Virtually every Internet website I log onto (excepting ours) has these annoying pop-ups.

Most are ads and others want to know where I’m located.

Yes, I know you can use ad-blocker and settings in your web-browser. However, when you do that now, more and more websites will not allow you to read their content because that is how they make their money. “We detect you have a pop-up ad blocker please remove the block” is the message.

Others charge for the privilege of reading their content. Some ask for a donation.

More worrying is when you get told you have malware on your computer, a nasty infectious worm, and this nice message tells you to click on this button and they will immediately remove this worm for free.
That is so nice of the person behind the message.

I warn you now. DON’T CLICK THAT BUTTON. Everything you have will either now be infected and/or your personal information will be stolen.

Things have improved. I well remember in the early years of computer browsing when I happened by accident to hit an ad that had popped-up I then got hundreds! That was frightening.

Whist saying things have improved I meant ‘things have improved from those early days. However, every day I get more and more pop-ups. I start to read and bong my screen has either an ad partly over it or other message I don’t want to read.

I fully understand we all have to make a living and we want people to read their adverts on our websites. There just has to be a better way of doing than by pop-ups.

So are pop-ups bad or good for business?

These are the statistics:

70% of Americans say they get annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads
The #1 reason why people would block a site is annoying ads
There are 2,000+ threads in the eBay community dedicated to annoying pop-ups
At the same time…

Pop-ups can double your subscription rate
Entrepreneur.com increased their sales by 162%, subscriptions by 86 % thanks to pop-ups
Visual Website Optimizer upped sign-ups by 50% with a pop-up form on the site

SOURCE: http://webmeup.com/blog/do-your-pop-ups-annoy-customers.html

The article comes to the fascinating conclusion to make the pop-up ads ENJOYABLE.

It also goes on to give examples.

The very worst pop-ups are the ones that don’t have or a difficult to find ‘Close’ button.

It looks like I’m going to be stuck with pop-ups for a very long time.