From Annoyance to Pleasure - The Artistic Popup Approach
May 12, 2006
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Popups or Hover ads?

During the last few years web advertising and marketing acquires greater and greater share of the web related activities, as Internet becomes more suitable for defining an electronic market in its environment, and more visitors tend to participate in it.

The Technology

There have been developed a number of web advertising means, such as banner advertisements, flash based ads, popup ads, etc. During the first years of utilization, an apparent exploit of effectiveness emerged - the beneficence of popup ads form of web advertising. The latter acquired a prominent share of online advertising technologies and solutions. One of the early Internet popup ads were created based on JavaScript technology, and using a very simple, plain and yet obtrusive method - the window.open() JavaScript function call. This routine does not manipulate the content of the web page thus it extends the application and environment of web real estate the surfer works in. The procedure opens a new browser window, which is in fact a standard operating system window, thus expanding the area of the visual interface of the user. The advertising content of these popup ads is presented in the newly created browser window as HTML content loaded from an external web address. The second important feature of this approach is the ability to iteratively create new operating system windows, branded as browser windows, and thus not only expand, without permission, the visual real estate of the visitor, but also, expand it infinitely and to the full extend, acquiring, capturing and consequentially taking over the visitors personal computer visual resources. This iterative generation of web browser windows leads to uncontrollable web experience and computer resource manipulation - a characteristic inherent to intruding software, i.e. computer viruses, malware, spyware, adware, etc.

The Effect

Using the above effects and capabilities, inimical participants in the web marketing and commerce space managed to deliver commercial information without permission or intention to web visitors, violating their computer experience, specifically getting over the boundaries of willing web information acceptance and presenting data outside the web space the visitors intends to experience. This behaviour led to classifying popup ads as SPAM and to develop methods and software to block this malicious behaviour. As a result, the ordinal popup ads were successfully and easily disabled (blocked) by software components called popup blockers.

"The Good" came to the scene

Inevitably, web advertising specialists started searching for new ways to develop applicable web advertisements. The reason for this trend was on one hand the diminishing of violent popup ads, but also the realization of the fact that the web market was growing with a higher rate and there was clear and undoubted hunger among Internet business parties to utilize this market as a normal media market through the means of full featured and adequate advertising approaches. The fact was there, current ads were not achieving the potential of the web markets and the latter was incomparably archaic and undeveloped compared to television and radio media advertising. Thus the hover ads were born. The final word of web market development and the approach which finally succeeded in reaching the top and utilizing the full of the web space and Internet marketplace.

The Technology

Hover ad web advertisement are utilizing the full potential of the web based media and technologies thus delivering the ultimate experience to web advertisers and moving the web marker space to its mature state of existence. They are developed around several web browser technologies but in the centre of their realization stays the so called modern form of HTML - the Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language. DHTML is a creative synthesis between HTML markup language and the JavaScript procedural and object oriented programming language. DHTML was created due to the large demand among web users worldwide to make Internet a multimedia place for information exchange with full realization of the potential of modern IT technologies available.

The Result

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