Pop-Up Challenge

POP-UP CHALLENGE!
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(If your best scores are not correct, hit Refresh/Reload on your browser.)

The challenge:

It's 2001 and in a last-ditch attempt to commercialise the Internet, businesses are resorting to advertising practices that used to be the sole purview of porn sites (so I'm told :-) ): the dreaded pop-up. They get in your way and they're annoying as Hell. What to do? Well, you could either boycott the site or register your displeasure with an email to the site host... or... you can practice at getting damn good at putting them out of your misery. So, here I present to you a practice range, a shooting gallery for pop-ups. Train hard. Train well.

Get ready with that mouse* and take one of my pop-up challenges:

Time challenge: pop-ups will appear, initially, every 2 seconds. As the challenge progresses, the interval becomes shorter. The game ends when 10 pop-ups are open at once. Beware of menacing "pop-behinds" which appear underneath this window instead of on top. Closing a pop-up is worth 100 points minus 1 point for every 1/100th of a second the pop-up remains open. Minimum points per pop-up.
Speed challenge: you have 30 seconds to close as many pop-ups as you can. You earn 1 point for every banished pop-up.

In either game, if you close this main window, the game ends immediately.

*you can close pop-ups with the keyboard too, but you'll be at greater risk from pop-behinds, because you might close this main window by accident.

(Privacy note: high scores are recorded in cookies. That's all that's in the cookies, so feel free to reject any cookies sent by this site.)

Warning/Disclaimer:	this game opens up to 20 pop-ups. They're all cleared away automatically when the game is over, but if your browser can't handle 20 pop-ups, you might encounter problems. Really poor browsers might even crash. Be sure to save anything important before playing, just in case.

Supported browsers:	this game has been tested with Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0, and Netscape 4.79 and 6.x.

The commentary:

The reality of Internet-commercialisation has set in and banner advertising revenues are going through the floor. What's the solution the industry comes up with? Pop-ups. The reasoning, I suppose, is that people weren't noticing those banner ads that were blinking and sliding and animating around the rim of the page, begging you to punch the monkey and the like, so what had to be done is to put them in your face. Make them impossible to avoid. Make them pop up every 10 seconds, right over the text you were reading. That'll draw in the consumers, right?

Let's think about this for a second. In other media -- magazines, for example -- ads stay there nice and static. Magazines get their advertising revenues in return for the space. That was it. But in banner ads, people actually have to click on the banner before it registers. Having an independent hit counter telling how many times the ad was viewed wasn't enough. This is akin to making magazine readers call the 1-800 number on the ad page before the magazine will get their fee.

I say, if you're going to advertise on the web, pick a site that looks like it's got your audience, and offer to pay them in return for a little space on their popular page. Track follow-through if you like to determine the effectiveness of your advertising, but do not nickle and dime the web sites. If the web site can't support itself this way, then that's that. It's sad when a popular site goes, but the WWW didn't start out commercial. Some of the best sites out there were personal sites, created by people with interest and passion. This isn't going to be the end of the Internet as some naive corporations would lead you to believe. The Internet was around decades before banner ads. The Internet was around well before the WWW, for that matter. (It was also around a real long time before anyone heard of Al Gore and that annoying catch-phrase "Information Superhighway" -- the usage of which, mercifully, seems to have gone into decline of late.)

Companies: the Internet and the WWW are a public-relations medium. It is not a venue to get rich. If someone wants to feel comfortable before buying your product, you put the information out there that they need in order to feel comfortable. If you want name recognition, you put out pointers to your site. Dignified pointers. Advertising should have a slow and cumulative effect. Do not beg or bully people into visiting. You'll just turn off your potential customers. Here's a creative solution: try sponsoring a site the way cigarette companies sponsor sports and arts festivals.

Time challenge:				Your best score:

Speed challenge:				Your best score: