Ghost Sites of the Web

Web 1.0 history, forgotten web celebrities, old web sites, commentary, and news by Steve Baldwin. Published erratically since 1996.

July 06, 2007

The Fabulous (and Mildly Licentious) X10 Pop-Up Ad Museum

Remember Pop-Up (and Pop-Under) ads? Those infuriating little mothers that would distract you from whatever it was that you were doing and (occasionally) install some truly evil malware on your hard drive?

Well, Pop-Up ads are not exactly extinct, in fact you'd be amazed at the number of mainstream sites which still employ them. Why do they do this? Because Pop-Up's work: people click on them, and this is why marketers continue to use them. I frankly think that any marketer still using a Pop-Up should be popped upside the chin, but Pop-Ups bring in the bucks, so don't expect them to disappear anytime soon.

Pop-Up ads have definitely declined in the past four or five years, thanks to the triumph of text ads and Pop-Up blockers. Future generations of Web users will have little knowledge of the Pop-Up Hell we all had to endure between roughly 2001 and 2004. Fortunately, a fellow by the name of Kenny Law has archived a bunch of the mildly licentious Pop-Ups served up by the X10 home surveillance company on his small corner of the wisc.edu servers.

Enjoy this peculiarly twisted shrine to Orwellian voyeurism and joyously intrusive browser-hijacking (and thank your lucky stars that these ads, now trapped in a museum, are forced to stand still)!

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Red Herring 2007 = APBNews.com 2001?

In an eerie throwback to 2001, ValleyWag reports that technology magazine Red Herring may have stopped paying its staff, including former Ziff-Davis heavyweight Joel Dreyfuss, its current editor. Red Herring, it should be remembered, was a magazine formed in the late 1990's to channel dotcom ad dollars to its pages. It survived the Web 1.0 shakeout, cut costs by reverting to a 'zine, but this latest news suggests that it may not be faring well, even with a skeleton crew. The whole affair is an eerie reminder of the time that APBNews.com, a celebrated Web 1.0 startup, did the same thing back in 2001, and Netslaves.com's Steve Gilliard called them to account for it.

I guess everything that's old is new again in the tech industry boom/bust cycle.

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