Here's Why Pop-Up Advertising Was Invented (and Its Creator's Apology)

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Do you know who invented the pop-up window ? This invention is claimed by the American Ethan Zuckerman, now 52 years old. In a 2014 article in The Atlantic, he recounts his experience at Tripod.com, a site he worked for from 1994 to 1999. It was a service that hosted online content and positioned itself as a kind of social network.

“For five years, we tried dozens of revenue models, printing out brilliant new business plans to sell each one”, we read in his article. But ultimately, the business model that funded this service was online advertising.

Pop-up advertising was created to satisfy an advertiser

Pop-up advertising was invented to satisfy an advertiser who did not want their banners to appear next to user-generated content, which could be sensitive. So the idea was to have a visible ad that appeared on another page.

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“I wrote the code to launch the window and show an ad in it,” says Ethan Zuckerman. But in hindsight, he realized that this was a mistake. “Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolbox,” the article reads. The post, titled “The Internet’s Original Sin”, is actually a mea culpa of sorts. “I’m sorry. “Our intentions were good,” writes the former Tripod.com employee, regarding pop-up ads.

It should be noted, however, that in 2018, most publishers have already reviewed their practices, after the launch of an ad filtering system on Google Chrome. This prohibits certain ad formats that encourage Internet users to install ad blockers. And among the prohibited formats, there are pop-up ads, as well as autoplay video ads with sound.

• Ethan Zuckerman claims the invention of pop-up ads
• In an article, he says that he coded the window that displays an ad when he worked at Tripod.com, in order to satisfy an advertiser
• Later, he regretted having “created one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolbox”

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