Does anyone know why About.com still has around 2 pop-up ads for every page visited on the site besides the main home page? The site is ranked #68 on Alexa.com as of today, so it must be doing good financially, unless their business plan is not doing well itself.

Isn’t there another way to have ads shown to visitors other than to open new windows on almost every page visited on that site? A typical information page on About.com now has about 9 ads on the main page alone. The pop-up ads are extra advertisements, and they come in pairs of 2 as a bonus too. That gives the user a prize of at least 11 advertisements per page.

The site is facing stiff competition from everyone else including Google and Wikipedia. Google offers a list of other places to go to for almost any article one may be looking for, and Wikipedia is being helped by all the users on the internet to build up an up to date encyclopedia on almost every topic imaginable. Even Answers.com has enough information that makes it a good alternate to many popular online places now.

If sites like About.com want to compete, they need to make the site more attractive. It is very cheesy already that many of the previous articles on the site themselves are links to external sites and do not have enough content of their own. Adding pop-ups on top of those links is not going to leave a good impression on the end user.

Following is a screenshot of a page on About.com talking about “Star Wars III: Revenge of Sith” and the advertisements on the page, including the pop-ups.