You know pop-ups are bad, especially when the guy who inviented them hates them.
Ethan Zuckerman has apologized to the Internet for creating the first pop-up ad in 1997, via a piece he wrote in The Atlantic.
Zuckerman said that from 1994-1999, he worked for Tripod.com, which became a "webpage-hosting provider and proto-social network."
"Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit: the pop-up ad," Zuckerman wrote.
Why exactly were pop-ups created?
Zuckerman said he wanted to "build a tool that allowed everyone to have the opportunity to express themselves and be heard." But there weren't many ways for them to offer free webpage hosting and make money in 1995. Since Tripod was free, they had to make their money somehow.
That came in a form of a pop-up advertisement. The rest is history.
But now Zuckerman has a message for annoyed Internet users.
"I'm sorry. Our intentions were good," he wrote.
And Zuckerman didn't stop there.
"I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web," he wrote.
"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," Zuckerman added.
And Zuckerman has some news for us in case we didn't already know: pop-ups are bad, and he explains why.
First, there is surveillance in the majority of ads. Second, pop-ups "[create] incentives to produce and share content that generates page views and mouse clicks" without quality content. Another point is that advertising "tends to centralize the web," which causes danger for online speech. Lastly, many websites personalize content to match our interests so "by giving platforms information on our interests, we are, of course, generating more ad targeting information," Zuckerman wrote.
But Zuckerman did say that something can be done: we can pay for services we enjoy instead of letting ads "spy" on us.
"20 years in the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive," Zuckerman wrote. "It's time to start paying for privacy, to support services we love, and to abandon those that are free, but sell us - the users and our attention - as the product."
