Is anybody anywhere as irritated as I am by pop-up ads?
If so, please write me and share your annoyance, your outrage. Maybe, together, we can do something about them. They are reproducing worse than Tribbles in that classic Star Trek episode.
Let’s unite, join forces and banish from the universe that dastardly pop-up practice once and for all.
First, I must emphasize I’m not against advertisements. Obviously not. I have worked on newspapers for almost four decades and am well aware ad revenue pays the lion’s share for the production of newspapers. I actually enjoy advertisements, except for the increasingly obnoxious TV ads, which I loathe more than words can express – at least polite words. However, in newspapers, magazines and online, I scan ads often, learning what’s going on, looking for good deals, clipping coupons. Ads – good ones – can be a form of news. Very informative and often cost-saving.
What I don’t like, what irritates me to no end, what wants to make me pull out my hair (what’s left of it) are the pop-up ads. They are like rude slaps in the face.
You open a newspaper or magazine website, then you click on a story’s headline and – Blam! Pow! Punch! – you are slapped in the face with a pop-up ad. While cursing (well, maybe you don’t, but I do), you have to put your cursor on the little “X” on the upper right of the sickeningly jolly colorful ad pitch and click on the “X” to get rid of the slam-bang intruder. However, sometimes, if you don’t click dead center on the “X,” the ad pitch opens, and you have to try to get out of the ad’s gushy visual-textual promises and return to the news story you wanted to read in the first place.
I guess this relentless ad intrusion, these constant slaps in the face, could be rationalized away, excused by newspapers and online magazines because they might claim they so badly need the revenue and that some advertisers insist their ads be pop-up ones. OK, fair enough. But where, oh where, is the courtesy and consideration for subscribers, like you and me, who pay hard-earned bucks to access the news online? For years, I have paid sometimes in excess of $100 per year to several newspapers and magazines to access their online stories. This year, I have dropped three of them because of their onslaught of pop-up ads, which are the equivalent of blood-sucking mosquitoes on an otherwise pleasant day. You have to keep swatting them to kill them or make them go away.
And sometimes swatting, these days, doesn’t even work. Recently, go figure, some newspaper and magazine digital geniuses (I use the term loosely) have figured out that mere swatting won’t kill or even deter the pests (the in-your-face intrusive ads). Now, on some newsy websites, you can put your cursor on the upper-right “X” and nothing happens. The mosquito keeps buzzing, humming, threatening to bite, to suck your blood. So you have to scroll down to the story you wanted to read to begin with.
I know, I know – this all sounds to some readers so mundane, trivial, such a petty complaint. But believe me, it’s not petty, and it’s not just my pet peeve. I have talked with scores of people in just the past few months who are just as hopping mad about these pop-up ads as I am.
Please write me, share your opinions, and maybe together we can start a Ban Pop-Up Ads Revolution.
Our rallying cry will be “Down, down, down with pop-up ads!”
