[Sigia-l] AOL is NOT stopping pop-ups

[Brian.Calandra at ogilvy.com]

Before we all start firing cannons into the air to celebrate a victory in
the war for a usable Web, AOL has most certainly NOT stopped using pop-ups.
It's shrewdly manipulating the media for a sound bite. Time Warner is
trying to goose AOL's stock and ad sales (now there's irony) by
demonstrating how it is updating its services to avoid churn or defections
within its 35 million strong subscriber/consumer base. They're removing ads
so they can advertise better.

An detailed report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (too bad their online
service is subscription only) provided salient details about AOL's decision
to remove pop-ups. The only pop-ups the "ban" applies to are windows that
greet an AOL user when they log on, and annoyingly jump up, porn style,
when a user tries to log off. The Journal article specifically addressed
the fact that AOL wasn't, like Earthlink, giving its users functionality to
disable ALL Web pop-ups, and even included a quote warning that in light of
this closed revenue stream it is exploring "new" ways to insert advertising
into the overall Internet experience.

If anyone has access to that Journal article, it would be fantastic if you
could submit it to this list. Why I'm suprised by exploited press moves
from AOL/Time Warner I'm not sure, but rest assured this is calculated move
to imply that AOL's service won't get marginalized by cheaper competitors,
like Yahoo, and that its advertisers will be able to speak to a captive
audience more effectively, since they'll continue to gather more
information on them over time.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Brian


On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, PeterV wrote:

> I wonder if that means pop-ups stopped getting good click-throughs
> (possibly because users got used to them and started adopting
> "close-immediately"-like behaviour).
>
> Ironically, I got a pop-up when visiting the page on Wired.
>
> Hey, I just noticed the new Wired design has text-sizing buttons that
> are *relative* to your browser settings (unlike the text sizing seen so
> far on many weblogs that ignore your browser settings which is a bad
> thing). The first accessible text-sizings buttons I have ever seen.
>
> PeterV
>
>
> ------------
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
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