The dreaded pop-up ... could it really be on the way back?

For a while, about 10 or 11 years ago it became popular for website owners to consider pop-ups as a way to maximise impact.

After all, visitors' eyes might gloss over that banner ad - or, back then, the stack of 120x60 buttons - on either side of your content, but who could fail to notice if a big pop-up exploded across your screen?

Just because you can do something, of course, doesn't mean you should, and the dire effects of this form of communications, whether for the purposes of paid advertising or to draw users' attention to your own products or services - special offers or a newsletter, for example - became apparent very soon.

These days, the old-style browser window pop-up seems to be permanently fenced off in the less savoury porn-and-poker dungeons of the internet.


When we do see pop-ups, they're generally via smoother, infinitely less invasive in-browser devices, often based on once-per-user cookies. Even then they're used very sparingly - the legally important matter of cookie privacy policies have been broadcast in this way across many sites - and there's always, always a straightforward means of closing the in-browser pop-up through a nicely intuitive "X".

So it was a surprise to click onto the website of The New Yorker earlier and be confronted by a pop-up which not only dominated the screen but also forced a load time delay before the "X" option was available to skip past it.

It may not be as primitive as the multiple pop-ups and pop-unders of circa 2000, but it isn't far off.

There's no doubt The New Yorker tech guys will have set up some web analytics to allow them monitor the impact of this on visitors to their site.

Whether a plugged-in brand (sorry...) like Wired would be too enamoured with appearing in a manner like this, in effect being the conduit of potential annoyance to hundreds of thousands of web users, I'm not sure.

Either way, it's certain that there are executives in both The New Yorker and Wired penning strongly-worded emails about the potential fall-out for their brand, possibly as we speak.

Lesson to digital marketers - push the message too hard, and don't be surprised if the user revolts. Sometimes being up front and centre just isn't worth the hassle.