A Pop-Under Odyssey

Recently, while visiting ESPN.com to follow as closely as possible (for an American) the Stanley Cup playoffs, I went on a strange pop-under ad odd-I-see. Come, let me recreate it for you:

On page load, a pop-under opens. It's minimized, see, so I can see it on the taskbar but it's not a regular pop-up sized dialog box. I can't click it and set focus to it or display it because it's only minimize/maximizable. There is no restore. So I right click and maximize it, and I am treated to this beauty:

Whoa! Sorry for the scroll. Is that a 404 from the ad server, or what? Who cares? I right click it and close it, whereupon I am greeted with this offer:



Sweet! One simple inattentive click, ENTER, or press of the space bar and suddenly I'm searching with the unfamous qsrch.com. So I click No, whereupon another ad displays:



Angelina Joile in a Riddler blindfold. I've had dreams like that, but I don't want to lose the PG-13 rating on this blog, so I'll keep them to myself.

The whole thing illustrates how Internet sites that pad their underline with ad revenue from pop-up ads really don't audit the ads that display, nor do they approve or even pay attention to the content and behavior of advertisements that their sites spawn. If I were in marketing for these sites, I would carp incessantly about the difficulties of building a brand when you're letting taggers pay for advertising on the side of your building.

Of course, my marketing assistant alter-ego would have been gone in the first round of layoffs, but hey.