The Man Responsible For Pop-Up Ads On Building a Better Web 135
An anonymous reader writes Above all, Ethan Zuckerman wants you to know that he is sorry. In the mid-1990s, Zuckerman was working as a designer and programmer for Tripod.com when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad. He says: "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."
Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
We finally have it confirmed that pop-up ads are the result of anal sex. Makes sense to me.
This technology sounds totally cool! (Score:5, Funny)
This technology sounds totally cool. I'd like to see them use it to make pop-up ads on the shitty Slashdot Beta site. They could make pop-up ads to counter the user's extreme boredom as this user waits for the shitty Beta site's page and all its shitty JavaScript and CSS crap to initially load. Then they make pop-up ads on to record the exact back-button click when the person notices that it's the shitty Beta site rather than the Classic site, and the person's anger starts to grow. The pop-up ads would progressively cause the user's anger to turn into madness, and then finally utter and complete disappointment and despair once the shitty Beta site has finally loaded. The pop-up ads could also cause the formation and flow of the very first of many teardrops to cascade down this poor victim's cheeks as the user struggles in vain to read the stories' small text with poor contrast. The total anguish could be examined in excruciating detail, so the awful nature of the Slashdot Beta site could be truly comprehended.
Facebook (Score:4, Funny)
And then he went on to write Facebook. I'm not sure I like this guy.