Proxy Builder Blog

Over the last couple months I have been using Adversal popups on the browsing pages of some web proxies. Although I made a reasonable amount of money from them, I decided that the negatives outweighed the positives. So I proceeded to strip popups out of my web proxies for several reasons I will cover in this article.

Lets face it, no one likes popups. They have always been seen as intrusive, annoying, ugly and sometimes malicious. I have an inbuilt browser popup blocker with my Google toolbar but as I can tell from my Adversal stats - many do not. To be honest, I’ve never even seen a popup from Adversal so why should I put my loyal proxy users through it? I do use a fast, custom proxy script but any advantages of that can quickly be washed away by an uninvited flashing eyesore jumping around on the screen. If I was a regular proxy user I’d be searching for a new site pretty quick.

Besides your visitors you should also be looking to the search engines. Search engine bots and spiders are becoming more clever every day, if they browse to your page and find some easily categorized popup code you could see your search rankings slump or disappear altogether. You may even have your site categorized as “spyware” if you ran an ad infected with one of many exploits. Popups have had alot of bad press and even the newest web users will quickly turn off a site that runs them.

Although I have listed alot of negative points, I can only keep my web proxies popup free while other sources of monetization are available to me. I think my proxy sites have a better viral effect without pesky popups. I would rather someone pass my proxy website address on than make a few more cents off a visitor who will abandon my proxy forever.