“Sorry,” says man who invented pop-up ads

• 15 August 2014
• by: Bruno Bandeira
• in: Curiosities,Internet
• Tags: anuncios, diz, homem, inventou, perdao, pop, que, up
• note: no comments

Pop-up ads are among the most hated things in the digital world, so much so that every browser blocks them by default. Now the man who created this terrible invention in the mid 90's want to apologize.

Ethan Zuckerman, head of MIT's Center for Civic Media, says he didn't know what he would do to the world when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad. This was over two decades ago while he was working for Tripod.com – a site for creating personal websites, similar to the late Geocities.

He writes on the magazine's website The Atlantic:

Ultimately, the business model that secured us funding was advertising-based. Our company was acquired by analyzing users' personal pages so that we could better target ads. Over time, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools: the pop-up ad.

It was a way of associating an ad with a user's page without placing it directly there; advertisers worried that this would imply associating their brand with the page's content. Specifically, we created this when a major car company freaked out because it had purchased a banner on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to activate the window and run an ad in it. Pardon. Our intentions were good.

The full text argues that the web needs to abandon, once and for all, the ad-based business model: “It’s time to start paying for privacy, to support the services we love, and to abandon those that are free, but that sell us – the users and our attention – as the product”. The debate continues here: [The Atlantic]