Pop-up ads

Pop-up ads or pop-ups are forms of online advertising on the World Wide Web. A pop-up is a graphical user interface (GUI) display area, usually a small window, that suddenly appears ("pops up") in the foreground of the visual interface. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript that uses cross-site scripting (XSS), sometimes with a secondary payload that uses Adobe Flash. They can also be generated by other vulnerabilities/security holes in browser security.

A variation on the pop-up window, the pop-under advertisement, opens a new browser window under the active window. Pop-unders do not interrupt the user immediately, but appear when the user closes the covering window, making it more difficult to determine which website created them.

## Why Most of Them Pop-Suck

1. They ruin your experience.
2. Some of them can be misleading. (an example of this is the modern Chips Ahoy ads)
3. Terribly annoying animation.
4. In 2019, a 5-hour long ad for The Lego Movie 2 was all around YouTube.
5. You have to pay to remove them. These are called "microtransactions".
6. Some of them actually advertise **free money.** (Mistplay is a example of this.)
7. Some boring games can be advertised.
8. They can be criticized for showing 18+ content.
9. Mafia City was around YouTube in 2019.
10. Artists can promote their music videos.
11. Prior to 2018, YouTube showed ***unskippable*** 30 second ads.
	1. While they do help developers profit, some games, such as *Fight List*, have the audacity to show tons of annoying ads within a short period of time.
	2. Several mobile game ads have cringe-inducing and unfunny acting. One infamous example is *Lords Mobile*, a *Clash Of Clans* ripoff that had horrible let's play-esque advertisements, with fake CGI game footage that doesn't even represent the actual game itself.
		* Even though *Mobile Legends: Bang Bang* is a good game, some of their ads are really terrible and have bad acting.
		* Many clickbait ads now include crappy and clichéd phrases or quotes such as "Why is this game so hard?", "My mom: | My dad:", "I can't get past level [X]", "Harder than you think!", "I'm sure you can't find the 4th object", "Catch the cheater", "I can't reach pink [x]", etc.
	3. They can feature a player trying to complete a level (an easy one in particular), and keep failing. This is often followed with quotes like "I can't reach [level/section]".
	4. Newer ads for games, especially lower-end games such as *Words Story*, *Merge Plane*, *Gardenscapes* and *Matchington Mansion*, are incredibly repetitive. One variant will typically show the player managing to solve a puzzle or problem a few times (mostly easy ones) before messing up and having a circle with the word "FAIL" appear. Another variant will show two players, one being significantly more advanced than the other, with labels such as "NOOB" and "PRO", "MY MOM" and "MY DAD", and "ME" and "MY (family member)".
	5. Some ads for mobile games, one notorious example being *Toon Blast!* (which is however a good game), can play very frequently, which can cause boatloads of annoyance for players. To make matters worse, some of these ads cannot be skipped and must be replayed. This could make players not want to download such promoted games, as much as those ads only pissed them off due to how common they appear.
	6. Some ads are actually demos for the games that are being advertised. They are often poorly made, with barely any effort put into them. Some of them had a "play demo" button, but it redirects you to either Google Play Store or Apple App Store. (depending on your mobile phone) *Lords Mobile* had a demo ad that represented the fake gameplay shown in the regular ads, not the actual gameplay. Luckily, most of these demos stay true to the actual game, not the fake footage.
		* Since they aren't actual apps, they usually take so long to load, making the viewer of the advertisement have to wait through a loading sequence which is often a black screen.

## Redeeming Qualities

* In 2018, YouTube removed unskippable 30 second ads.
* There is a way to block ads without paying for them.