* YAHOO RUNS ANOTHER ADVERTISING TEST
... Now [Yahoo's] testing pop-under ads...
The ads can currently be seen on Yahoo News and Yahoo Travel. If pop-unders become a permanent fixture on Yahoo, which has traditionally been known for its extreme user friendliness and quick download time, prices for pop-unders will slump even further, due to Yahoo's enormous inventory availability.
This in turn will push sites that are currently using pop-unders, including NYTimes.com, and MSNBC.com, to lower their prices. And this will lead to greater losses and the eventual move to a subscription model.
I don't know how realistic that prediction is, but it is an interesting progression. Personally, I can't stand pop-unders (or pop-overs). I find it rather rude for them to open a second (or third) browser window on my screen, eating up my resources and slowing down my surfing. I click them off as quickly as they can open, usually before they've even loaded anything, and can't imagine they'd be terribly effective.
On the other hand, it's almost worth putting up with pop-unders for six months if it gets us to where large sites are forced to come up with a business model that includes realistic revenue. Yes, even if that means general acceptance of having to pay for content. I think it will eliminate a lot of the crap online, and push those content providers that remain to focus on quality (ie: Salon).
Or, perhaps we're already too late. According to The Death of the Web, the five-year-old prodigy has been buried beside a garage in Palo Alto. This page is humorous, just don't take it (or the "business" point of view it assumes) too seriously.
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