When did Customize.org start using those fake popups? What a PITA that is. I understand the need for advertising money but if someone has disabled popups, then they don't want popups. Simple as that.
If you don't want to see any more ads, start paying for Customize.org's hosting and bandwidth costs.
If you don't want to do that, I'd suggest dealing with the ads as best as you can, to quit bitching about the ads, and to be glad that Customize.org is still 100% free.
I do not block any banner ads. Popups & popunders are too intrusive, especially for a site where the majority of the content is user submitted. This site doesn't blong to me though. Whatever.
That's the point. Unless you can come up with a better way for Customize.org to bring in money, you'll have to deal with ads and popups/popunders.
I don't mean to come off as a complete dick, but a lot of people have whined and complained about the advertising (including ads and popups) in the past, without doing anything remotely helpful to keep the site running.
Customize doesnt choose the ads we have. I dont know exactly how it works, but the ads are not chosen by us. Currently we are trying to figure out a way to run custo without these ads, but it is very difficult. It costs money to run a website. Since this website is free to its users, we have to have ads to make money to run the site. If you want to help out, buy a t-shirt and/or a sticker.
I love it, keep the ads coming. I just installed a pop-up blocker and I'm good. I mean, this site is crazy w/o one, but you get one and it's great. Keep it how it is, I like it!
PepeM4Y: I'm not sure; I've heard some people say that they click on a couple ads each day (I'm one of them) but I've noticed that a lot of them ask for an email address. Therefore, I'm not sure if the ads work on a pay-per-click basis, or if they require user input. I guess we'll have to wait till darksheer sees this, or until someone asks him and gets back to all of us.
farm: Good for you. Go buy a shirt or a sticker now.
fool, if you block the ad noone makes any revenue ... and thats makes it a completely redundant scheme. i say lets think about this and come up with something "truly evil and intuitive", similar in class to the page titles. keep the popup's coming, i'm happy to click one once in awhile or get/find/make a program that clicks the link then closes the window.
This been talk about many time. I agreed with that ads may needed to help pay the bills. I have no problem with that. But the only thing I can complain is that this fake popup will stay/stuck in the middle of the browser window and sometimes the page will not be able to scroll up/down because of it.
+| he who will kill the god if given the slightest chance |+
i find that the 'opera' web browser helps keep popups under control. I mean it doesnt block them or anything, but opens them up and hides them behind whatever you're doing. That way when you're done browsing customize.org, open up all those popups and just click on them all and exit. It only takes a minute or two and it helps out.
Interesting fact - clicking popups doesn't help sites directly, it only helps them in theory.
Once upon a time in the 90's, when the internet was still a giddy virginal schoolgirl, there were two dominant forms of banner ad contracts: CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost-per-thousand). Cost per click campaigns paid on a 'per-click' basis, with a site making $0.08 to $0.10 per click on a banner ad. CPM campaigns paid websites from $1 (to as much $75 in the .com hayday) per thousand impressions an advertisement got.
At the time, larger sites were all using CPM, and making money hand over fist if they played their cards right (ultimately leading to the .com bubble), while smaller sites which didn't qualify for CPM campaigns used CPC. Smaller websites tended to have smaller-thinking owners who thought it would be a good idea to ask their users to click on the ads to 'help them out'.
Since CPC pays for each click, theoretically this would help websites directly (and it did for a while). But when advertisers discovered that people were clicking through ads just to support websites, the per-click value dropped by some 95% industry wide.
But for whatever reason, users got it in their heads that clicking banners equaled helping a site, even though it doesn't make ANY difference to sites using CPM campaigns.
Some people argue that click throughs help the website *indirectly*, because more clickthroughs (or a higher clickthrough rate) industry wide would result in more online advertising, but realistically the online advertising industry is either dying or dead in every form.
For many mainstream websites, advertising represents less than 40% of their total income, and in many cases (such as, for instance, homestarrunner.com or livejournal.com), advertising would perform so poorly it's not even used, instead merchandising sales support the site 100%.
in the real world advertising is geared specifically towards the kind of person that will be seeing it. googleads do this by analyzing the content of a page.
