You’ve heard how much fun it is to work on Firefox. But as with everything, there are ugly sides. One of these sides has been enjoying some buzz around the web lately, especially on Slashdot.
Every so often, word breaks that another site has bypassed Firefox’s popup blocker. The problem also afflicts Internet Explorer. This is only mildly depressing in terms of the additional headache it causes the talented Gecko engineers. What’s extremely depressing is having to clean up the messes of braindead companies who won’t be in business soon anyways.
Hint: If you are trying to display a popup ad to someone who doesn’t want one, you won’t be around in two years. Because if your complete and total disregard for customers doesn’t do you in, the short-sightedness you’re exhibiting in trying to make a quick buck will surely bite you in the ass in other ways—like being completely blindsided by smarter, more human competitors.
Why is this so hard? Is there some rationale I’m missing in my anger?
The rationalization that browsers include popup blockers by default and therefore not everyone is “opting in” to block popups doesn’t fly: browsers include popup blockers because people want them. Much as it might help you sleep at night, you’re not defeating the Firefox or IE popup blockers—you’re defeating your own customers. I tend not to give my money to people who engage me in a fight, let alone win.
The rationalization that some tiny subset of the population will actually click your ads and generate enough revenue to justify them is certainly true enough— it is, after all, the same one that spammers use. Is that the company you want to keep? When will you realize that over the long run, a healther brand image will help you more than a quick fix? Google figured that out and seems to be doing quite well for themselves. At a time when Yahoo was teaming up to explode a Flash Pizza Hut pizza in the middle of its front page and rain pepperonis all over the place, Google was telling its users that, uh, we’re human too and we hate swatting at popup ads. Google seems to be doing quite well for itself now, and Yahoo is following its lead.
At the end of the day, the deceit doesn’t scale. You can slyly bypass popup blockers (until Microsoft and we plug the holes). You can fool people into clicking the ads by choosing advertisers that design them to look like Windows error messages or impel viewers to shoot the monkey and win a prize. But at the end of the day, users are going to discover that there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. And they will be left staring at your unmasked company in disgust.
If your product had a feature that everyone hated, you’d remove it without pause—because refusing to do so would impact your bottom line. Can you really not see how this is ten times worse for your business?
Netscape couldn’t. Have you heard the one about how they whitelisted themselves? This is one of my favorite anecdotes, and though my memory is fuzzy about the exact timeline and versions involved, it goes something like this: Mozilla implements popup blocking and releases a milestone to great acclaim. Netscape soon follows with its own release based on the Mozilla offering. Because Netscape is Mozilla at its core, the press is naturally expecting it to have popup blocking. It doesn’t, because—lo and behold—some AOL/Netscape web properties use popup ads, and heaven forbid those get blocked! After a thorough public lashing, Netscape goes back to the drawing board and finally puts out a release that blocks popups. The catch: a whitelist, buried in preferences and thus out of reach of most users, that permits AOL web properties to continue opening popup ads. One of these properties just so happened to be Netscape.com.
Guess what the browser’s default homepage was.
The user started up his shiny new browser—NOW WITH POPUP BLOCKING!—and got a popup ad.
Netscape isn’t doing too well these days.
February 28th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Why does Netscape have to suck so bad…and for so long?
I’m glad I’m not the only one bashing them at regular intervals ;)
Your popup story is almost as bad as when they skipped an entire version to play “catch-up” with IE.
February 28th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
here’s a little bit more…
There was no “pop-up blocker” in Mozilla 1.0. It was a javascript preference that effectively blocked pop ups that should have been included in Netscape 7.0. a) because no one changes their preferences, b) people who did know how to set that bit wouldn’t click on popup ads anyway.
I helped release pop-up blocking in nscp 7.01, that had better ui, etc. I’m glad that we did as it helped shake things out and led to the AOL popup blocker and hopefully helped in designing the Firefox popup blocker as well (what was good/what was bad about it, etc.) The white list was necessary at the time for compatability for legit sites; nscp.com/aol.com as you mention correctly were not legit sites.
Decisions about popup blocker went all the way up to Jon Miller, CEO of AOL. It was frustrating and just dumb because between me and Jon, no one in between (effectively three other people) could make a freaking decision.
A side story is that at the end of 1999, I inherited two of the more popular popup promotions on Netscape.com. I tried to pull those popups as well as get rid of popups altogether before being blocked by our mutual friend Steve. You should ask him about it.
Anyhow, getting rid of popups actually meant getting rid of 3-4 people on the marketing team (yeah, popup “mktg” were full-time jobs…that team eventually got laid-off).
The kicker. Pop-ups ads did show a 1-2% higher clickthrough rate than other ads, but a lot of the ads were house ads or ads that didn’t generate revenue. Popup ads are around because sites need volume. They either don’t have enough traffic and need to increase their ad volume or they’re just plain greedy after they’ve oversold existing inventory. Popups ads are all about volume.
So that’s a little more on the story. That was fun.
March 1st, 2005 at 1:09 am
That was an interesting read, rebron.
March 1st, 2005 at 7:07 am
For more on how these ad companies respond to their customers growing angry at their subversive pop ups and pop unders, check out the response I got from the ad company I use for MacSlash, Tribal Fusion.
I’ve never been so angry at a business in my life.
March 1st, 2005 at 7:59 am
Blake Ross (one of the people you can thank for Firefox) has a great post about how using popup ads is bad for business. I couldn’t agree more. He also recalls a pop-up faux pas that Netscape made a few years back and is definitely worth reading about.
March 1st, 2005 at 3:10 pm
I remember that time well. As a result of the Netscape whitelist, documentation was required to refer to Pop-up Blocking not as that but Pop-up Suppression. Is it me or does that sound a bit too much like some medicine you take when you’re nauseous.
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:30 am
I think you’re very correct when you state that companies that use deceit and circumvent the pop-up blockers will be out of business very soon. It’s the same reason I refuse to use any product from Real. I installed their player and felt like it moved into every nook of my computer. If a company annoys me once I’ll find another retailer to take my money.
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:01 pm
You guys been talking the same crap for 5 plus years.
Pop ups have there place and no matter what you say they are going to be around for awhile longer.
You are only looking at it from a surfer point of view…on the webmaster end of things…if you guys had even a small clue…you would understand that pop-ups drastically increase your profits….in the range of 400 to 1000 % higher on the same traffic.
Sorry to burst your little safe world but I just wanted to give you guys another person eyes for a second and to let you know there is nothing you can do to stop what works ;-)
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:54 pm
Brad,
Did you read what I wrote? I said:
“The rationalization that some tiny subset of the population will actually click your ads and generate enough revenue to justify them is certainly true enough.”
I also said that the long term benefits from building a healthy brand by not using popups far outweigh the short term benefits (i.e. instant cash) of using them. In other words: it’s the difference between being a Google and getting by. Maybe the two year estimate isn’t correct for all sites, but eventually you’ll be squeezed out.
–Blake
March 9th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
Been using Firefox for about a year now, and this is the first time I have completely read a blog by Blake Ross. Usually, I don’t care about computer/technology news as they don’t really affect me too much (heck, today is the first day I have ever checked out SlashDot, even though a bunch of my friends who are into technology keep on mentioning it), but this blog is very nice and I agree with pretty much all the points that you have stated. This may not be earth-shattering to you that a person has appreciated what you have written, but it’s very interesting to me because I rarely ever read blogs that talk about technology. Thanks =)
March 10th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
First of all, let me get this out of my system: Please fix your comments system. I had this nice comment written down only to receive a “Please enter the correct code” message when I clicked on “Say It!” Needless to say, my message was gone when I clicked on the Back button to fix the code. This is so last century….
Now, on to the post… if I remember it.
I agree 100% with Blake on this issue of pop-ups. Just imagine what television would be like with pop-up ads. You’re watching “24″ when suddenly the TV switches to a different channel to show you an ad! You scramble for the remote to switch back to “24″ only to have it happen again in a while. Or maybe when you try to switch back, the TV endlessly jumps across ad-related channels. AHRG!
Granted, web content doesn’t usually play on while you’re not looking, but you get the idea. Pop ups ARE annoying, and if your website depends on pop-ups to survive then there’s clearly a need for a new system (or a new website!). Why on earth would you want to antagonize your audience? It’s almost like saying you want to be a squegee-pest because you can make some money at it…
happy flying!
PS: this time I did the copy-paste thing, so I didn’t lose the text…. but something’s seriously wrong with your authorization code system.