mlive: Your Pop-Ups are a Field of Lies!
My local paper has an online edition called mlive.com.
When you want to view content beyond the homepage at mlive, you are greeted with this annoying pop-up:
Unless you complete the pop-up, you cannot view further content at the site. (Oh, it says you can in the fine print — if you accept cookies and never clean your computer. Clear the cookies, though — and you’ve got problems.)
Here’s the kicker: I’ve been greeted with this very same pop-up since 1999 – over 8 years!
Do you think mlive has lived up to its promise of “delivering better service” for me? Over 8 years — and it doesn’t appear that they’ve done anything fundamentally — or even incrementally — different. So who are they trying to serve?
After all, a pop-up is in NO ONE’s best interest.
- Not the reader. Pop-ups get between the reader and the content.
- Not the advertiser. Pop-ups prevent people from easy, immediate access to ad content.
- Not even mlive.com! After all, Mlive is collecting data that they aren’t even using! Aside from annoying readers and advertisers, they are wasting resources.
And since Mlive is so blatantly lying about improving my experience — hey, it doesn’t take anyone 8 years to figure out pop-ups are annoying — I don’t feel inclined to give mlive accurate information in their pop-up form. And neither does anyone else I know!
For the past 8 years, I’ve been entering in:
- a zip code of “90210″
- a birth date of 1919
- and a gender of “male”
…and so have many of my friends. Yet we still see articles targeted for middle-aged housewives from West Michigan, instead of wealthy, educated male Californians.
So stop lying, mlive – and we’ll stop lying, too.
Note to online businesses everywhere: don’t encourage your audience to lie. Don’t interrupt them. Don’t annoy your advertisers. Be a good online citizen.
Develop honest relationships based on trust. By habitually lying for 8 years, mlive has squandered trust with its online audience. And note to mlive readers everywhere: please enter “90210 – male – 1919″ — until the pop-ups are gone!Thank you!
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Comments
Re: the above comment from Haig Larsen (IP: 69.2.100.68 , nat.mlive.advance.net):
Isn’t it just easier not to visit mlive at all? Why should I enable cookies to suit mLive and its advertisers instead of my own browsing, safety, privacy, and information needs?
When a “standard industry practice” turns off customers, it’s a good time to change it. (I’m not the only one who thinks this practice stinks, after all.)
Instead of calling would-be visitors “fools” — why not take this as an opportunity to advance industry standards? To more fully engage with customers? Or see this a huge opportunity to provide a competitive advantage to both advertisers AND readers?
[...] tell me: what do you think of this jaw-dropping example of industry standard in online marketing? (Remember, it’s [...]
You must have your cookies disabled if the gateway page (not a pop-up) keeps asking you for that info over and over. Turn them back on, fool. Also, MLive is a local site, so any zip code outside of Michigan is going to just resolve to random ads instead of targeted ones. The zip code is there to determine what advertisers are close to you geographically, not to tell how much money you make. At least, this is industry practice.
Haig