Ethan_Zuckerman
Posted on 08/16/2014 5:12:53 PM PDT by upbeat5
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Hate pop-up ads? So does the guy who created them.
Ethan Zuckerman worked for the webpage hosting site Tripod.com from 1994 to 1999, when it was struggling to develop a revenue model.
“Along the way,” he writes in The Atlantic this week, “we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.”
The pop-up ad started as a solution to a complaint from a car maker upset that its banner ad was running on a page containing sexual content. Zuckerman wrote the code to launch ads in separate windows, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the Web’s biggest nuisances.
“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,” Zuckerman wrote. “I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
Zuckerman works these days at MIT, where he’s the director of the Center for Civic Media and principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He says he’d like to see the Internet evolve away from ad-supported businesses, perhaps through greater use of subscription models or direct “micropayments” to creators of content.
“20 years [into] the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive,” Zuckerman writes.
He ought to be in jail for life.
Ad Block Plus.
They mostly went away with proper browser extensions and third party tools but lately animated JavaScript popups which dim the screen, have very tiny close buttons, etc. are coming on like a storm. It’s even worse when using a tablet browser with little or no ability to block such annoyances.
Sadly, many of the conservative web sites employ these intrusive and frankly juvenile ads.
Pop up ad? Good grief people...learn to use the easy browser controls and add ons. Haven’t seen a pop-up in years.
he created a monster, created a monster and nobody loves her...
tech ping?
Agreed!
Finally, somebody worthy of a witch hunt.
Typhoid Mary was probably sorry too.
Ethan_Zuckerman
Who invented “onclick”?
That was just done out of hatefulness.
If he didn’t make it, somebody else would have
It’s always the way, isn’t it?
I`m not a computer expert, but it seems to me that if he hadn`t invented it, someone else would have. He shouldn`t feel bad.
GMTA! ;) please see post 15! :)
TO: Pop-up Ad Creator
I hate you...........
):^(
I don’t even know when the last time I saw a popup was. FF with ABP and NoScript kills just about everything.
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