Explain to me why this would work?

This blog makes a lazyweb request to create a fake "ad clicker and visitor" that would somehow make advertisers revolt and stop using the Pop-Up, thereby quickening its demise?

Umm... what? I am all about getting rid of pop-ups/pop-unders, but there are a few problems with this plan.

First of all, most of the pop-ups and pop-unders are purhased on a CPM basis. So a click on the ad doesn't cost anything nor would most advertisers really care - and assumably they don't track it.

Second, even for all the extra traffic headed to the advertiser, it is certainly bandwidth (which has costs), but I find it hard to believe that any extension in Firefox, even if installed by default in Firefox, would make that big a dent. Firefox is at most 5% of the market (if that). Of course, having the application hit the website 1,000, or 1 million times might be a different story, but I doubt that the script could do that without getting noticed.

The reason pop-ups/pop-unders exist still in the world are for the following reasons:

1. It is a cheap way to purchase advertising and a standard format.
2. It is a LOT of money for publishers. It is not an easy revenue line item to wean yourself off of once you have been using it on your site. A site like Google that never had them doesn't have this issue.
3. They deliver traffic - maybe not the most qualified or convertable, but they deliver enough (even if the 90% crud stat is right).

If you could figure out a way for publishers to replace the revenue they receive from pop-unders/pop-ups, most if not all would jump at the opportunity to get rid of them. They dislike them as much as the next guy but they like making their revenue for the quarter more.

How about a lazyweb request for some suggestions on ways a generic publisher could replace the money they get from pop-ups with another incremental revenue source? That would be interesting to hear about from the blogosphere.