Inventor Of The Popup Ad Says He’s ‘Sorry’
Ethan Zuckerman, inventor of the popup ad, is sorry for creating one of the most hated features of the online world.
Ethan Zuckerman, a media scholar and director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, wrote a nice long post for The Atlantic in which he explained why his company created the annoying popup ad, and according to The Huffington Post, apologized for his role.
It all began while Zuckerman was working for website-builder Tripod in the 1990s:
“At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. 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.”
According to The Huffington Post, Zuckerman went on to explain that their original intention was good. When he first wrote the code for popups it was to help out a major car company who didn’t realize they had bought a banner ad on a sexually explicit website:
“Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
According to The Atlantic, Zuckerman said that when Geocities introduced popups a few weeks later, they reused his code.
Even though popup ads are still quite annoying, they aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be. The Huffington Post stated that popups where at their worst in the 1990s and early 2000s. By 2004, the report states that Microsoft had introduced a feature that blocked popup ads on Internet Explorer, and now, many sites, including Google, don’t allow any popup ads.
Of course, many believe that Ethan Zuckerman should be sorry for creating one of the internet’s most hated features:
@7bc He should be (sorry)! ? Bonjour, to you. ?
— M. Fca (@bihotita) August 15, 2014
Way too late, Ethan Zuckerman, way too late. “The man who invented pop-up ads is sorry. Apology not accepted” http://t.co/qEeSteRYOB — Karolin SPunkt (@NoAverageRobot) August 15, 2014
Man behind pop-up ads says sorry for ever creating them, at least he’s apologetic!! http://t.co/6jjlNlx8VU
— Zeal Media (@wehavezeal) August 15, 2014
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[Image via Shutterstock/Sam72]
