Perilous Pop-Ups

New Advertising Technique Sows Seeds of Confusion Among Users

Angela Gunn Consumer Reports WebWatch Web Ethics Columnist>

How much attention do you, the Web visitor, owe the folks who provide your pages? The purveyors of pop-up and pop-under ads have a new idea for getting your "eyeballs" for advertisers: All you have to do is roll over one of their ads with your mouse and you will be taken to the advertiser's home page via a new browser window. No clicking involved.

It's called "kick through." I call it wrong.

So far Orbitz appears to be the only company to advertise in this way so far, but expect others to follow suit as per the maxim "one bad turn deserves another." Just what you didn't want: another window full of advertising — particularly since you only rolled over the ad on your way to the close-the-window X in the upper right hand corner.

We've got here another — another! — battle in the eternal war between viewer experience and Web publisher expense. Users, if I may be frank, generally hate pop-up ads. They also prefer not to pay for content, which leaves site proprietors to scrounge funding from other sources. Pop-ups became, alas, an accepted form of online advertising once it was determined that nobody pays much attention to banner ads (those ads usually positioned at the top of Web pages). Now that users have become relatively accustomed to pop-ups, it's again time to escalate.

Advertisers, therefore, have gone from asking visitors to scrutinize one graphic on a Web page (a banner ad), to launching a little advertising box on top of or beneath your intended Web page (pop-ups and -unders), to spawning a full-size browser window (which could include annoying background music, strobing graphics, or any of the other offenses against good taste one finds online) just because of one false move by your mouse (the kick through). One wonders if next the advertisers will be reaching through the screen and grabbing the cash directly out of one's pocket.

Meanwhile, I've noticed another trend in the pop-up/pop-under saga: Some sites are fighting back against the software that blocks such ads, running prominent warnings to visitors stating that blocking ads amounts to "stealing" their content since advertising is seen as the price of getting free site access. With Internet service providers such as Earthlink spotlighting their popup-blocking tools, certainly some sites that rely on advertising are feeling the heat.

It's time to weigh the claims and decide: How much attention do you owe a site's advertisers? How much claim do they have on your browsing experience? And at what point do questionable advertising practices affect the credibility of the advertiser and of the site itself?

Even the most stalwart old-school Netizens have given up on the idea of the Net as an advertising-free space; what seemed feasible in 1993 is feasible no longer. (Hey, once upon a time you used to be able to register a domain for free; once that started costing money it was all bound to head downhill.) Banner ads, as long as they don't include music and don't take an extraordinarily long time to load, are generally acceptable — they load as part of a page you've requested and, like that page, go away when you're done with it. Pop-ups, on the other hand, take system resources, which can be a problem for those running older machines with less memory. Plus they're a cluttering nuisance.

Pop-ups are not that bad. Most of us by now grit our teeth and close pop-ups or pop-unders as they appear, since once they're onscreen pop-ups behave much like other windows and can be closed with equal ease. Ideally, a site will offer a subscription option allowing loyal users to support its upkeep without forcing them to deal with advertising — Salon's premium service comes to mind as a nice example of how to let readers detour around the commercials. But if that's not feasible, pop-ups and pop-unders, as they now exist, are ethically tolerable, balancing the needs of the site and the desires of the advertisers with the skills and interests of the user.

Pop-ups using the new rollover technique, however, cross an ethical line: They behave in a way that confuses users and requires them to learn a new set of computer skills specifically to deal with such ads. After all, the average user is used to having buttons or images change when they roll over them onscreen. They are not used to having entire windows appear. Once advertisers require users to change their surfing technique to deal with their ad, they've become too great a nuisance to justify whatever money they've given to the site in question.

They are, in short, asking too much — disrupting what should be that equitable relationship between advertisers, site proprietors, and casual visitors.

And credibility? I'd suggest that, yes, intrusive advertising does affect the credibility of both the advertiser and the sites that accept such advertising. Strong-arm tactics hardly inspire confidence in any product, and rollover-pop-ups are most certainly strong-arm tactics.

Were I a Web publisher accepting such advertising, I'd be embarrassed to so inconvenience my visitors. Were I an advertiser, I'd be warned that the boycott line starts right here.

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Gunn is the co-founder of, and former Internet ethics columnist for, Yahoo! Internet Life and is currently the technology editor for Time Out New York weekly magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for PC Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, CNN.com, Seattle Weekly, LA Weekly, and other publications.