“MacDailyNews (MDN) has been expunged from this pundit’s bookmarks. Their use of pop-under advertising has simply become too annoying,” ron carlson writes for Insanely Great Mac. “As the site plainly admitted, a cookie generated by the site limits the number of pop-under ads to one every 24 hours. There are days when I’ve seen more, but one is the general rule. However, a couple dozen Mac sites offer nearly identical content and manage to put bread on the table without resorting to such unwashed advertising tactics. So, why suffer even a single moment’s annoyance?”
carlson writes, “Perhaps if enough of us decide that pop-unders aren’t acceptable, period, MDN will change its tune. Until then here’s one reader that’s taking his ad impressions and walking… What’s your take?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: MDN will change our tune when we can land an advertiser or advertisers that will commit to making up for the loss of the pop-under revenue. The alternative is a site is updated much less frequently without a single pop-under per day. If a single pop-under bothers you enough to no longer visit MDN, well, we hope to welcome you home when we’ve landed that replacement revenue. Or maybe Apple will get Safari working again… Anyway, the full, sordid “pop-under story” is explained here and we also provide a link for opting-out of pop-unders.
Please ask yourself honestly, of the “a couple dozen Mac sites that offer nearly identical content” out there, how many would link to an article that reams them (thanks, ron) and also provide an advertising opt-out option to its readers?
We’ve been upfront about this throughout. We’ve always had pop-unders. Safari users got used to not having them and a few people had a minor stroke when Safari’s pop-under blocker was coded around. Welcome to Capitalism. MDN stopped pop-unders immediately at this time – based on principle – while we investigated. When we discovered a way to let those who didn’t want pop-under ads opt-out, we provided the link and turned those ads back on. Without advertisers, MDN cannot run – this is an ad-supported site. Admittedly, we’re not the greatest ad salespeople, but we’re trying our best (lately) and things are slowly getting better.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Safari’s and Firefox’s Pop-Up Blockers broken? [UPDATE] – February 20, 2005