Most pop-up ads come from just 63 firms
They seem inescapable, but a new report has found that pop-up ads are used by less than 10 percent of on-line advertisers.



Although pop-up or pop-under ads can be found literally popping-up all over the Internet, much to the irritation of many Net users, Nielsen//NetRatings has said that only 9.2 percent of all companies advertising on-line use them.



According to Nielsen//NetRatings, advertisers purchased and launched more than 11.3 billion pop-up ad impressions (including pop-under ads) during the first seven months of 2002. This constituted just two percent of the total on-line advertising market.



The research company defines pop-up advertising as any ad that spawns a new browser without user input, and includes pop-up ads that focus to the front or back of the active browser (pop-under).



Although the ad format was used to a greater extent by niche sites such as on-line directories and games Web sites, the likes of portals, search engines and e-commerce sites avoided it. Nielsen//NetRatings said that around 80 percent of all pop-up advertising was carried out by just 63 companies, with the remainder split between 2,145 companies.



The leading pop-up advertiser was X10 with more than one billion of pop-up ads for its wireless video cameras launched during the first half of 2002. In second place, was travel site Orbitz with 687 million pop-up ad impressions, followed by Providian Financial with 679 million.



The research company also found that advertisers are using pop-up ads primarily as a direct marketing tool, instead of to build their brands. More than 6.5 billion impressions, or 58 percent of all pop-up ads, attempted to drive traffic to the advertiser's site, while 26 percent offered incentives aimed at increasing traffic. This, said Nielsen//NetRatings, indicated that 84 percent of all pop-up ads used a direct marketing tactic, which is much higher than the industry average of 64 percent.


"Despite consumers' general distaste for the ads, a few advertisers clearly view the benefits of pop-up advertising as greater than the harm to brand image," commented Charles Buchwalter, vice president of client analytics in Nielsen//NetRatings.



Buchwalter added that although more and more sites are banning pop-ups, he expected new ad designs to be introduced that would be less intrusive and more responsive to consumer desires.



One company that has made a move to outlaw pop-ups is US Internet Service Provider, EarthLink. It said at the end of August that it would offer a pre-release version of Pop-Up Blocker, an application that runs within Microsoft's Internet Explorer and stops pop-up or pop under ads from appearing, so that its users could have a "more enjoyable, less intrusive Internet experience."



Pop-Up Blocker does though allow users to review thumbnail images of the ads blocked by the software, and can be customised to allow for pop-up windows to be displayed by specific sites-such as e-commerce sites, which often use pop-ups to display product information. EarthLink expects to bundle the full version of Pop-Up Blocker with its Internet software from next year.



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