Would you like fries with that?
Competition is good. Free markets are good. Censorship and monopolies are bad.
The beauty of our system is that users (generally and should) get to decide what products thrive and which perish. No one person generally gets to make the decision for the whole.
I do not disagree that pops can be annoying, but whether a site has them or not is a decision the users of that site should make. When users’ desires are carried out by the companies that vie for their attention, things work. In my mind, there are many areas of online advertising that have this and certainly some that do not. Pops have this. People can block pops coming from sites. Plenty of free and paid tools exist, and they work. Most ad companies will admit that 30% of their impressions currently get blocked. The system is working. So, why do companies feel the need or entitlement to make decisions that impact the market as a whole, to speak for the collective as though they cannot act on their own.
We want healthy competition. In my opinion, if one company owns the market, you get unhealthy competition because others too often work at eating away at the dominant player’s power rather than focusing on what the customer wants. Similarly, when a company is too dominant it can block out all legitimate entries that try to give the customer what they want, leading back to this unhealthy competition that only damages the landscape.
As I mentioned in my previous article on this topic, there are a lot of advertisers who have moved away from pops; but for those of us in the direct response world, it is still a great vehicle. We don’t have budgets we must hit, so practicality is the name of our game.
Active X ads, often the scourge of the internet, are a great example of how the market should work. A lot of users don’t like Active X ads. When Active X ads show up on a site they frequent, they complain to the site. That site in turn, stops showing those type of ads. The ads work for marketers, so they still focus on it, but consumers still have the ultimate say. No regulation, no big brother like interference by a particular company. It’s still not a perfect business, but so long as the consumer voice dictates how the market behaves, no entity needs to step in and decrease the efficiency of the free market.
Interference by a third party, while most likely arising from good intentions, generally means undesirable consequences for the end user. If pops go away, ads are likely to get more aggressive not less. Interfere when the system doesn’t correct itself, not when it does. Those trying to impose rules on a working system, tend only to make the environment more unruly not less.
Ultimately, disabling pops will make the majority of users happy. Most of us in the space will find ways to cope with the change. I know we will. I’m certainly not looking forward to the extra work, but the work doesn’t anger me. No, I’ll be angry at the precedent it sets, at having to operate in a system that does not have the freedoms upon which it was founded. That’s not our system. That’s not good for the people, and obviously not good for the businesses that service them. I wish these companies could understand that. Our work has enough challenges without someone artificially creating more.
Keep the pops? Doesn’t really matter. Just keep out of it. If there is something we don’t want to see, give us a remote. Don’t turn off the TV and risk causing our favorite program only being available on cable.
