You hate Pop-Up Ad’s ? So does the guy who created them.
The creator of one of the biggest nuisances of the internet, Ethan Zuckerman feels sorry for creating them. He mention’s his apology in this weeks article in The Atlantic.
Ethan Zuckerman worked for the webpage hosting site Tripod.com from 1994 to 1999, when it was struggling to develop a revenue model.
He writes, “Along the way we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content, I’m sorry. Our intentions were good. 20 years [into] the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive.”
An idea which started as a solution to the complaint raised by a car maker that it’s banner ad’s were showing on the page which was NSFW. So Zuckerman wrote the code to open the ad in a new window, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the Web’s biggest nuisances.