The Incidental Economist

This is a follow-up to a November post about some annoying pop-up ads on TIE that some people were seeing. We’re not running the ads and, for a while, nobody had a good theory where they were coming from. But, on a hunch from a reader comment on that post, I did a search and found this:

I’ve recently noticed video pop up advertisements on several websites I manage, and have tracked the source of the problem to the sitemeter.com visitor counter code installed on those sites.  I can’t find any mention of this problem on the web (since the videos don’t always pop up many sitemeter users probably haven’t realized where the videos are coming from), so I wanted to put something online for others to find.

The post goes on to describe symptoms identical to what some readers have experienced at TIE. It also documents that the author had contacted sitemeter and not gotten a response. I just did as well, but I’m not expecting a reply. Based on past experience, it seems like nobody there cares to engage with clients. It’s too bad, because the service (apart from these popups) is very good. For real time traffic tracking, there is nothing like it out there. Even Google Analytics doesn’t do as good a job. StatCounter doesn’t either.

I don’t know if we’ll yank sitemeter or see if paying for a premium account helps (it’s really too expensive, in my view). If you use sitemeter, particularly a premium account, I’d love to know if your readers are seeing popups.

UPDATE: I’ve turned sitemeter off. If you still see a pop-up ad, let me know.

UPDATE 2: Paid sitemeter customers are not immune to this problem. See also this. Sitemeter is behaving badly.

@afrakt

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