A Brief History of Popup Ad

Pop-up ads are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to increase web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means also.
A variation on the pop-up window is the pop-under advertising. This opens a new browser window behind the active window. Pop-unders interrupt the user less, but are not considered until the desired windows are closed, making it more difficult for the user to determine which Web site opened them.

For websites in early financed by advertising, banner ads were generating sufficient revenue, but in the wake of the dot com crash, prices paid for clicks from banner ads decreased and many vendors have begun to investigate the most effective advertising methods. Pop-up ads by their nature are difficult to ignore or neglect, and are claimed to be more effective than static banner ads. Pop-ups have a higher click rates than banner ads to web (about 14,000 each ad is clicked on popup e).

Pornographic websites are among the most common users of pop-up ads. Some particularly vicious type of pop-up ads (again, usually set in relation to adult entertainment sites) appear to have been either poorly planned or have been specially designed to "hijack" a user's Internet session . These forms of pop-ups sometimes generate multiple windows, and each window is closed by the user activates the code that generates another window - sometimes indefinitely. This is sometimes referred to by users as a "Java Trap", "spam cascade" or "pop-up Hell" among other names. Usually the only way to stop this is to close the browser.

Opera was the first major browser to incorporate tools for blocking pop-up, the Mozilla browser later improved on this by blocking popups only generated as the page loads. In the early 2000s, all major web browsers except Internet Explorer (the most popular browser and again in 2006) allowed the user to block unwanted pop-ups almost completely.

In 2004, Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, which added pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer. Many users, however, still unaware of this ability, or choose not to use it. Many others are not able to use it at all because they do not use Windows XP SP2 but older versions of Windows. Some users install non-Microsoft ad blocking software instead.