Tapping into consumer disgust with online ads, a scrappy Internet company that grew profitable by selling pop-ups and banners launched a Web portal last week that features text-only advertising.
In an in-your-face swipe at Yahoo, the upstart portal virtually replicates the look of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web giant’s home page but without the bold ads. Like Yahoo, MyWay.com offers free search, e-mail and content.
The new portal’s name is a reference to Yahoo’s popular personalization feature, My Yahoo. MyWay said it targeted Yahoo because of its size and full embrace of eye-catching ads that fill up the once-simple search and directory site.
The new portal collects revenue from paid listings that appear in Web searches.
MyWay is the latest offering from two Harvard Business School classmates who created the sweepstakes site iWon.com. Bill Daugherty and Jonas Steinman, partners in Irvington, N.Y.-based Bulldog Holdings, last year also bought the remnants of Excite.com from bankruptcy court.
IWon.com, which draws visitors by giving away $10,000 a day, and Excite.com rank among the most ad-packed Web sites and will continue to rely almost solely on revenues from blinking banners and pop-up ad copy.
But now that pop-ups have become so unpopular, the pair said they also are serving the latest market demand for faster, cleaner Web browsing.
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The growing distaste for online ads that interfere with Web surfing is getting some serious response from other quarters. America Online announced last month that it will begin banning third-party pop-ups from its sites, along with iVillage, EarthLink, Infospace and Ask Jeeves.
Although pop-ups account for as little as 2 percent of all Web-ad impressions, they are leaving an increasingly bad impression.
“You can’t become numb to them or ignore them,” said Jim Nail, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
No one expects MyWay to supplant any of the big Internet behemoths, but the “no pop-ups” pledge is aimed at drawing attention to a new portal just as Yahoo, AOL and MSN launch a new round in their high-stakes battle for users.
But MyWay could be in for some criticism about how it separates paid text ads from non-commercial search results, an issue that in the past has drawn the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.
MyWay collects revenues from paid text-only links that appear when a search, powered by Google, is conducted on the site. The ad links, labeled “sponsored listings,” dominate the top of the search-results page, requiring Web users to scroll past them before reaching “Web listings,” which are based on relevancy and popularity. Daugherty said the paid listings are clearly identified ads.
Charles Buchwalter, vice president of analytics for Nielsen/NetRatings, predicted MyWay will “have an uphill battle against Goliath.” Yahoo, he said, should get credit for still providing useful free services during the biggest ad drought in decades.
Yahoo declined to comment on the new competitor.
And even as pop-ups and banners lose steam, ad-weary Web surfers shouldn’t rejoice.
Already, so-called eye-blaster ads that dance over a Web page and paid messages delivered in video have surpassed the number of pop-up impressions.
“Those more sophisticated ads are coming into favor,” Buchwalter said. “When the book is written, pop-ups will just be a footnote.”