Pop-up adverts inventor apologizes for ‘internet’s original sin’

Most internet users find pop-up adverts that disrupt their browsing downright annoying.

And now the man who invented them has apologised – admitting they are ‘one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit’.

Ethan Zuckerman also believes that advertising is the ‘original sin of the web’.
And while the internet may have been underpinned by adverts for two decades, it is not too late to adopt a new – and less irritating – model, but users will have to pay for web content.

In an article for The Atlantic, the inventor and director of the Centre for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says that the advert-reliant internet is the result of good intentions gone awry.
But it was not his intention to annoy the world when he came up with the idea at web hosting service Tripod.com in the mid-1990s.

Pop-up adverts annoy users so much because they obstruct the view of a page that they are viewing and have to be closed down with the click of a mouse. Mr Zuckerman describes them as a barrier to overcome.
He explains that a large car company loved the idea of pop-up advertising and he found himself coding an advertising window that popped up on an unsavoury website.

He is now sorry for coding it, but says that his intentions at the time were good.

The computer scientist also helped to develop software that allows advertisers to see what users click on, which lets them to target consumers in a more personal way.

Mr Zuckerman believes that as long as the internet is reliant on advertising, people’s privacy will be invaded.

He says: ‘20 years into the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive.’

He thinks that over the years, users have been trained to expect this and accept that it is part of them using certain websites.

‘I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web,’ he writes.

‘The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.’

Mr Zuckerman says that an internet that is not built upon advertising could be achieved if users start to pay for services that they love.

The move would see website numbers change considerably and could lead to more innovative products.

He believes that ‘free’ services are selling their users and their attention as the product at the moment.