BYTE MARKS
How to do away with pop-up ads

By Burt Lum

Picture this: You're surfing your favorite Web site and unexpectedly, browser windows open up, sometimes over your current window, sometimes under. These pop-up windows contain advertising for products like spy cameras, long distance service or mortgage reduction plans.

Welcome to the world of pop-up ads. This scenario is happening frequently and getting annoying.

Nevertheless, advertising on the Net is something we've grown to accept. If it weren't for advertising, portal sites like Yahoo would have been history a long time ago. In any mass media format, whether television, radio, magazines or the Internet, advertising will continue to generate revenue.

Web sites such as Yahoo push ads through banners and pop-up windows in your browser. The actual ad content is not usually from Yahoo but comes from a service that places the ads on Web sites that sign up for the service. Such ad services include Double-click, Mediaplex, FastClick and Advertising.com, among others.

There are ways to minimize the frequency of these pop-up ads. Cookies — files stored in your browser that provide a visited Web site information about you — can be a useful tool, in fact.

You can easily view your list of cookies, on a Mac at least, by scrolling through your preferences. Interestingly, many of the ad services mentioned provide a cookie option to opt-out of pop-up ads.

Here's what you do. If you get a pop-up ad, look at the address from where the ad came. This will show the ad service — Mediaplex, as an example. Then go to the privacy statement, usually found on the home page of the service. If you scroll through the privacy statement, you will find instructions to place the opt-out cookie in your browser. It's a one-click process.

Although not permanent, this will tell the ad service you don't want pop-up ads, at least until the cookie expires and you have to repeat the process.

I found instructions and a list of these opt-out links at technoerotica.net/mylog/optouts.html.

Burt Lum is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.