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As we moved into 2007, Forrester Research identified that 81% of broadband users now have pop-up blocking software installed. According to the National Statistics Office, UK broadband users account for more than 73% of the UK’s Internet audience. With such information available it’s fairly safe to assume that next to nobody will see a pop-up campaign on screen. The continual demise of the traditional pop-up advert has surely reached its climax; pop-ups are beyond terminally ill, they’ve flatlined and there’ll be no resuscitation.

Numerous other sources have been quoting increasing blockage statistics since 2004, but it’s hardly surprising that this should be the case. Internet Explorer has been coming preinstalled with a blocker since version 6.0, search engine toolbars from Google, MSN and Yahoo! carry the same blocking default too. One question resulting from the decline has to be ‘is the death of the pop-up a good thing for online advertisers?’.

Whether visitors liked it or not, pop-ups were phenomenally successful at driving click rates in excess of 2%, the likes of which had never been seen from website advertising real estate (search engines excluded). Compared to the click through rate of most banner campaigns (typically ranging from 0.2% to 0.6%) it was no surprise that, at the first sign of an online advertising format driving a tenfold increase in referrals, marketers flooded websites with ‘in-yer-face’ boxes. According to Nielsen NetRatings, pop-ups made up 6.4 percent of all online ads in April 2004, compared with 1.8 percent in the same period of 2002. Their proliferation was phenomenal, but this is ultimately what has lead to their downfall.

For many online marketers pop-ups seemed ideal to drive new sales, enthusiasm was mammoth, I even remember being asked if I could arrange for pop-ups to appear from opened emails! But one could argue that a certain percentage of visitors to a website already have purchasing in mind. By making the purchasing option unavoidably accessible to all, surely these conversions weren’t additional to those that would otherwise come from standard navigational links anyway? And at what cost to the 98% of visitors who were thoroughly irritated?

There are many historical surveys which highlight the world’s hatred of pop-ups, both for their intrusiveness and their downright rudeness in assuming that people are so stupid that they need to be spoon fed adverts. “There is nothing more annoying than adverts popping up… it’s enough to make me leave a siteâ€? is typical of the comments from audience studies.

There do of course remain a large proportion of people who are stupid and need spoon feeding; the sheer volume of hotel bookings, restaurant reservations and phone calls this blog receives from confused visitors demonstrates that fact! But on the whole people like to be treated in a civil manner, and pop-ups were as impolite as a smack in the face when you open a newspaper.

Probably the worst feedback from pop-up surveys, written in a now offline report from BunnyFoot (UK eye tracking and usability experts), suggested that 77% of people were so hacked off with pop-ups that they would consider never revisiting as a result. Also backed up by findings from a user survey from a company called ‘Hostway’. Most of the popularity metrics are truly awful, and that would mean pop-ups kill websites and any other associated online advertising that takes place there. In the long term pop-ups are bad news all round.

Publishers are probably very lucky in fact, that the pop-up blocking remedy came along and stopped them in their tracks, saving the Internet even if killing some non W3C compliant web functionality along the way. However, could the humble pop-up still turn out to be the online marketer’s biggest mistake?

This article at Information Week suggests that the irritation factor from pop-ups, and the desire to find blocking solutions is having a dire impact upon other advertising formats as well ‘Forrester also notes that ad avoidance is becoming more common on television. Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004’.

So will the pop-up ultimately lead to the demise of all advertising? Is the future really to become word of mouth, viral campaigns and Corporate blogging?

> Consumers Love to Hate Advertising

Technorati Tags: pop-ups, popup, online advertising, online marketing, banner advertising

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