The Man Who Invented Pop-up Ads Apologizes To The World

oke efagene

August 15, 2014 4:42 PM

The man responsible for creating one of internet's most hated features has apologized for the invention.

Pop-up ads are definitely in the top five list of the digital world's most hated things, not including Internet Explorer.

Now, Ethan Zuckerman, the man who invented them back in the mid-90s, wants to apologize.

Zuckerman, the head of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT, says that he didn't know what he was bringing into the world when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad more than two decades ago while working for Tripod.com.

Writing for The Atlantic, Zuckerman explains that he had unintentionally created one of the worst forms of advertising on the web:

"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. 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."

The full essay, he argues about how the Web needs to ditch the ad-based business model once and for all, and explore other options.

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