X10 for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This is news that will largely go unnoticed by the people who should notice is the most: advertizers. It won’t matter to them, because they by and large have the attention span of house flies. It should matter to them because it reinforces my old adage.
Don’t annoy potential customers.
Perhaps I come from usual breeding, as I know for a fact that my mother still won’t buy a certain kind of laundry soap because of an obnoxious commercial from the 1970s. Whenever I used to hear an offensive commercial, my first move was to hit the mute button (I wore it out on the first TV that we bought). My second move was to find out what they were selling, and then make a mental note to not buy it.
Advertizers don’t get this. They don’t get that people don’t like to be annoyed.
There may be some short term results. If you shout loud enough, you will get people’s attention, but is just getting their attention enough?
X10 thought so. They were the company that first exploded onto the scene with pop-up or pop-under ads. You know the kind… you go to one website and suddenly another window appears either on top of the window you were trying to read (pop up) or underneath it (pop under). The theory behind it is that you will read the pop up because it is right in front of your face (wrong… people learned to close the windows as soon as they started to open) or that you will eventually read the other one because you will think it is important (false: people know an ad when they see one).
X10 started it all, and now a lot of sites have followed suit. I actually don’t know how often these are used, since I use Opera and have them blocked. (If you use Opera, press F12 and make sure you have “Open requested pop-up windows only”) There are ways for Mozilla and even Internet Explorer users to block them.
My guess is that most people don’t block them They just ignore them. Like banner ads. Like Flash ads. The mind is remarkably agile. It will learn to block out what it wants to, and no advertizer can stop it.
But that won’t keep them from trying.
Advertizers are going to have to learn that what is of value is a long-term relationship with a customer, not a .002 second flash of some ad.
It will be better for them, and for us. But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.