I can never remember the names of the meta-windows used in HTML (as in
<form target="_somerandomnamepulledoutofahat">). Partially because they
are named so poorly but also because I haven’t needed to use them in a
really long time (pop-up windows are soooo 90s dontchaknow). Anyway, I’m
googling for “target window _blank” when I stumble upon the following
message board post: Pop-up prevention and target=_blank. The question
is whether anyone had heard of these crazy pop-up blocker thingies and how
they could be defeated.
Some of these posts just blew me away. I mean, I knew these people existed but I always assumed the “How to be evil” forums were private. Check this out:
Up until November I used the “target=_blank” and made 0 sales. Once I deleted the “target="blank”, I immediately started getting sales.
It’s that easy!
This one is even better. Someone had asked for a list of names of these alleged “pop-up blocking hacker tools” and this guy responds:
The blocker on my pc at home blocks target=blank. I am not home to check what the name of the program is, however. I know that Google allows target=blank, but I fear I am losing sales to those other programs which do block them. I just removed the target=_blank, and we will see what happens to conversion.
So maybe I understood this wrong, but is he saying that he personally uses a pop-up blocker to get rid of annoying and intrusive adverts that make his computer unusable but he is, at the same time, fearful that others might be using a pop-up blocker to get rid of his annoying and intrusive adverts and, therefore, has decided to make his adverts more resilient so as to return them to their original level annoying and intrusiveness?
And just when I had lost that last scrap of respect for saleskind, this guy comes along with some actual fricking sense:
We’ve made a campaign about not using popups, and educatd users as to right clicking and how to block them – as I detest popups extensively, if I want a new window, I’ll right click and do it myself.
In fact, if an affiliate uses any popups, I’ll find another affiliate to buy that product from.
This has led to us selling a huge amount of pop up blocking software and privacy software even though the affiliate site has nothing to do with either.
Information is powerful, show people how to do stuff and they’ll buy…
Beautifully put.