Down With Pop-Ups

Published: Friday, May 27, 2005 Online-Casinos.com

DOWN WITH POP-UPS

Are these uninvited visitors bugging you?

Numbers of players on fora across the Internet were bewailing the increasing presence of intrusive, uninvited and difficult to remove pop-up advertisements this week, bringing this growing problem into sharp focus yet again.

It seems that online marketers (and not just in the gambling industry) have yet to realise that this form of advertising could well prove counter-productive in terms of the sheer irritation and distraction that it causes. That could lead to players avoiding the sites who are invading their equipment in this manner.

Quite apart from the questionable ethics of literally thrusting unwanted sales material in the consumer's face, the developers of these invasive adverts have made the covert contamination easier and their removal in some cases almost impossible without technical assistance.

The battle between adware removers and adware installers is becoming increasingly dynamic as one tries to outguess the other...and the angry consumer is left somewhere in the middle trying to keep his or her computer clean.

One poster wrote about a very typical experience as follows. The brands mentioned in this post are specific but these are not the sole culprits by any means - some of the biggest and most respectable names in Internet casino gambling are equally active and just as guilty:

"I have been having an awful time with pop up ads on my computer. I have probably downloaded at least 10 different adware removers to try and resolve the problem. This is a huge concern for me.

"Golden Palace Casino has come up many times in various scans of my computer, and I can't get rid of it. I uninstalled this casino over 6 months ago,...and yet like a parasite it has lodged itself on my computer without my consent. When I last ran my adware debugger 2 other casinos, Diamond Deal casino, and Ace Club Casino had somehow infected it, too."

Another user reported that top names like Casino On Net and several well established Microgaming powered casinos were hammering away with repeated pop-up ads, sometimes presenting four and even five pop-ups one after another and causing intense frustration and anger.

Surely this is not the way casinos want their customers to interact with them? Or do the stats show such positive returns from pop-ups that no-one gives a damn about what the consumer thinks? Are there no controls or guidelines for marketers using this technique?

We're not talking spyware or malware here, which is another and perhaps even more serious problem - we're talking the deliberate, in-your-face presentation of specific brands in such a way that it causes resentment instead of support. That has to devalue the brand.

And because this garbage was not requested and is difficult to remove, that resentment grows with every repetition.