-- POPUPS -- please read

[David Murray]

Well ACTUALLY Mark, unless you're being paid simply for views (which is the reason why the dotcom bubble burst in the first place) rather than for people clicking on your ads and buying the products, your pop-ups are pretty useless anyhow.

Let's examine a couple scenarios.

1. Visitor comes to your site, is presented with a semi-pornographic image of Britney Spears and realizes what a crap site this is. Leaves.

2. Visitor comes to your site, no pop-ups, surfs your site, loves it to pieces, buys a copy of RON thru one of your links. Or, buys a mug from your store. Etc.

To cut a long story short, pop-ups suck and sites that use then will burn in hell. Thank god for Mozilla.

[vovan]

Question: how much more likely is a visitor to click a banner than an ad in a pop-up? I'm sure some market research was done on this topic?

Personally, I much prefer advertisement through banners, as IMO, pop-ups are evil. Banners can get pretty annoying sometimes, too, especially the flashing ones, but I quite like the ones I see here at 'Poly in a sense that they don't really interfere with viewing the content.

[MarkG]

your pop-ups are pretty useless anyhow

popups are indeed paied on a cpm(cost per thousand impressions) basis rather than cpc(cost per click). unfortunately they've been critical in the funding of Apolyton over the last two years. on the issue of people buing games through our links, they do help a lot too, but as the games we cover dont have new releases every day, but 2-3 every year, income from them are mainly concentrated in specific time periods

how much more likely is a visitor to click a banner than an ad in a pop-up? I'm sure some market research was done on this topic?

if you think about it, popups would not continue to exist if they werent effective. even popup blockers are in favor of popups as a banner type(until the day of course that all browsers come with a by-default-enabled popup blocker ), since people who would never click on the ad are just not seeing it, thus make the response numbers better

[vovan]

Originally posted by MarkG
if you think about it, popups would not continue to exist if they werent effective.

Well, obviously... I still fail to understand why spam messages generate any return at all, but obviously they do since there's so much of them. Same holds for popups, I suppose.

Originally posted by MarkG
since people who would never click on the ad are just not seeing it, thus make the response numbers better

I never thought about it that way. Interesting.

[TCO]

Mark,

Thank you for doing what I told Dan to do. I sleep better knowing that you are back minding the shop.

[mrmitchell]

cost per impressions makes sense if you believe all the marketing mumbo-jumbo like "images" and "branding" and "customer awareness".

in other words, they're really effective if your IQ is under 40.

[alva]

Wow, 'Poly must be making a bundle then

[gwillybj]

Please clarify this for me!
As a rule, I block all cookies that are from advertisers, because my browsing is not for them to know and I don't want to become their target for additional spam.
But, by blocking bfast and qksrv cookies (the only ones I've identified with Apolyton) from being stored on my hard drive, I have been costing Apolyton money?
Please clarify this for me!

[DrSpike]

Pop-ups have been 'Poly's main source of funding for some time now.

[MarkG]

gwillybj,

qksrv: yes, but only if you've followed related links(with qksrv in them ) and bought something...

bfast: in somes cases impressions(=showing of a banner) will not be counted(e.g. we wont be paid for it)...

in any case, cookies do not harm you....

[Asmodean]

Originally posted by MarkG

in any case, cookies do not harm you....

Mark: I know you have a webmaster's perspective on this. I respect that. But webmasters and advertisers on the internet will have to come to grips with the fact, that most people consider some cookies an invasion of privacy.

The way many cookies function, they store information about your browsing habits, so that this information can be read the next time you accessthe site that particular cookie is from. To me, this is an invasion of privacy, as I'm not informed about what is stored, nor am I told what is read.

I know this will not cause harm to me, nor to my computer, but still....some cookies are at best shady.

This was a user's perspective.

That said and done, I want to help Apolyton make some money, so I don't block pop-ups, nor have I ever done so.

Asmodean

[vovan]

Originally posted by Asmodean
The way many cookies function, they store information about your browsing habits, so that this information can be read the next time you accessthe site that particular cookie is from. To me, this is an invasion of privacy, as I'm not informed about what is stored, nor am I told what is read.

Well, I am not sure that is true, actually. Cookies can only be written or read by the site that issued them. So, for instance, CFC can't read my 'Poly cookies, nor is the fact that I visit 'Poly more often than CFC written into CFC cookies. They are restricted by the domain name, so they can only be read or written by the same domain where you got them from in the first place. In that, sense, there is no information about your surfing habits in the cookies accessible to the shady sites. The only information they can write or read from your cookie is how often you visit their site, and which pages on their site you visit, and potentially how long you stay there. I, personally, don't see how that is an invasion of privacy - the sites that don't use cookies can achieve the exact same thing with the IP address tracking. (Well, having a dial-up connetion and thus a dynamic IP introduces a certain amount of complications to that, but in general that is the case.)

[gwillybj]

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I was mislead by various paranoid rants. I identified these three as Apolyton advertisers, and their cookies are now allowed past the crusher: qksrv, bfast, atdmt. There may be other advertisers that I've never blocked, so they've been allowed all along, and, of course, apolyton.net cookies were never blocked.

[DarkCloud]

Well, I am not sure that is true, actually. Cookies can only be written or read by the site that issued them. So, for instance

But they CAN be read by people other than the user... who can track where users visit. (at least that is my understanding... the reading may not be legal and might be connected to hacking, but it's still disturbing.)

[vovan]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
But they CAN be read by people other than the user... who can track where users visit.

No. That's the whole point of the cookie: it can only be read by the same site that issued it. For instance, suppose you log in to Apolyton, and set your personal preferences so you can remain logged in the next time you come back. Then, your log-in information is stored in a cookie. In fact, all "remember password" forms work that way. Do you think people would do it that way, if any old site could read your cookies? No. That's why cookies are at once fairly secure, and present no (in my view) intrusion of privacy: because they cannot be read by any site other than the one that created them.

(Since we are getting a little deeper into this "debate" than before, I suppose it is good to mention the fact that what I describe above is the way cookies are supposed to work. There was, indeed, one, or two instances, where it was discovered that one could read cookies issued by another domain through clever use of vb script, due to a few bugs in the way client-side scripting was implemented in IE. Note however, that, for one thing, only IE was subject to this vulnerability; that it had been fixed; and that it is not the normal practice. For all intents and purposes, cookies cannot be read by a domain that did not issue them.)