However, I see Christian is using the term to mean ‘dhtml pop-up simulation.’ Were others using it this way and I’ve been talking about the wrong thing?

Personally I don’t like them much either, but in this case, a friend really needed to advertise a change and simply explaining it was just not enough.

many editors have an obvious bias against sites that exist for profit.

Perhaps, but having been an editor for the past five years, I can say that most editors do not have a bias against sites that exist for profit. In fact, we have several categories devoted to for-profit sites.

“For general audience sites the average rate for a leaderboard from an ad network nowadays is going to be less than $1 CPM”

That’s because leaderboard ads suck. There’s no reason why you can’t get an average of $3-5 CPM (primary unit) from adsense ($7-8 page eCPM). If you’re in a lucrative niche market (web development, finance, etc.), you will easily be sucking in $8+ CPM. Once your traffic is significant, you should be able to direct-sell ads which you can typically get $0.50—$2.00 CPC for (a $10-40 CPM if you have even a 2% CTR).

Most popunder clicks are on accident.

Also, the most lucrative ad network out there (by far) is adsense, and you can’t use popunders / popups with adsense.

Of course thats mostly true, so you’ll notice I said general audience site. Meaning a site with no specific demographic.

What’s not true about what you said is that you cannot use popunders with adsense. You cannot advertise adsense in a popunder, but you can use adsense on pages with popunders. Adsense also isn’t always the most lucrative ad network out there, it depends entirely on your site’s topic and demographic.

I’ve had to deal with auto popups but didn’t exclude the sites (even though they were really annoying and did damage credibility of the submission).

Though I suspect if the site was overrun with them I’d probably have to think very hard about the site content and it’s real worth.

I have also purchased numerous sitepoint produced items in the past and will most likely continue to do so because unlike some other sites I also frquent, sitepoint seems to be right on top of a lot of the things currently going on around the web and they always provide me with meaningful, insightful articles that give me enough info to make up mind on stuff or point me to other resources.

So, with that said, thanks to Chris for the article on popunders. I thought it was good, and informative, and most definitely targeted towards what you primarily write about which is making your web site make money. Matt, thanks for pointing out the “don’t show” links, even though I doubt I will ever use it.

That’s because leaderboard ads suck. There’s no reason why you can’t get an average of $3-5 CPM (primary unit) from adsense ($7-8 page eCPM). If you’re in a lucrative niche market (web development, finance, etc.), you will easily be sucking in $8+ CPM. Once your traffic is significant, you should be able to direct-sell ads which you can typically get $0.50 - $2.00 CPC for (a $10-40 CPM if you have even a 2% CTR).

Most popunder clicks are on accident.

Also, the most lucrative ad network out there (by far) is adsense, and you can’t use popunders / popups with adsense.

Well done SP.