While reading this I want you to imagine that you get this far and... wait! Would you like to buy some of my old videos and CDs? I want to sell them, and this strikes me as the best time to approach you about it. Please contact me if you are interested... An advert has popped up in the middle of the text.

Wouldn't that be annoying? Maybe not if you wanted to buy my copy of The Seattle Years by Daniel O'Donnell, but what if I was offering you the chance to max out your credit card in my offshore casino game? You would probably stop reading. But please don't. Despite my desire to shift old records I think that pop-up adverts are the cancer of the Internet - but perhaps the tide is turning against them.

This week iVillage, a women's portal in the US, announced that due to negative feedback about the advertising carried on its site it will cease to use pop-up adverts. A survey of users apparently found that 95 percent consider these adverts to be the most frustrating aspect of the Internet.

I found this out by looking at Slashdot, where pop-up adverts are saved as a target for vitriol. But when I clicked on the link to get to the story on another Web site it was dwarfed by an ad the size of my screen. It told me the time and suggested I clean my teeth because I might have eaten an apple. Having recently polished off a Granny Smith, I found this rather disturbing.

Paranoia aside, iVillage is still getting rid of pop-up ads. "We have built iVillage by listening to what women want, and our move to eliminate pop-up advertising is a direct example of this," said iVillage co-founder Nancy Evans in a release. Although the company will still use pop-ups to promote itself on the site, the ads will not be offered to advertisers. Instead, iVillage will focus on alternative formats including - rather worryingly - pop-under ads.

Pop-under ads? Well, we can only assume they were not featured in the user poll that outlawed pop-ups, and that their life span will be as long as the gap until the next survey.

Perhaps the worst offender in the pop-under arena is Gator. Gator probably doesn't need much of an introduction to Web users so I'll simply say that if pop-ups are cancer, then Gator is cancer of the posterior - a real pain in the bum.

But again, its time may be nigh.

A suit filed in the US federal court last month described Gator as "essentially a parasite on the Web that free-rides on the hard work and investments of plaintiffs and other Web site owners... In short, Gator sells advertising space on the plaintiffs' Web sites without [their] authorisation and pockets the profits from such sales."

The suit emanates from a group of publishers who have decided that enough is enough. Fed up with the way that Gator piggy-backs itself onto both sites and users' hard drives, they are suing the advertising network for violating their copyright and stealing their revenue. This news was greeted with cheers in the online world, and because I had struggled for weeks to get it off my system, I joined in.

But I am not just bitter about that. Although it was very inconvenient being subjected to adverts at the whim of a program that analysed my surfing habits and offered me what it thought were tailored ads, I didn't think the targeting was always appropriate.

No one expects the Internet to be free of advertising - little is these days, after all. But we should expect that when ads are used, they are secondary to the rest of the information being presented. When I use the Internet, I use it for a reason. Perhaps it will come as a surprise to some online companies to learn that the reason never involves reading adverts.

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