In 2014, Ethan Zuckerman, the inventor of the much loathed pop-up ad, apologized for his creation in a .
In the late 1990s, Mr. Zuckerman worked for Tripod.com, a website that marketed content and services to college graduates, but found it could not support itself on the original business model. After the company attempted and failed to sell merchandise, subscriptions services, and a magazine, it turned to Zuckerman鈥檚 big idea:
鈥淎t the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising," he writes. "The model that got us acquired was analyzing users鈥� 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鈥檚 toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user鈥檚 page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page鈥檚 content."
But when a car company freaked out that its banner ad appeared on a page that celebrated explicit content, "I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it," Zuckerman adds. "I鈥檓 sorry. Our intentions were good.鈥�
