That annoying pop-up ad, splattered across your computer screen and blocking what you really want to see, isn't likely to go away.

But as online advertising budgets balloon and a consumer backlash brews against such online nuisances, companies are looking for better ways to snare the audience who will actually point, click and buy.

Downtown start-up MSpoke Inc. hopes to capitalize on this movement with new software that can let the consumer pick and choose what he or she sees on the Web. MSpoke's software is geared toward online publishers who are hoping to rake in advertising dollars by allowing their readers to identify the articles, subjects and ads they like -- or don't like.

Leslie Ament calls this approach direct marketing on steroids, and the director of customer intelligence research at Boston-based research firm the Aberdeen Group expects its use to boom.

It's sort of the next phase of the mid-1990's Web explosion, when Internet-focused firms first started devising ways of tracking consumers' online habits, she said. It may make some privacy advocates wince, but by mining eons of data on where people travel on the Web and what they are looking for, this next movement can help better match consumers with advertisers.

For years, industry watchers have debated whether online ads were worth the time it took to point and click. Tracking the return on the investment -- the link between dollars spent on online advertising with the consumer's decision to buy -- was difficult, said Ms. Ament.

But that has changed in recent years, with 80 percent of advertisers now using the Internet to sell their products, causing Internet advertising revenue to jump 30 percent in the last year alone, according to data compiled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Advertisers, it appears, have realized that snagging the right audience to sell a product could be worth the money.

Matt Fleckenstein, the vice president of marketing at MSpoke, said the firm's software helps take this process to the next level by allowing users to give feedback on ads as well as content. With a click of a mouse, articles they like can get a "thumbs up;" ads they don't can get a "thumbs down," he said. Such information is invaluable to publishers seeking to draw advertisers.

MSpoke executives also believe their software can help overcome a growing backlash of Internet consumers who have grown wary from being inundated with unwanted information.

"Consumers are sick of getting irrelevant messages," said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. And they are letting advertisers know by using blogs to bash certain advertisements, by signing up for do-not-call lists and -- an advertiser's nightmare -- by using software tools to erase the Web "cookies" that track what sites users have visited from their computers.

Allowing Internet surfers to tweak both ads and content will be "big -- if it isn't already," said Rob Pizzica, director of business development at Labwerks/Ten United, a Downtown marketing and advertising agency. Many of his clients aren't aware that there are tools to target the exact audience they are looking for, bringing the right message at the right time.

Still, tracking consumers' behavior online and then showcasing ads for products they think they might want is not new. But allowing the consumer to tell you who they are is new, Mr. Fleckenstein said. "Our goal is to involve the consumer in the process," he said.