Pop-up ads seem to be the Internet equivalent of supermarket tabloids: Everyone claims to hate them, but somebody keeps reading.
According to a study conducted by GartnerG2, 78 percent of respondents claimed they found pop-up ads "very annoying." In contrast, only 49 percent of participants applied the same rating to banner ads.
Yet pop-ups had click-through rates almost twice as high as those of banner ads, meaning they"re probably going to stick around a while. Indeed, Nielsen/NetRatings" online-advertising rating, AdRelevance, found that pop-up impressions jumped from 1.2 billion to 4.9 billion between January 2002 and September 2002.