There’s nothing more annoying when visiting a website than being spammed by lots of pop-ups/-unders advertising useless junk. Haven’t advertisers yet realised how annoying these are? Isn’t the fact that most browsers have built-in pop-up/-under blockers a hint that people don’t like this kind of advertising?
Fortunately, it’s becoming less common and I for one immediately leave a site if firefox indicates that it’s blocked an unrequested pop-up/-under. It indicates a lot about the publisher’s/webmaster’s motives behind a site, too. Unsurprisingly, sites with little (or no) original content employ such rubbish methods of gaining revenue.
Even more annoying are the pop-ups/-unders that try to install spyware or pretend to be system software warning you about a problem. For example:
The example popup does state it’s an advertisement, but in light-coloured and small text at the bottom of the image. Even worse examples are javascript alert boxes that pretend to be M$ Windows alerts warning about system problems.
About a week ago I came across this tactic on a zero-content site that someone was trying to sell for $13,000 (!). The seller described it as a "games cheat database" that had a lot of daily traffic (about 3,000 unique visitors). I checked the site last Friday to see if someone had purchased it and added content. The first thing that happened was a javascript alert box popped up and displayed "Your registry is corrupt. Would you like to fix it?" and there were options for "Yes" or "Cancel". Even cancelling the javascript alert opened a pop-up window which tried to install a .exe (windows executable software file) on my system. Closing the pop-up caused it to re-open and this continued in a cycle until Internet Explorer crashed (I normally use Firefox or Epiphany but at the time was using M$ Windows on my laptop to check CSS compatibility).
*sigh* The kind of junk sites people put online to make money.
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