Giving people what they don't want

You produce the website for a major daily newspaper. The website features a large number of articles which are freely available to all site visitors, whereas other newspapers charge visitors to read many of their articles online.

Currently advertising revenues for the site are down and there has been talk of employment and budgetary cut-backs if this does not change. You are worried about losing a number of key staff.

Recently the online advertising department has been focussing upon selling pop up advertising to clients, but have been complaining about the low number of people viewing these ads in comparison to other pages on your site. You know that this is because many site visitors have software which blocks pop up advertising from appearing.

A bit of research has led you to a way to circumvent current pop up blocking software and force all of your visitors to view these ads, which will help obtain better statistics for your advertising department to use to entice new clients and boost its revenues.

However, you are well aware that using such a solution is likely to annoy a large number of your site visitors and may well harm not only the reputation of the newspaper but perhaps even the reputation of those advertising with you.