I know for a fact that the majority of web browsers (if not all) already implemented the popup blocking services so my questions is : Should we continue to concentrate our marketing efforts in this direction or not ? What do you think ?
I made a survey on one of my sites in early 2004 and 92% out of 400 uniques of my loyal return visitors voted that they really hated it. I stopped using it long ago but it's still effective if you know how to use it. Well, popups really suck. the best is to use a dhtml "sliding window".
Responsible use of popups (1:12hrs or once per user session) will not cost you any traffic and will make you substantial income. I speak from close to a decade of experience, not from opinion or conjecture. Many, many large websites (ESPN, Yahoo!, MSN, CNN, CNNsi, etc) all use pops and have for years. Why not split the traffic coming to your index page by 80%:20% and responsibly show a pop to the 20%. Track how many complaints you get (most likely none), how much traffic you gain or lose (most likely none), and how much extra income you make (most likely significant. Test for yourself and find out.
They are annoying indeed BUT if I see even a minor increase in my inceome due to their use, I will surely use them in the future too. I don't believe that all my visitors use state of the art popup blocking software.
Well ... there you go. Despite the existence of popup blockers there are webmasters who really earn big money out of this. Considering that my website (the one in the sig) will fully launch in a few weeks or so ... do you think I should start using popup righ away, after a while or never ? Please think like a business man (or woman)
SoniaJr, No, I would not reccomend you start useing pops right away. Actually I think worring about ad revenue should be 4th or 5th on your list of priorities right now. Build your site, get links up, increase your page rang, build traffic. After you get your site up to speed then start to test and implement different advertising methods.
Traditional pop-ups get blocked by ~ 90% of all browsers, so they aren’t really effective anymore and it’s true, almost everyone hates them. On the other hand, I think pop-overs & pop-unders (jscript + DHTML) are very effective if used properly (conveying a strong benefit...) and they are also much less annoying than simple pop-ups. You can buy software packages that create this kind of scripts (prices are ~$30 - $90), but you can get these relatively simple scrips also for free – just do a search on Google (something like: free pop over script) and copy & paste the script between the header tags of your home page.
Pop ups suck, and whenever I see them I just click off of them. When I'm searching for something specific I don't like having to click through pop ups that have nothing to do with what I'm searching for. My advice to you is to not use popups at all, especially on a new site. Your credibility will be slayed the moment visitors get to your site and see a popup.
I won't use any advertising methods until I manage to get a decent traffic on my website. I was thinking more on using popups as a help function or something similar.
I think that all depends on the way you are using popups. I believe there are annoying ways to do it and other ways that would not make my visitors angry. Anyway ... you've convinced me ... I won't use popups. At least for now ...
IMHO Popups - Bad for site visitors & bad practice for webmasters to use Popunders - Better, but still not so great for site visitors, but a nice handy little tool for webmasters to use
I think pop-ups drove my visitors away. I put my site up in a free host but didn't know that they had pop-ups because I block any and all pop-ups. Luckily some friends told me about it. Theirs comments were unanimous: "Your site is nice but those pop-ups are annoying." I have since moved my site to another free host that do not have pop-ups.