[old_skul]

We can go on and on about how if your computer is properly configured, you will "only" get one popunder a day. That's not the point. Neither is ROI, dot-com boom, Mozilla, or popup blockers.

It's about trust. I am a strong believer in the ideology that Google espouses: don't be evil. Don't break the trust your viewer has in you. And although many people will self-justify having to put up with unwanted advertising for products they're already perfectly aware of, the maximum number of people can be reached when there is an unbroken circle of trust between the user and the site owner. And the people who think Pelican is some benevolent angel for providing this forum? Please. Give me a break. Can you imagine the number of dollars this forum brings in? Why do you think it's maintained? Although Wayne's a great guy, I don't realistically think he pays for the bandwidth and hardware for this site out of the goodness of his heart. (Although I'm sure it has an impact. Love ya, Wayne!)

Things are turning around in the Internet. It is no longer cool to put up a bunch of popups, have your page covered in advertising, or to push marketing on people when all they want to do is read the content they came for.

Excellence is a great example. There's ads all over the place, right? Well, sure, but there's not an ad on every single page of content. And many times, the ads in there are full-page, and I can simply choose to skip right past it.

This forum has two ads, minimum, on every single page of content, and half the time on my obviously improperly configured browser I get a popunder ad for a site I've already spent many, many dollars with.

My point? It's no longer okay to simply bombard people with marketing. It turns them off. There comes a point where people will skip right away from this forum, and the Pelican Parts main page, simply because it's a commercial site that uses "too many" popups/popunders. For many, one popup is one too many.

/rant off.