AOL makes good on a promise.
[ Posted by Dan on December 13, 2002 | 1 Comments ]

As you likely already know, /Netscape has released Netscape 7.0.1 which includes the old new feature of blocking pop up adverts. Advertising is a core business for AOL, and fighting an advertising mechanism in favor of the user experience is good news. Recently the message coming out of Dulles has been about re-focusing on the customer/user experience. I'm glad to see some evidence of this out there on the public internet.

However, I can't imagine how many companies AOL must be pissing off by doing this, but then again, market penetration for Mozilla based browsers is barely in the range of what I would call "significant" so advertisers may not care. Stop and think about when AOL builds this into the AOL client, and keep in mind that uptake of new versions of the AOL client are robust to say the least (8.0 was released this fall, and I think it's already the most used version on the service).

When millions of user go to popup blocking, the popunder ad might become less viable. Unfortunately, according the C|Net "Netscape 7.01 comes with the pop-up filtering off by default."

 

		Consumers look to ISPs as the trusted advisor for their connection to the Internet. From a typical Internet users perspective the Internet is throwing more Spam, viruses and irritating pop-up ads at them. Consumers want solutions to the increasing problem of bad user experience on the web. AOL, MSN and Earthlink have done their homework and know that if they can position their companies as the provider of an Internet connection that provides a good user experience customers will flock to them. -Posted by John Cass on January 22, 2003 10:56 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).