When you open the website, then there are pop up ads. Uhhh it's so annoying! Who has the idea to make a pop up ad? This is the history.
Pop up ads are probably the least preferred feature of internet users today. But historically, this feature was created with good intentions in 1994 ago.
Historically, the inventor of pop up advertising is Ethan Zuckerman, who is now Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT. But when he created pop up ads in the 1990s, he was an employee of Tripod.com.
Reporting from Forbes, as seen Monday (11/8/2021) the history is like this: Zuckerman in the 1990s worked at Tripod.com. Tripod makes money from selling merchandise, subscription services and paid magazines.
But the most selling is advertising. Zuckerman in his history once wrote a confessional article in the Atlantic, that he was the one who invented the pop up ad.
"We analyze users' personal homepages so we can better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated advertising tools: pop up ads," he said in a lengthy 2014 article in the Atlantic.
According to Zuckerman, the beginning of its creation was not with bad intentions. Zuckerman said in 1994, there was a large car company in America that bought the wrong banner ad next to a porn site ad. They were afraid that their company's image would be damaged and then contacted Tripod.com asking it to be closed.
"I wrote code to launch a window and run ads in it. I'm sorry. We meant it well at the time," said Zuckerman.
At that moment in 1994, the first pop up ad was born. Pop up ads at that time was considered a genius solution to show ads to internet users who were browsing. But Zuckerman now regrets it. Ads targeting internet users are now considered annoying.
"Advertising is the original sin on the web. The chaos on the internet is a consequence of choosing advertising as the basic model to support online services and content," he said.
Zuckerman supports other business models on the internet for better browsing. He supported Sir Tim Berners Lee who proposed affordable paid private sites. Or the Pinboard model that offers a registration fee, or the paid premium service model that is ad-free.
But in reality, only some people consciously choose paid services on the internet. The majority of internet users are still looking for free ones, even though they are bombarded with pop up ads. How about yourself?
