March 31, 2001

8:09 AM

View this ad or we shoot this dog:Forget CNET's poster-size adverts. The latest trend is a user agreement that requires visitors to view your banners.

What other websites will attempt to adopt this trend? And what will the backlash be? I for one won't go to sites that "require" me to view advertising.

Story towards bottom of the page
posted by da5id (6 comments total)

Who cares? Such user agreements are completely unenforceble, and will be ignored.
posted by aaron at 9:41 AM on March 31, 2001

here's what they said after a complaint in their forums:

Our advertising company contacted us and they have an extra supply of Pop-up ads... which means they're paying an extra large amount for them!

They only have this extra high paying inventory for today and tomorrow; so we have added an extra popup or two to other pages on the site to help bring in additional revenues

does this make any sense to anyone?
posted by quarsan at 9:52 AM on March 31, 2001

It makes me wonder if the people who run the site understand the difference between physical and electronic inventory. 'Extra supply of pop-up ads' my heinie.
posted by darukaru at 10:41 AM on March 31, 2001

"they're just sitting here NOT popping up! we need to MOVE MOVE MOVE!!"
posted by pnevares at 11:07 AM on March 31, 2001

I hurt my back picking up a gross case of pop-up ads once.

Of course, what they mean is that they had oversold ad impressions to their clients. They needed to get extra impressions quickly or they would have to do a buyback. (TV networks have to do the same sort of thing if a show has much lower viewership than expected. Either they refund cash to the advertiser, or more often, they offer a deal for ad time on another show.) Thus they would pay a premium just to get their ads seen by the end of the month.
posted by dhartung at 2:02 PM on March 31, 2001

thanks dhartung for the explanation. that makes sense.
posted by quarsan at 4:20 AM on April 1, 2001