IMDb features static and interactive ads. We realize that some of these advertising methods may be more intrusive or require more user interaction than regular banner ads, so we constantly work together with our advertisers to substantially limit the frequency of such ads and achieve a good balance between an effective promotional exposure and maintaining great site usability.
Please keep in mind that IMDb is a free service: our advertisers help us to continue providing you with great movie information, and thanks to them we can keep offering our popular service for free and continually improve our site with new content and features.
We obviously do not wish to annoy or alienate our users. If you are receiving an excessive number of pop-up ads or if these ads crash your browser or cause other technical inconveniences, that wasn't deliberate and we apologize for it.
We use a cookie-based system to strictly limit the number of ads that are displayed to users during the same session. Make sure that your browser is configured to accept cookies, which are used to detect whether you've already been shown a particular ad. If you get the same ad whenever you open a new page or click on a link, enabling cookies and restarting your browser should take care of the problem. If you are worried about privacy, please see our Privacy Policy.
If you do have cookies enabled and you still get multiple ads/popups, it's likely that they are not being sent by us. Make sure that you close ALL your browser windows, shutdown your browser then relaunch it and try accessing our site again. Some ads are designed to be loaded in the background when you visit a site but are only displayed after a long delay or when you close the browser window and leave the original site.
If you're receiving the same ad, and selected the option "Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser" on Amazon Advertising Preferences, this preference would opt you out from our site storing the information whether or not you had seen the same ad. You can update your preference to "Personalize Ads from Amazon" and select "Submit". In addition, cookie and ad blocking plug-ins on your browser can interfere with the frequency capping for ads, so we recommend disable ad blockers when on IMDb.
Finally, be aware that some ads may be generated by third-party software installed on your computer. Many free software applications (i.e.. music/file sharing programs) often include hidden components that run in the background and show pop-up ads at random intervals while you're browsing the net or display targeted ads based on your browsing habits or on what you type on a web page.
For more information about these types of software (commonly known as spyware or adware) and tools to detect/remove them from your computer, please see the Wikipedia Adware page.