Pop-Up Ads
Pop-up ads or popups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web (www) intended to increase web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means as well.Pop up windows come in many different shapes and sizes, typically in a scaled-down browser window with only the Close, Minimize and Maximize commands.

There is a strong resentment by some Web surfers towards pop-up ads. Marketers often do not realize the ill-will generated by pop-ups because it is easier to click the "close" button than send an email to complain. What can often be seen is an above-average click-through rate, although some of this can come from "false positives," unintentional clicks when the pop-up gets in the way of the desired target. Advertisers can get a better picture of the effectiveness of pop-up advertising by paying attention to conversion rates and return on investment (ROI).Pop-up ads are not popular with the average Web surfer, and there are several products that disable them, such as Pop-up Stopper, Pop-up Killer, and Pop-up Annihilator. One thing to look for in such a program is the ability to differentiate between user-initiated pop-up windows and others, because many other applications (for example Webcasts ) make use of pop-up windows. If a pop-up stopper utility can't tell the difference between a pop-up window that the user has requested and an unsought pop-up ad, the program may cause more problems for the user than it solves.

Pop up advertising was successful, but pop ups are everywhere. At one point of time, pop up advertising became so omniscient and irritating that many people raised a hue and cry about how it was messing their surfing experience. Each time a surfer would open a new window, a pop up advertising specimen would come up and distract him/her from the actual surfing. This was all fine in the initial days when pop up advertising was still a novelty and much sought after, but soon, especially since it was popping up everywhere, people were tired of it. It was just a short transition from that to getting exasperated with pop up advertising and people made that transition real quick. And pop up advertising became a dirty word in the online space.

Small wonder then that, pop up advertising is better known today for the number of softwares and companies that try to eradicate it than the number of companies that specialize in producing it. The valuable bandwidth that it occupies and the near nothing returns that it generates has ensured that producers of pop up advertising have been driven underground for the most part. Those who remain in the sphere, do so as eradicators of pop up advertising. There are a number of anti pop up advertising software available, either as free downloads or as packaged offers with other anti virus software. This in itself is a telling point against the use of pop up advertising. Virus programs are malicious programs written to extract information from a users computers or to use other computers for the transmission of memory hogging, virulent programs. But pop up advertising had very similar aims when it started out.

Pop-up blocking
Opera was the first major browser to incorporate tools to block pop-up ads; the Mozilla browser later improved on this by blocking only pop-ups generated as the page loads. In the early 2000s, all major web browsers except Internet Explorer allowed the user to block unwanted pop-ups almost completely. In 2004, Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, which added pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer.

Most modern browsers come with pop-up blocking tools; third-party tools tend to include other features such as ad filtering.

Blocking of legitimate "pop-ups"
In some cases a pop-up is desirable and problems can arise when they are inappropriately blocked.

  • Many websites use pop-ups to display information without disrupting the page currently open, e.g., if you were to fill in a form on a web page and needed extra guidance, a pop-up would give you extra information without losing any information already entered into the form. Most pop-up blockers will allow this kind of pop-up, however, some will reload the page, losing any information that was entered.
  • Some web based installers such as that used by McAfee use a pop-up to install software.
  • On many internet browsers, holding down the ctrl key while clicking a link will allow it to bypass the popup filter.

Circumventing pop-up blockers
Advertisers continually seek ways to circumvent such restrictions, e.g., some pop-up ads are generated using Adobe Flash. Since pop-up blockers only blocked the JavaScript method, the Flash method would bypass the pop-up blocker.

A combination of a banner ad and a popup window is the "hover ad", which uses DHTML to appear in front of the browser screen. With the use of JavaScript, an advertisement can be superimposed over a webpage in a transparent layer. This advertisement can appear as almost anything the author of the advertisement wants, e.g., an advertisement can contain a Adobe Flash animation linking to the advertiser's site. An advertisement can also look like a regular window. Because the advertisement is a part of the web page, it can be blocked with third-party ad blockers such as Adblock or by using custom style sheets. DHTML ads can be very CPU intensive, sometimes bogging down older computers to the point of unusability.

Pop-up generators
A popup generator is a computer application used to design, produce, store, install and maintain popup advertisements. Popup generators vary from simple ones that generate blockable old-style annoying popups, to complex and sophisticated computer software applications, used to develop feature rich popup ads and hover ad windows.

Pop up advertising aimed to present users with a viable and attractive alternative to conventional advertising avenues on the web. When it first came about, pop up advertising was heralded as revolutionary, exciting and some experts even predicted that it would soon root out all other forms of advertising online. They were right, but in a self destructive sort of way. The initial success of pop up advertising led to its rampant abuse. It would be safe to say that no other form of advertising since the dawn of civilization has enjoyed as much fame and abuse as pop up advertising has. So from an exciting and new age medium, pop up advertising evolved, or should  rather one day devolved into something little better than spam.