Come on in.
Sit down; make yourself comfortable. Kick up your feet and read my magazine of life. In the meantime, I’m going to try to smack you upside the head with my promotional material and make you give me your email address. Don’t worry, there’s a “close” button somewhere, but you’re going to have to find it because I hid it. Come on, it’ll be fun.
It’s really not fun at all. As a matter of fact, it’s the number one way to piss off your website guests according to a recent Elite Eternity consumer study. lol.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about by now, then the pictures below will help illustrate my point. I’m talking about those terribly annoying website popups. I guess you could call them the web 2.0 version of 90′s pop-up advertisements.
Take special care to notice where John Chow puts his “close” text. It’s cleverly hidden to the bottom right of the window so you have to scroll over to click on it. Tricky, tricky.
The Condemned Ones:
I’m willing to bet that these marketing gurus (in the case of the affiliate marketing blogs) are converting a lot more sign-ups because of this pop-up. As a matter of fact, I know they are, or they wouldn’t be doing it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it pisses me and many others off.
I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if it would only happen once, but for a site that I visit multiple times a week, it gets really annoying having to play the “find the close button” game over and over. Give me a break.
Do you agree?
Edit: Don’t get the impression that I’m hating on Zac Johnson, ShoeMoney, or The Chow Man by this post. I’ve said many good things about all of them, and I wouldn’t be anywhere (as far as affiliate marketing goes) without them. It’s just that the lightbox fade in gets on my nerves. But if that little box is all that stands between me and the great info they provide, then by all means, keep the lightbox.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Cowboy,
Just an FYI.. but on John’s website, you’re probably having to scroll to the right to see the close button because you’re on an inferior browser. [aka chrome] Those of us that use the more reliable (but slower) browser do not have that inconvenience.
Hardly “inferior,” but you make a good point. I wonder why it does that. It does it in FFX too, just not enough to hide the “close.”
Nice post. It’s pissed me off and even worse one did it and the others jumped on board. So it hit everyone at once.
Good thing Shoe money is the only site of those that I still visit. Shoemoney’s should only popup once, but not sure about the others.
Thanks Keith.
Yeah, maybe it’s because I use Google Chrome and there is some sort of bug or something, but it seems like every time I go there it pops up. Maybe I’m just seeing things though.