Floater ads create 'an arms race'

IHT - NY Times: "If you happened upon nj.com in the past month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company. On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.

On the Web, the floater's time has come.

Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (the name varies), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.

In the past year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004 while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.

The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.

Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: They cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.

As with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: They get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - msn.com, msnbc.com and Hotmail.com - followed by espn.com and yahoo.com.

Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)"