Annoying PayPal Pop-Ups
Published August 31, 2009
I’ve had a PayPal account for trillions of years, ever since back in the day when it was x.com. As of recently, I’ve been getting exit popups when I click the PayPal Logout. That’s annoying as all hell. I feel I lose control of my interent experience when that happens. lol
Clicking the exit link this morning resulted in 4 new windows plus a Windows error popup. I’ve been quintuple-popped. One of the windows had a link to http://altfarm.mediaplex.com, a banner farm.
I Google’d “mediaplex altfarm” and there are a shitload of complaints going back several years. I’m confused. Is PayPal using Mediaplex to serve ads or have I been tagged and bagged by Mediaplex and Mediaplex is watching my ones and zeros and serving ads based upon them?
Has anyone else had to deal with this? Leave a comment and share what you know.
In the meantime, I’ve downloaded a free spyware removal tool called Spyware Terminator. I used to run a search tool bar called MyWebSearch on my old computer. I know, I know. It’s spyware, too, but I loved the search feature and keyword highlighting it had. (I was little back then. I like lights and shiny objects, too.) When I got a new computer I installed it again, but it wouldn’t run on the new O/S and I had since forgotten about it. McAfee scans my computer every weekend, but it never once found it. It was the first thing Spyware Terminator found. It was like looking at an old high school year book…Hey, I remember him! LMAO I opted for installing the ST toolbar, but took it off after an hour. It slowed down my computer and I kept losing cursor focus.
6 Responses to Annoying PayPal Pop-Ups
PayPal uses Mediaplex to serve ads. If there’s exit popups, that’s entirely PayPal’s decision. That is, pop-ups are always the decision of the advertiser, not the adserver.
As their adserver, Mediaplex does have the ability to offer targeted messages in ads they’re going to serve anyway. I don’t see that as a problem. It’s like seeing better commercials on TV.
@Matthew, targeted ads, per se, is OK. Heck, that’s what advertising is all about. Hitting a target market.
However, I do feel that going to my PayPal account is about managing my money and not about shopping. Yes, I spend the money in my Paypal account when I buy stuff, but I spend it on other websites. I don’t use PayPal as a shopping portal. How can PayPal or Mediaplex decide what ads to display when all I’m doing is checking my account balance? The true fact of the matter is, they can’t. Therefore, it’s not targeted.
As for commercials on TV, you don’t have 4-5 commercials playing all at once. Why does it take multiple windows popping up to get the job done? I’m not quite sure what you mean by “…Mediaplex does have the ability to offer targeted messages in ads they’re going to serve anyway…” Are you implying that Mediaplex is piggybacking more popups on top of PayPal’s? Or maybe PayPal is doing it themselves? Yikes either way! That would be a gray hat technique, IMHO. If advertisers are paying for what they think are quality displays, then someone is eating up those displays with a highly inefficient method.
Being on the internet, unfortunately popups come with the territory, but when I get a barrage of 4-5 all at once, I’m going to close them as fast as I can and not even look at them. The advertisers are getting ripped off by such an ineffective tactic. And if PayPal is doing the piggybacking, then Mediaplex needs to issue a stern warning to PayPal out of respect for its advertisers. Regardless of who’s doing it, one popup might get the visitor’s attention, but multiple ones are doing nothing more that annoying the visitor and eating up some vendor’s advertising budget. I think it’s unethical.
That’s like Google charging for multiple clicks on the same Adwords ads by the same IP address within minutes of each other…but that’s another topic…that I already bitched about. Wow, I see a pattern emerging. Advertising is crooked. LMAO
Anyhoo, thanks for your reply.
thats weird, I’ve never had any pop ups on the exiting paypal. I’m always directed to the shopping page though
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You never know. Mediaplex may be getting information about you from third parties or your cookies / saved preferences.
Paypal redirects through altfarm.mediaplex.com every time you login to Paypal (at least here in the UK). This is some form of cookie settings or lame analytics hangover from web 1.0 I guess.