Ask HN: Why are popups still being used today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are popups still being used today?

6 pointsrevskill5 comments

I have a question (actually a confusion), that my habit is always block a website (means hardly i'll revisit it again in future) if it has popups for marketing purposes.

Does that strategy actually work for them ? I might consider myself in minority here. Just ask for some curiosity facts.

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In my experience it doesn’t work for people actually wanting to sell something. I don’t know why marketing folks keep doing it, but hopefully they’re measuring the ROI at least and seeing that it pisses off most users. Then again, most sites don’t actually care because they get their money from the ad traffic.

It's not more annoying than a skippable YouTube pre-roll ad (which is sometimes directly encoded into the video feed by the streamer).

From an advertiser perspective, of course it works if you have a product to sell to the audience visiting the website (a mobile game, etc...).

A popunder is really no different from YouTube ads, except the advertisement doesn't cover the page content nor blocks it.

Some of the networks are even so confident that they will bring you new revenues and make you profitable that they will take the financial risk on their side (you just give the product and agree on a revenue-share and they pay all the traffic acquisition from their pocket).

Not even AdWords offers that (you take all the risk, and when you are down 100K USD, Google just says "hey, too bad, but thank you for the money, if you want you can put 500K again to make a test")

I read on article on this once (don't remember where) and it showed that the popups got very few clicks but they did increase traffic/brand awareness/etc by essentially subliminal means. They want you to just close it without consideration just to plant their name in your head so when you are shopping for a product service they offer you recognize their name without knowing why you recognize the name. If you recognize a brand you are more likely to consider what they have to offer more seriously than a brand you have never heard of, especially when the recognition is a vague recollection you can't place, it makes it feel more important.

The numbers in the article were fairly clear, despite abysmal clicks they would see results.

1) They probably have some data that indicates that this tactic generally works for them. There's a ton of shitty businesses and landing pages that use random dumb popups that make money: not Facebook or Google money, but some solid income.

2) If I had to guess, I'd bet that tactic works well on a less experienced and technically unsophisticated crowd. You might not be the target audience for some dumb popup, but a less experienced user who sees some flashy warning message might just take the bait.

I always hated popups and the thought is: I need to get out of here immediately. Been running a website for 10 years with some type of ads and I ran ads for a little while, only to find them really annoying and could imagine how my visitors felt.

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