If you’d released an unstoppable plague upon the Internet just by doing your job, you’d probably feel a bit sorry, too. Now Ethan Zuckerman, the person responsible for the Internet pop-up ad, has come forward to apologize for the untold mental anguish and Flash mini-games he hath wrought.
The apology comes as part of a bigger piece he wrote for The Atlantic about the evils of our ad-based Internet business model and how it’s not too late to change our ways. As Zuckerman tells it, he was just doing his job at Tripod.com over twenty years ago when he Frankensteined his monster into existence.
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.
TL;DR: Sorry I ruined the Internet, you guys. I didn’t mean it. Honest.
He’s trying to make good with his suggestions on how to turn things around for the Internet, so go and give the full piece a read.
(via Gizmodo, image via butupa)
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