I always considered pop-up advertising as spam. I was just looking over some article on the net and some of them are saying that pop-ups are not spam and are completely legal. Is this true?
In theory yes they are perfectly legal, not that i know of any rules concerning them, but as it's the webmasters page your looking at which I belive is someone elses property, spamming is rather intrution of privacy.
Probably not. If you look, Most sites like Proxy sites, Myspace, Hotmail, Sometimes have them. I expect only the 'Virus Pop ups' are illegal of course.
If I were to hire a company to advertise my website through pop-ups how would they do that? Do they have a network of websites that allow them to show pop-ups in exchange for a percentage of the earnings?
Pop up ads aren't illegal, just veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery annoying (and I would add in alot more e's in there but don't want to waste time like that), thus in the regards of annoyance it is spam... again VERY legal, but if it annoys someone they can just choose not to go to your site. Basically, unless you have irresistible content that the average person going to your site don't want to browse away from then yea... look into that. Though I'd look into embedded ads on the page like text ads/banner/skyscraper ads since they're unintrusive.. Now as I'm typing this that IS the preferred way to do advertising since pop-ups seems so 2003 especially there's several other issues with pop-ups that I don't want to get into. But yea... pop-ups = legal but utmost in annoyance. Get at Adsense, Adbrite, hell even I run a online ad network (no shameless plug - in it's infancy anyways) that'll do everything but annoy a user the way pop-ups will.
I agree with the post above, They are VERY annoying. If any site has them I would leave straight away, That's why most proxies put me off
They are completely legal and completely annoying! Do what you want with your own stuff, but read terms when using popups to generate third party.
I find popups and popunders incredibly annoying. I would personally never, ever click something advertised on one. That being said, the fact that they exist and are so widespread must mean they work for some group of people. I'm just not in that demographic.