Bizzare Facts
Bizarre Fact:
The first pop-up ad was invented by a man who now regrets it.
Quick Explanation:
Ethan Zuckerman created the pop-up in the late 1990s as a way to separate annoying ads from content. He has publicly apologized for it.
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The Full Story:
The most intrusive, universally loathed form of digital advertising was invented by a man with perfectly good intentions who later apologized for his creation. In the late **1990s**, **Ethan Zuckerman** was a programmer working for the website Tripod.com. His employers were desperate for ad revenue, but Zuckerman noticed that users were irritated when banner ads were directly associated with content on the page.
His solution was to use a new piece of JavaScript to launch advertisements in a separate window, ensuring the ad was not technically 'on' the page and couldn't be mistaken for site content. The goal was to maintain a separation of church and state between editorial content and intrusive ads, but the result was the creation of the hated **pop-up ad**.
Zuckerman's good intentions paved the road to digital frustration. He later expressed profound regret, writing a piece for *The Atlantic* in 2014 titled 'The Internet's Original Sin,' where he acknowledged, 'I'm sorry. Our intentions were good.' The pop-up became the ultimate symbol of the web's commercialization, making his invention a notorious footnote in internet history.
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