Posted by Skymouse on May 13, 2001 at 08:08
In Reply to: Re: PAY SITES: Wrong way to go posted by icupn on May 12, 2001 at 20:46
Thanks for the compliment - I'm glad you're enjoying my site :)
I agree that if a site is trying to attract customers, it's crazy to bombard them with popups which just drive them away - either because they close their browser (or it crashes) they and never come back again, or because they end up in popup hell and can't come back!
Usually, the amount to be earnt from popups is smaller than the amount to be earnt from selling memberships to one's own successful paysite. Webmasters tend to use them for two main purposes: firstly, as a kind of last-ditch effort to keep the visitor on his group of sites, or more often send the visitor to a sponsors site; and secondly, as material for a traffic trade with affiliates.
Now, traffic trades are not a problem as such. The idea is that site 'A' has a link to site 'B', and site 'B' has a link to site 'A'. Thus, both sites help eachother out by sharing some visitors. Often, the principle is taken further, by having on one or both sites an automatic mechanism that counts how many visitors are arriving from the other site, and then tries to arrange that a related number of visitors are sent back in return. One simple example is the "TopList", where sites thats end us the most visitors appear nearer the top, and so (because of visitors' surfing habits) get more visitors back in return.
But a more complicated example, which is extremely prevalent but which most surfers are not directly aware of, is the "Circle Jerk" site (CJ). A CJ site counts the visitors from affiliate sites and uses "blind links" to send the appropriate number of visitors back to the affiliate sites. A blind link is any kind of link whatsoever that, when you click on it, a program decides at that moment which of several sites to send you to. In the case of a CJ site, visitors who click on the blind links get sent to the affiliate sites; and the more visitors each affiliate site is currently sending to the CJ site, the more often a visitor will get sent to that particular affiliate site.
This is fine and dandy. You click on a link that says "click here for an XXX surprise!" and you end up somewhere. But - and here is where it becomes nasty - sometimes the blind link isn't a normal link that you click on, but is instead a popup widnow that pops up either when you first arrive at the CJ site (an "entrance console") or when you close or leaver the CJ site (an "exit console"). This way, the CJ site maximises the amount of traffic it sends to its affiliates by forcing its visitors to the affiliate sites!
And what is worse, if the affiliate sites *also* happen to use consoles in this way, and springs popups to *their* affiliates, and so on, the result is a seemingly endless chain of popups. Not surprisingly, all reputable traffic-trading programmes specifically ban chained popups, and it is considered cheating. But a terrible number of webmasters use it.