AfterDawn.com pulls pop-unders from its site
Alright, so, its official now. We have now removed the last remaining so-called "pop ads" from our site. We did so to our forums few months ago without notifying anyone about it and now the transition is complete for the main site as well. No more annoying pop-unders.
To know the history of our site's advertisement decisions, we need to go back in time. Our site was founded in 1999 and our aim right from the beginning was to keep the site easy to use and friendly for users. Unfortunately, back in 2001 or so, our site was experiencing the aftershock of the dotcom collapse and advertising money spent on banners by big companies simply vanished, almost overnight. As our site was a small entity back (not a company, just an obsession run by seven guys) then, only about half a million page impressions each month and only few thousand registered users, we were struggling to keep the site running -- to even cover the hosting fees. Thus, we, like thousands of other sites -- ranging from goliaths of Net to small hobby sites -- had to adopt the much-hated "popping ad" advertising to our site. However, we wanted to spare our users from the worst and have never actually accepted "pop up" ads, but instead, we always used "pop under" ads -- simply put, ads that (in pre-tabbed browsing world) opened in a separate window, behind the active window. Additionally, we forced our advertisers and ad networks to set the limits so that one user could only be annoyed by one pop-under, not more than that.
Our indie band service, MP3Lizard.com, just reached one of its big milestones, when the 10,000th track was added to the site.
