The NYTimes.com has been running pop-under advertising since last summer. "It's become one of our more popular offerings [for advertisers]," says Craig Calder, vice president at New York Times Digital.
Consumer response rates to pop-ups or pop-unders can range anywhere from one percent to 15 percent depending on how targeted the campaign is, industry sources say. At Flipside Inc., which operates Traffic Marketplace, a pop-under ad network, an average of five percent of the people who see a pop-under from one of their clients click on the ad and sign up for a service or buy a product, said director of marketing Michael Streefland. That compares with a typical Web banner ad's click-through rate of less than one percent.
Moderator Comment: As the trend to retailer-specific marketing grows, should these plans include the use of pop-up/under co-op ads with manufacturers on the retailer's e-commerce site?
A new item has been added to the list of things you should never speak about in polite company: politics, religion, money and now, pop-up/under ads.
If you want an emotional response from your average everyday web-surfer ask them how they feel about pop-up ads. The search engine, Google.com, stopped running pop-up/under ads after it received numerous complaints from users of its service. The complaints made Google's technicians aware of a potentially more serious problem. Other sites were using a stealth code to launch pop-ups from Google's pages. [George Anderson - Moderator]