Franki earlier reported on the re-emergence of pop-under advertisements as a method of circumventing pop-up blockers built into Safari and Firefox browsers. I wanted to dig further to see if they were really back. The answer is clearly yes, as shown in this screen shot. As you can see by the next screen shot, this pop-under with the address http://205.180.85.40/w/pc.cgi?mid=60922&sid=4253 comes from a referring page at http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/motor.htm. This confirms the information at MacFixIt that howstuffworks is using them.

That causes me to wonder, why use a pop-under and risk offending me when you could just use an in-line advertisement? Are pop-up/pop-under payouts so much better? I quit using about.com some time ago because I found the pop-ups there offensive. Even after I got a pop-up blocking browser, I continue to skip over that site when looking through search results. Ironically, I really like the simply worded knowledge base at howthingswork.com, but I may add them to my skip category.

This article was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 at 1:33 am