Pop-unders are a form of online advertising that load behind the main page and can be annoying or informative. They aim to increase website traffic without permission and may be more effective than pop-ups as they require a crawl of the site. However, some people find them intrusive and there are remedies to avoid them.
Imagine a situation where you go to the library to find something and are approached by salespeople with every step you take. How long would you stay in the library if you couldn’t take a step without someone trying to sell you something? Now imagine there is a small bake sale outside the library, where the vendors are instructed to only approach people who leave the library. After you get the books you want, or read to your heart’s content, you might not mind being asked to buy cookies, and you’d certainly be more likely to buy cookies when you leave, rather than when you enter. This is the theory behind a marketing practice in Internet sales: the popunder ad.
Pop-unders are a type of pop-up ad that you may come across when searching Internet sites. They are distinct from ads that appear in front of the main page you are looking for. The typical pop-up ad loads with the page you are looking at and can often be closed with a mouse click or two. With pop-unders, you may not notice that an ad has been opened until you start closing web pages. Thus, you will find small ads or pages that have loaded behind the main page you were looking at, which can be somewhat annoying or informative, depending on how you look at advertising on the Internet in general.
The term popunder, sometimes spelled as pop-under, quickly entered common usage in the early 2000s as these ads became more prominent. They especially posed problems for some people with older computers, if a page loading time seemed to take forever. Pop-unders can make the main page load slower and can produce graphics or sounds that force you to look through open pages to find the source of the slow loading, or noises that interrupt the pages you want to watch.
One of the purposes of pop-unders is to increase traffic to websites without your knowledge or permission. The ad behind the page you’re browsing opens up a whole new page. Even if you just close the page, the counters may suggest that you’ve been there and if you have cookies enabled on your browser such ads or sites may be silently looking for some things about you without your knowledge, since you won’t notice the popunder until you do not close the page you are browsing.
People using extensive internet marketing suggest that popunders may be more effective than popovers. A popover is likely to be closed fairly immediately, as the person searching the internet may have a clear search goal in mind. They don’t want to be bothered by intrusive advertisements and are likely to close any popup ads without looking at the sites.
Once the initial goal of visiting a page has been achieved and the web page has been closed, a pop-under ad may actually require an actual crawl of a site. The person may want to understand why the site has opened one of the browser windows or, having achieved the objective in the search, is now free to view the featured ads. This isn’t always the case. Some people just close their browser programs without looking at the ads below the page they are looking for.
Another advantage of pop-unders is that they deliver ads without intruding on the browser’s lens. Pop-overs can be so incredibly intrusive on a site that people will immediately seek out a page with less intrusive ads. Yet some resent pop-ups of any kind and there are many remedies to avoid them. Many web browsers and virus scanning software can help get rid of both types, and there are a number of free or cheap pop-up blockers that can help get rid of ads you find intrusive.
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