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.
Despite our best efforts, pops were always hated -- we didn't really like them either, but hoped that people would understand that advertisements pay for the content, for the servers and for the service users receive from ad-funded sites like ours. But, they were always hated :-) Thus, we have now eliminated them from AfterDawn.com. For good.
-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 29 Apr 2006 9:41
