as Lost and The Unusuals. While the content is great, I can’t help but notice one thing: pop-ups. That’s right, ABC.com feels that – on top of the ads they are serving inside of the ABC free-episode player – I should also be presented with at least one unwated pop-up advertisement while on the network’s website. Every time I navigate to the ABC.com site, followed by clicking on the Free Episodes link, and then picking a show to watch, I am presented with a pop-up containing an advertisement of some sort. Note that this pop-up is not the ABC.com player itself, but another window entirely.
I thought we have moved away from pop-ups. I thought people understood that pop-ups are not the most effective way to get people interested in whatever is being advertised in a pop-up. In fact, unwated pop-up windows are probably the least effective types of online advertisements. Think about it: what’s the first thing you do when you see a browser window open that isn’t supposed to be there (read: an unwated pop-up window you didn’t initiate). The first thing I do when I see a pop-up? Look for the close button. I don’t even look at the ad. In fact, I would go so far as to say that any company that attacks me with unwated (uncalled-for) pop-up windows immediately loses credibility with me: if you think your website is important enough to interrupt my browsing experience (and override my pop-up blocker), I will think less of you and/or your company/organization.
But that’s me: how about the rest of the web-browsing world? What’s their opinion, reaction, and experience with pop-up advertisements? Usually, people respond to pop-ups by dismissing the (unwanted) window by using the close or cancel feature of the pop-up itself, or by interacting with the close window button of the user’s browser. By clicking cancel or a similar function on the actual pop-up can lead to the user launching the “simulated cancel” option – where the button does not perform the action it implies it will perform, but rather executes an unwated function (such as opening another pop-up window or executing code on the user’s system). Read more »
Posted in ABC, Advertising, Business, Decisions, Marketing, Monetization
Does this ever happen to you: you find an interesting article on the web but have no time to read it at this moment in time? What do you do? Do you just leave the window open, hoping that your browser doesn’t crash and if it does, it will remember the tabs you left open? Do you the web page to that overflowing bookmarks folder called “stuff to read”? Or do you just take the environmentally-unfriendly route and send the article to print? All of those solutions work, but they can be equated to using a stick with dry leaves to start a fire: antiquated and inefficient, to say the least. With today’s technology having come as far as it has, there must be a better solution. Meet Instapaper. 