If you despise popup advertisements while surfing the Web, you're not even close to being alone. Several analysts believe as many as 95 percent of Netizens respond negatively to popups – particularly those that don't specify what they're pushing, move content around, or occupy most of a page, and which try to trick surfers into clicking on them.
Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, Yahoo! researcher John Boyd, and eBay researcher Christian Rohrer say surfers are also put off by ads with no close buttons, blink on and off, float across the screen, or play sounds automatically. Which just about covers every known kind of popup advertisement online.
Boyd and Rohrer showed research backing their findings at a recent User Experience 2004-5 seminar, while Nielsen wrote briefly of his findings after polling about 605 surfers earlier this year and discovering similar findings showing in the previous two years.
He said users began defending themselves more with programs like blocking software, finding among those he polled that such use rose from 26 percent in April 2003 to 69 percent in September 2004. He also said he found those he polled saying they transfer their dislike of popups to those advertisers who use them or whom the ads purport to represent.
Around 95 percent of web users react negatively to pop-up advertisements, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says in an article on the most hated online advertising techniques.
Nielsen said most studies focused on how successful ads were in driving traffic but few, if any, took into account the user experience of online advertising.
Commercial Web sites, Nielsen said, should think again before they accept ads surfers don't like, because long term prospects of the site and the products or services the site promotes would be affected.
