Self-professed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace, whose very name once provoked bilious protests across the Internet, is again finding ways to irritate people in the name of marketing.

Rather than promoting and proliferating the kind of junk e-mail that earned him his dubious moniker, Wallace is backing an entertainment site dubbed PassThisOn.com that automatically spawns no fewer than three browsers when patrons try to exit it--one of which shuttles them to an affiliate such as JobsOnline.

"Because control of content is in the hands of the viewer on the Net--and that's anti-everything in our advertising and marketing culture--this is their attempt to retain control," said Terrance Alan, managing general partner of Smoke & Mirrors, an Internet design and site-hosting company. "It forces eyeballs to look at something that they aren't normally looking at."

If, that is, they ever come back.

Therein lies the high stakes in this form of marketing, known as multiple-window launching, or "exiting," in the industry. PassThisOn's tactic, which borrows heavily from marketing practices that largely have been confined to pornography sites, is the latest in a spate of seemingly desperate attempts to survive the digital economy's shakeout. The risk of alienating visitors is obvious, but the Internet industry's slowdown has led entrepreneurs to push traditional limits for success in a sector obsessed with traffic tallies.

"This is a game to juice the Web traffic numbers," said Laura Mitrovich, program manager in Internet market strategies for The Yankee Group. "In an era where we're not sure what the sustainable model will be, they're probably thinking this is better than nothing."

Holding consumers captive

This is hardly the first idea aimed at keeping visitors on a site. But programs such as those used by PassThisOn and JobsOnline take online marketing to an aggressive new level for mainstream, heavily trafficked Web sites. When viewers type in a new address to leave JobsOnline, for example, another Web browser interrupts the attempt with a job registration page that includes a "Stop" sign and a message that reads: "One minute could change your life." After clicking this window away, the viewer gets yet another registration page for a site such as The Motley Fool.

Although this may be one of the more extreme examples, other popular sites are increasing their efforts to retain visitors. Ask Jeeves, LookSmart and others use frames to hold consumers captive as they surf the Web. Another tactic used with increasing frequency is "mousetrapping," which renders a browser's forward and back buttons useless so visitors are forced to stay on the sites.

Promotions known as pop-up and "interstitial" ads--typically half or quarter the size of a browser window--are also becoming more common at large sites such as AltaVista and RealNetworks. Web ranking site Top9.com lists AOL.com and Netscape as the top two sites that launch pop-up windows. Other Web publishers are also experimenting with new advertising formats, including CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, which launched larger, interactive ads last month.

Advertisers find these promotions more appealing because they are larger than the usual banners and are thought to encourage consumers to click through them more often.

"Pop-up promotions are slipping into the mainstream because banner ad rates have dropped through the floor and people are migrating to a number of techniques to get the consumer's attention," said Craig Nathan, chief technology officer for privacy start-up MEconomy.

The practice of corralling people with browsers was raised to an art form in the porn industry years ago, said Jay Kopita, a spokesman for Flying Crocodile, which operates an Internet audience tracker for porn sites. Sites began using software scripts that essentially take control of the visitor's browser by continually launching another page when visitors try to leave the site.

New medium strikes gold

The question, of course, is how much mainstream patrons will put up with. Wallace and others have shown in their spam initiatives that they are more than willing to experiment with a relatively new medium--and their customers--for the chance to strike gold.

"We've been doing this practice for the last 12 months, and we're still in the top 100 (of measured Web sites). And we've been profitable for 12 months," Wallace said.

Unlike pop-up ads, which are not Web pages, full browser pages served by JobsOnline and PassThisOn can be counted as "impressions"--the units used to determine advertising rates on the Internet. The more impressions a site can claim, the theory goes, the more it can try to charge advertisers.

"Marketers are like dogs: They jump up on top of you and try to lick you everywhere, and it's just painful to have to ward them off at every corner," said Jason Catlett, a privacy advocate with anti-spam group Junkbusters. "Surfers are an individually minded lot, so the marketers are using browser technology to extend and exploit that attention in ways that really annoy the consumer."

The issue also underscores the long-standing debate over how to count and use online traffic. Internet measurement companies often base their rankings on projections from a limited number of Web site visitors. The methodology, which is used to determine traffic on the entire Web, is frequently called into question but remains the closest thing to an accepted standard used by the industry.

JobsOnline shot to the top of the charts for traffic among employment-related Web sites in the second half of 2000. It still leads the pack and fluctuates in and out of the top 50 of all sites online.

According to PC Data, JobsOnline garners the most of its traffic, about 13 percent, from PassThisOn, which attracted 7.1 million unique visitors in December--more than the Web site of U.S. shopping chain Wal-Mart. JobsOnline pulled in 4.6 million unique visitors that month, surpassing career sites that are more widely known, including Monster.com and HotJobs.com.

Viral marketing spreads

PassThisOn, which encourages visitors to share such tidbits as dog animations and cow pictures, boasts of its own standing with several media measurement companies. It touts such recognition as "the fastest growing site on the Web" from PC Data and "top newcomer" from Jupiter Media Metrix on the top of its site.

"There's good publicity in having large traffic numbers," The Yankee Group's Mitrovich said. "What lies behind that is the implicit assumption that you'll sell more advertising."

That principle has critics questioning the validity of multiple windows counted as impressions, calling them the online equivalent of empty calories because they do not necessarily measure a potential consumer's interest. They point to such statistics as the average time visitors spent on JobsOnline in December: about 2.6 minutes, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. That stands in marked contrast to the 22.9 minutes reported by second-place career site Monster.com.

"The online advertising and marketing business so far has been built on getting very large, very quickly. This mind-set is ingrained in Web entrepreneurs that bigger is better, so you can claim king of the mountain, make more money, and get more funding," Mitrovich said. "But the traffic seems unqualified."

Wallace countered that PassThisOn's traffic has grown purely from what's known as "viral marketing," a term used to describe the swift spread of information online--usually via e-mail--sparked by friends and co-workers rather than by advertising.

PassThisOn has "earned its traffic," Wallace said--so much so that he has himself become the target of Web opportunists.

Wallace said his site is being victimised by a "typo squatter," a person or company that has registered various misspellings of Web addresses. In Wallace's case, a company called Pointcom.com has registered the name "PassThiOn.com" (missing an "s") that also launches multiple windows when someone tries to exit the site.

"Usually these are not reputable companies...I'm about to start taking legal action," Wallace said.

Pointcom did not return phone calls for this article.

Like Wallace, JobsOnline President Tony Priore defends the browser tactics and says the company is already profitable.

"We may use hooks as promotions, but I don't think that's a bad thing," said Priore, a former executive at e-mail marketing service Yesmail.com.

JobsOnline, which does not disclose any of its affiliate relationships, has a business model that differs markedly from those of other employment-focused Web sites. Unlike Monster.com and HotJobs, the site doesn't charge listing fees but makes money through advertising and marketing to its job seekers. When visitors sign up with the service, they must opt in to receive third-party promotions.

"You can run a Super Bowl ad and that can add up to nothing," Priore said. "These are legitimate tactics that are used in marketing."

Still, Priore said that evaluating the technique of multiple-window launching is one of his charters as president.

"If enough people find it annoying, we'll probably find a different way to generate revenue," he said.

At least some design professionals think that would be a wise idea. Those like Joshua Ulm, director of interactive design studio IoResearch, say that launching multiple windows won't catch on because consumers' desire for privacy will eventually prevail.

"Throwing something up there that the visitor didn't ask for is unprofessional--it's basically the cold call in the middle of the night," Ulm said. "The audience is not going to be comfortable with that, which is why the pop-ups have to be all that more exciting in order to take your mind off the fact that they just insulted you."

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