pop-up ads

In late May, Nielsen/NetRatings, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial website Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million. In the case of millions of surfers, Entrepreneur.com visited them - and not the other way around - by way of pop-up ads, writes the New York Times.

Entrepreneur.com’s pop-ups were unusual because they contained news content, like articles on how to start a small business, making them hard to distinguish from an intentional visit to Entrepreneur.com’s site - and more than tripled Entrepreneur’s reported traffic before it was detected and factored out.

Other sites that appear to have used pop-ups for content in the last year include Concierge.com, the website of Conde Nast Traveler magazine; ForbesAutos.com, part of the Forbes financial publishing group; and Heavy.com, a popular humor site, according to Ben Edelman, a Harvard doctoral student who has compiled a large database of pop-ups by installing many kinds of adware on his computer.

The concern over pop-up content goes beyond traffic numbers. Many advertisers pay premium prices to reach readers of certain websites. Through pop-ups, these advertisers may find their orders are being fulfilled with low-cost pageviews that users never requested, with pages never having been viewed.