A Whodunit!

Ladies and gentlemen, who or what is putting pop-under ads on blogs?

I've seen this happen on occasion for a couple of weeks now. As you know, I surf without pop-up blocking technology in certain situations so that I can explore the seamy underbelly of Internet commerce for you. I've been known to hit a number of blogs on my other blog's blogroll. Once in a while, a click on the blog roll would open a pop-under, too.

The First Time I Saw It

I'd narrowed the behavior to Balloon Juice. Want to see? Here goes:



Note the titlebar to the pop-under, claiming ownership.



An online casino ad! How quaint.

I asked John Cole, proprieter of Balloon Juice, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He uses pop-up blockers and hasn't seen this, and apparently has not sold this particular "space" for his own benefit.

Here are a couple other ads that have popped up while I have enjoyed Cole's commentary:







Here are some URLs to other ads I have seen rotated under Balloon Juice but didn't capture. Enjoy the complete beauty of the animated GIF until their companies issue a cease-and-desist to me:




Now, here's the thing: The pop-unders don't appear on every page load. They show up at random intervals. You can reload the page four or five times, and the pop-under opens only on the sixth. Could this be an intelligent decision on the part of the marketer, who expects blogs to be opened from blogrolls, more than one at a time? It certainly would mask the offending blog, wouldn't it?

And Then I Saw It Again

Last night, I saw Bill Hobbs.com was throwing them:



Again, the titlebar shows the calling page before it loads the HTML for the new page.



It's a common screensaver ad.

Here are two other ads I've seen load under Bill Hobbs' blog:





I contacted Bill Hobbs, and he, too, had no idea. Tonight, I have not seen any pop-unders on his site, although I have certainly spiked his traffic reloading the site.

Could It Be Adware on My Computer?

Yes, it could be. However, I have tried this on two computers, on two networks. One environment features a paranoid guy who refuses to download anything from the Internet, and the other features a professional network administration staff that refuses to let any user, even paranoid guys, download anything from the Internet.

Also, in my rambling amongst blogs and other sites, this behavior is only consistent between these two sites as described above.

Brian J. Speculates

• The ads are rotated, and represent heavily rotated ads. You will see these ads under some mainstream magazine sites and The Drudge Report. However, the casino ads introduce an interesting wrinkle; you won't see those under larger Web sites such as CNN or Fox News.
  
  
• I suspect, but have no proof, that one of the external scripts these guys have in their blog templates is responsible for the pop-unders, and both call BlogAds. Maybe they both embed the same counter or something, but I haven't looked that deeply.
  
  
• Could it be a particularly unscrupuluous advertiser that dishes up pop-unders from a third party to underwrite a portion of their own advertising costs?

Any further answers are beyond my technological ken. Hey, I am a tester by trade, fellows; I see the behavior and I report it and I let those wiser than me figure it out.

So turn off your pop-up blocking technology and go take a look. Make sure I am not crazy.

And bloggers: be careful out there. Make sure no one is piggybacking on your success by stealing advertising revenue from you.

Update: As alluded to in this post, it looks as though BraveNet's started dishing up pop-up ads with their free counters. This campaign seems to be relatively new, but I've seen the ads on Pejmanesque and Asymmetrical Information now, too. Whenever I see the extra window and flashing icon on my taskbar now when opening a blog, I know to look for the Bravenet counter, and so far, it's always been there.