Squeeze page vs Pop up opt-in on a blog

Hi everyone,
Just browsing the forums and came across this post & thought I too would comment if I may Personally I prefer the squeeze page too & I agree with mgtarheels it is extremely annoying when a pop up obscures what you are there to read in the first place... especially the floating ones...uurghh, lol!!

It seems that way to some people, yes.

It can depend how you split-test them, and for how long, and how effectively you allow for all the lost "would-otherwise-have-returned" traffic.

They can, of course, be accurately split-tested, but it's not trivially easy to do so.

I haven't tested them, myself. I have three clients with, collectively, quite a wide range of niches, who've tested them thoroughly (i.e. not like most people do, allowing themselves to believe that the fact that people opt in to them means they "must be working", and/or the fact that people are copying other people by using them means they "must be working"), and all three have abandoned them.

This I have tested a few times, and your thoughts match my experience: I've always done better, myself, with a prominent, incentivized opt-in on a blog/site than with a squeeze page.

Many people have apparently found the opposite. Either that's true for them but not for me (and there are, admittedly, a couple of specific reasons why that could easily be so), and/or some are perhaps misleading themselves a little by monitoring according to "numbers of people opting in" rather than by "longer-term income produced" from those people - which I've found to be two very different things, myself.

But gradually acquired experience of discussing the subject is increasingly convincing me that if people have an emotional commitment to believing that they "must work", and just want to "be right" about it, it isn't really possible to use any facts or figures at all to change their minds to any appreciable extent, and it's probably futile even trying to do so.

To me, in that sense it's very similar to the "click-through rate" discussion among article marketers: people who are already certain that increasing your CTR is necessarily, in itself, a measure of success, are for the most part simply unwilling to try to increase their income and/or the stability and longer-term potential of their businesses in any ways that might also reduce their CTR's. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything bad or wrong with that, if that's what's more comfortable for them. That's just how it is.