The people running Eyeconomy are bad people. They encourage people who have web sites to use bad practices.
Take a look of their section on sub-sites. What they so innocuously call “sub-sites” are better known to the rest of the world as “pop-unders” – that is those extra windows that open underneath your existing browser window and stay there until you find them when you minimise or close your browser. Or, at least, they used to until you installed Firefox and got the benefits of pop-up blocking (you did install Firefox, didn’t you?)
See how proud they are of their technology. See how they use marketing terminology to make it sound like what they are advocating is perfectly acceptable.
And then see this chilling phrase towards the bottom of the page.
Coming soon – Total Pop-up blocker bypass system – Regain that lost traffic due to pop-up blockers with our new system which simply ignores the block and delivers anyway
Now, I know that it’s possible to get round most pop-up blockers. I’ve started to see it happen occasionally on Firefox. But that’s ok. A newer version of Firefox will eventually plug that hole. And then people like Eyeconomy will spend time getting around the improved pop-up blocking. And then Firefox will block the new pop-ups. And so on.
But what people like Eyeconomy need to realise is that pop-up blocking is popular for a reason. People don’t like pop-ups. And forcing pop-ups onto people when they’ve installed a pop-up blocker isn’t going to be a very popular move.
The lesson is that pop-ups just piss people off. You really don’t want to be using them.
Actually, ABCE (http://www.abce.org.uk) also call it subsiting. So it’s something of an official name. But when they issue their certificates it is necessary to state whether or not you have used subsiting. So an audit certificate with “100,000 page impressions and we employ subsiting” is of less value than one saying “100,000 page impressions and we do not employ subsiting”.
If people don’t like subsiting then it will eventually die out as the cost outstrips the value. Anyone who finds themselves trapped in that dying market will just be a victim of simple eyeconomics.
Hi Dave, I was talking to a legal friend of mine yesterday and he said that your comments regarding Eyeconomy above are libelous according to the Defamation Act 1952/1996. You might want to retract or better still bin the page.