Pop-Up Advertisements In Today's Internet

Pop-up ads, a blanket term describing a wide range of web advertising that pops up over, under and everywhere else in your browser windows while you're surfing the web, are now widely accepted as a nuisance. If you are considering web advertising via pop-up ads, you should reconsider. Nowadays a major selling point for Internet service providers such as AOL, Earthlink and others is "pop-up blocking". Software included with the Internet service effectively block any and all pop-up advertisements from ever displaying on their users's screens. This renders pop-ups, as a form of web advertising, virtually impotent. What's more, the general public tend to hate pop-up advertisements so strongly that they will actively boycott businesses that engage in pop-up advertising as a form of web advertising. They consider pop-ups invasive and annoying. Furthermore, since some unscrupulous companies utilize pop-ups containing malicious scripts that

can plant spyware on your computer, pop-up advertisements can pose real security threats. Because of the public outcry against pop-up advertisements as a form of web advertising, and the resultant rise in popularity of pop-up blocking software as provided both by Internet service providers and third party companies as freeware and shareware, many legitimate uses of pop-up windows are also ineffective. For example, a webmaster who wants to display a small window with information that pops up when a link is clicked may find that visitors cannot see the pop-up window even though they have clicked on the link to initiate it, because their blocking software recognizes it as a pop-up window.