By Ken Adelglass
Adelglass Computer Training and Consulting
Everywhere we go today we are bombarded with advertising. Walk to your mailbox and you're hit with junk mail. Take a local drive in your car and your eyes will be inundated with billboards and signs on cars, trucks, shopping centers, and storefronts. When you stay home and turn on your television you are confronted with commercials and infomercials. Walk to the refrigerator to escape for a snack and you will find marketing on your favorite box of cookies or cereal. With all this marketing and nowhere to hide from it, why should we expect the Internet to be any different?
For most people, the Internet experience begins with an account with an online service such as America Online (AOL) or some other Internet service provider (ISP). As most people can attest, with American Online you are immediately barraged with pop-up ads from the very first time you start to use your account. Pop-up ads are an effective and inexpensive way for AOL and other Internet marketers to advertise. They appear in their own window and prevent you from getting to where you want to go unless you make a purchase or respond by clicking a "No Thank You" button which is purposely obscured off in a corner of the window below the advertising copy. New users having never seen this form of advertising before may mistake it for an important piece of information and will have the tendency to read it and if AOL is lucky the user will make an impulse purchase.
On free services such as Juno Email or NetZero you do not have an option to turn off advertising because it is the advertising revenue that allows you to use these services for free in the first place. If you are an AOL user, you are given the option to turn off their advertising including their pop-up ads but don't expect AOL to go out of their way to help you find how to "opt-out" of their advertising. Here is how you can do it...
- Sign into America Online.
- Click your left mouse button over the My AOL button (located next to the Favorites button along the top of your AOL window). Point and left-click your mouse on Preferences in the dropdown menu that appears.
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A small window will pop up with a series of boxes to click. Left-click your mouse on the box labeled Marketing.
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The Marketing Preferences window will appear and you will you will see a series of six plum colored buttons on the right side.
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Start by clicking on the top button and follow the prompts to "Not" receive contact from AOL. Then work your way through the other five buttons.
I just recently learned that AOL has announced that you will have to perform this "opt-out" process annually, as AOL reserves the right to expire your marketing preferences. Ironically, they will warn you when your marketing preferences are about to expire via a pop-up message. "Opt-out" marketing is legal in this country but is quite controversial as it depends on a certain number of people not reading or seeing these pop-up notices "informing" them of these choices.
The battle against pop-up advertising will rage on for many years to come. Opting out of AOL's marketing campaign does not make you immune to pop-up ads on websites hosted by other companies. However, I found a free useful utility called Pop-Up Killer that does a great job at disabling those annoying pop-up ads in computers running Windows 98/ME/2000. I tested it with AOL 5.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 on my Windows 98 system and it worked well in both. The program can be customized to disable pop-ups on certain websites while allowing them to appear on others. Pop-up windows do have other uses besides obtrusive advertising, so it is very helpful that it enables you to pick and choose. You can download Pop-Up Killer at
http://adelglass.com/downloads/
That's all for now! Happy Computing!
