Why Pop Up Blockers Were The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Pop Up Advertisers!

Yeah I know that title seems really weird… If most pop-up are being blocked how on earth can they be effective in advertising?

Back in the early days of the internet pop-up ads were the most common way of monetizing a site. It was horrible ineffective because everyone hated the pop-ups and would largely ignore them.

The (not so clever) answer was to put even more pop-ups on your site in the old “if you fling enough %&#§ at the wall, some will stick” strategy.

I’m sure you remember those days – when you could visit a website and get stuck in a vicious loop of pop-ups that would not stop until you gave up and restarted your computer.

This of course only made people even angrier and they started looking for solutions… pretty soon pop-up blockers were standard issue in every internet browser.

So why was this actually good for  pop-up advertisers? You’d think it would be the death of the pop-up?

It wasn’t – and that’s due to one of the most powerful emotional triggers in every human being… the fear of missing out!

What happened was that instead of getting all the pop-ups and just closing them without looking and thinking… Now your browser would warn you that something had been blocked and more importantly give you the option to unblock it.

I bet that when you get the pop-up blocker notice in your browser your cursors goes directly up to that little yellow bar to see what was blocked – we all do this, because we don’t want to miss out on something that could be important or beneficial to us.

So the end result was that after the invention of the pop-up blockers, the pop-up ads actually got more views than before (and by that I mean people actually looking at them rather than just closing them).

There is a very powerful marketing strategy hidden in this paradox and that gave birth to our Covert Action Bar plugin.

It’s not about the actual pop-up ad (that is still rather ineffective and there are much better ad forms nowadays)

However the “fear of missing out” still very much applies. Even more importantly, for the past 10 years all the big browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari & Chrome have been conditioning your visitors on what that little yellow pop-up blocker bar means (and that you can interact with it).

This is what the Covert Action Bar plugin mimics. With it you can put a bar like that on your blogs and because of this conditioning and the fear of missing out it’s guaranteed to draw your visitors attention and clicks.

But rather than actually serving (or blocking) a pop-up, you can link the bar to anything you want, which of course is far more effective.

You should be seeing a demo of the action bar at the top of this page – and very likely it drew your attention way before you got to this part of your post. It will do the same for your own visitors.

With people going increasingly ad blind and ignoring banner ads on your blogs – using something like Covert Action Bar is one of the most effective ways to get clicks and sales from your blogs.

It’s one of our most effective advertising tools, it consistently outperforms most other ad forms and it works great with our themes like Covert Social Press, Covert Video Press and Covert PinPress

You have probably also noticed the messenger ad on this blog. That one works really well for similar reasons. The fear of missing out… in this case missing out on an important conversation with your friends. That messenger ad is made with our Covert Messenger plugin and I discuss why it works so well in this post: “What Is The Most Effective Ad You Can Put On Your Blogs?”

Both ad forms are among our most effective and as you can see on this blog – you can use both plugins on the same blog. And you can configure them so that the messenger ads only show on some pages while the action bar shows on others.

But for now click on the banner below (or the action bar at the top of this page) to check out Covert Action Bar and see what it can to for your blog – and more importantly for your bank account!