The crazy thing about this whole newsletter and popup thing in general is that, why in the hell would I give out my email address or anything else 1 second after entering a website? How and where exactly is the connection there that makes sense?
I actually sent a strongly worded email to MIT Tech Review yesterday (there was an article on the front page) because they have 3 separate popups on first-entry to the site. Like, wtf? Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
It's so pathetic and such a 2005 trend, it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible.
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
How about NO POP-UPs? Remember when browsers came with built-in pop-up blockers so users didn't have to deal with them at all? Newsletter sign-ups are the same bullshit as 90s style pop-ups, and everyone agreed we should block those then, why are these different?
I don't want timed pop-ups, or pop-ups that are more convenient, I want NO POP-UPs, and as soon as I see one I am closing the tab and writing off the website as not worth my time.
I don't mean to call you out specifically, I don't think you're arguing in favor of pop-ups, but I'm just confused why your initial response was to ask for lesser evil pop-ups, rather than no pop-ups at all.
The popups you're thinking of were much more harmful than these. Those were separate browser windows that opened third-party sites and downloaded and ran insecure code.
This is a popup in the visual sense. Although to be fair lots of sites use third-party scripts to handle these email asks, so maybe it's not that different!
You're certainly not wrong about the malware / insecure code...
But a popup that opens an in-page modal vs a popup that opens a new tab or window are pretty much equivalent from a user experience point of view in my opinion. I don't want either, and neither is less or more evil to me.
At least the pop-up windows had a consistent way to close them and you could use keyboard shortcut. Now I have to think about the right way to close each custom popup.
I'd go even further: I don't want ANY pop-ups of any kind in my computing experience, period. When I set out to do some task, I don't want my attention to be yanked away by anything. Computers should essentially be REPLs. Read my command, execute the command, print the result, and then read my next command. And the equivalent function when using a GUI: I click on something, the computer does that thing, displays the results, and then it waits for me to click on something else. They shouldn't be doing a bunch of stuff on their own in the background. They shouldn't be trying to decide what they want me to be doing. I decide what the computer should be doing!
We have drifted so far away from the light--when the user was 100% in charge of everything the computer was doing.
I am convinced that twitch video games are the largest influence on UX/UI today.
And it stands to reason. What does a nerd do in his misspent teenage/college years but get a gaming rig and get on Steam for some AAA action. He builds reflexes and the ability to track and demolish targets.
Therefore when he graduates college and becomes a slinger of code, he writes a UI that capitalizes on video game reflexes that everyone must share. The ability to react within 50ms to a dramatic change on screen. The steely nerves to track a moving target with our finger and tap "Undo" before the interstitial vanishes forever and our action is set in stone. Navigating endless chains of hover-menus by threading the needle, because if you go 3mm off track, you'll need to start all over again.
GUIs today actively punish the user for attempting to anticipate and go ahead with actions before the computer is good and ready, but when that computer starts throwing up dialogs, you'd better be able to keep up.
I had 6502 and 286 based machines that had UIs that were able to react instantly and stably to every input I could give. How can response time and latency worsen in the intervening 30 years?
> I'd go even further: I don't want ANY pop-ups of any kind in my computing experience, period.
And I don't ever want my focus dragged away from the window that I'm currently on.
Whatever it is that the app developer thinks IS SO ABSOLUTELY FUCKING IMPORTANT THAT THEY NEED TO STEAL MY ATTENTION AWAY RIGHT THIS GODDAMN SECOND, just isn't actually that important to me.
My relationship with a lot of applications is like a clingy sidepiece that I'm about ready to dump if they get any more annoying.
The reality is that in a lot of cases, losing you is acceptable collateral damage. Some percentage of people will close the site if they see a popup (I do some of the time, depending on how much I care about seeing the site's content and how easy it is to close the popup).
> everyone agreed we should block those then
They didn't, though. It's very plausible that everyone in your social circle agreed on that, but there were a lot of people filling those popups out then, and there are a lot of people doing it now.
That is not to say that you're not right - they are annoying, and I'd generally rather be rid of them. The reality is, though, people who immediately close websites upon seeing popups are a small minority, and for many websites the value lost by those people closing the website it meaningfully less than the value gained by some percent of people giving their email.
Arguably these in-page pop-ups can over some value if used judiciously, and unlike traditional pop ups cannot flood the whole screen or otherwise break out of the tab.
They do it because it works. Many people on the internet are not tech savvy and they just assume that in order to view the content they must input their email. It doesn't help that the close button is sometimes barely visible.
I've gotten to the point where if a site displays a popup, I just close the page. If I had the ability to remove that source from all future searches I would.
Things break? I use a similar bookmarklet, but I only ever use it for reading articles which have zero need for any dynamic features. Give me the text, images, and get out of my way.
(function () {
var i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed') {
elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);
}
}
})();
They do it because they have been sold a story that it works. It's easy to show short-term gains, and hard to show long-term damage... and nobody gets paid today for showing damage months later. Short-term marketing incentives are horrifyingly destructive.
Does it work? In some areas, yeah, I believe it does. But most are cargo-culting a dark pattern that loses them what might otherwise be excellent customers, sold by people trying to justify their marketing position, and companies whose business incentives are perfectly aligned with selling snake oil.
It focuses far too much on numbers; in the case of newsletter signups, it's conversion rates. If interactions with newsletters is > 0, it's worth having a newsletter; if conversion for these popups is > 0, then it's worth having a newsletter pop-up.
It's like an often quoted thing; Linus Tech Tips was criticized for having "reaction faces" in their thumbnails, and they said that while they don't like it, they had the numbers to back up that it was effective... to boost numbers and therefore revenue, I guess.
In the case of my current employer, they focus on NPS, Net Promoter Score, a wooly abbreviation [0] indicating how good they are doing based on the question "how likely are you to recommend X to a friend". Number goes down in case of outages, number goes up in case of good service. That's the main thing they focus on, not individual stories, users, whatever, but NPS.
I stopped watching and blocked the linus channel (and may others) due to the faces.
But I guess I am only one and the many likes these faces for some reason.
It is also probably a failure of optimization where one started doing it and made a tiny bit more money than the other. Then the others had to do it to keep up, now all have the sucky faces and they all make the same amount as before while doing something they don't really like.
What they don't take into account is the secondary and tertiary effects of doing things like this. I stopped visiting channels that did the faces, LTT among them, and I also (usually) insta-close any video where the presenter is making a completely fake 'why don't you tell me about it in the comments' calls to action.
The things is that your numbers might go up and your audience might grow, but these tactics work because you are appealing to the trend at the time. People see stupid face and click and the trending metric goes up and you get more hits -- same thing with user interactions on comments.
However, two months later when someone is trying to find a video about how to hook up their AMD CPU De-hot-an-izer to a radiator and they see Linus making a Macauly Culkin Home Alone face they pass, and you lose a potential actual long-term subscriber.
Also, people with standards tend to be really happy when those standards are at least partially met, and tell other people about it. On the flip side, people looking for their youtube 'stupid faces video fix' tend to forget what they saw 10 minutes later.
At work, I deal with enterprise software, and I agree that the focus on numbers (and NPS) can drive things the wrong way.
In my personal time, I own an ecommerce company, and there it absolutely makes sense to be purely numbers-focused. The thing that matters is getting someone to buy, and getting an email address is almost universally the second most important thing, because it's the best road to getting someone to buy.
> It doesn't help that the close button is sometimes barely visible.
This particular dark pattern is nasty and unfortunately common across more than just newsletter popups. It doesn’t trip me up but I could see how others could fall victim to it.
If opting out is so strongly preferred by users that you have to try to hide the opt-out button for users to do anything else, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to do the thing they’re so adamantly opting out of.
In my experience, conversation rates were ~6% from a pop up timed to land when you were nearly done with the article (though on short articles, it was similar to what is described—I don’t have data on those two broken out). Subscribers stuck pretty well, something like 40% kept opening emails. For my relatively small newsletter, churn was extremely low. They’re basically warm leads if they make it to the end of an article, and email is extremely sticky.
Email pop ups are a very effective short term newsletter growth tool.
As someone who used to work in marketing, this. Anecdotal, but in my experience working in marketing it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented. My boss didn't care how many people actually clicked on the link in our newsletter, as long as we had a lot of subscribers we were good.
> it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented
Yeah, your clients expected you to be the expert, and honestly apply that expertise for their interests. In other words, they expect you to validate those numbers; if they wanted somebody they need to second-guess, they would just take opinions for free from a random web forum.
We didn't have any clients, it was a marketing department for a CPG company. I was just a peon; I didn't have any say in how things got done. Say all that to say, you would think that at some point VPs of other departments would want to know how all the money that got allocated to marketing was actually benefiting the company. I'm talking a concrete dollars to dollars comparison. I personally didn't get to scratch that itch until I moved into e-commerce.
Well, ok, I misunderstood that part. But the expectation of goal alignment is even stronger for an in-house department.
The people high up expected somebody on your department to validate your numbers and invest on the things that most benefited the company. For an in-house team, it's not rare that this expectation is so strong that nobody ever challenges it. So it's also not very rare that one team or another coast on it and don't deliver much value.
Obviously, none of that is ideal. But that doesn't stop it from being common. Anyway, if your department never checked anything, somebody up from you was doing a bad job, because it's literally their job, not really the random VP (but it is the VP's job to discover if the dept was doing their job) and really not of any other department head.
to be fair to your boss, you can't actually make me click on your link or read your newsletter. Delivering it is the only thing that you actually have control over, and you're probably delivering to one of those gmail purgatory folders anyways.
I definitely couldn't "make" anyone click on anything. But delivering it wasn't the only thing we had control over. The format and content of the email we had complete control over. This was years ago, but at the time I suggested trying to record and study which emails lead subscribers to actually click the link so that we could learn to produce content/offers that more people wanted to see. The idea was mostly shrugged off but I did it anyways. When the numbers of people actually following the links went up my boss never wanted to show anybody. My somewhat cynical guess is that he didn't want to introduce real accountability (proof that we were having an effect) into some of the data he was presenting to other departments.
This is why there's so many subscription services (e.g. streaming, apps, etc) as well; they don't care about viewers or happiness, they (and the stock holders) care about subscribers, because subscribers = fixed and predictable monthly revenue, as well as loyalty (if they don't unsubscribe) and inertia (forgetting to cancel).
I've often wondered about that. Spotify has never failed to have the music I wanted to listen to. Though their app interface has always been a little painful for me to use.
Marketing thinks "OMG, people subscribing the newsletter are returning to the website way more often than regular ones". Then by showing this newsletter pop-up down everyone throat, they successfully get X% more subscribers. Much engagement, much success, poor UX, annoying for everyone.
Maybe people subscribing to that newsletter are the most interested and you shouldn't bother everyone with it for the sake of few subscriptions.
Adding people to your email list surreptitiously, via frustration or because of some incentive (like 10% off) is a great way of building a high number of subscribers but I doubt this does anything to your bottom line. In the case of discounts for sign-up it's almost certainly negative.
If they are relying on fooling people into thinking you have to enter your email address to read the article... why don't they actually try to require you to enter your email address to read the article (perhaps after reading the first few screens), instead of just implying it to those who can be fooled? They could do this, right?
I own an ecommerce company, and while I can't tell you the why, I can tell you that ~6% of people fill mine out. Is it annoying? Yup. Would it absolutely, unequivocally, be a bad business decision to take it down? Yup.
You know what else I've got on the site? One of those annoying little notifications that comes up in the bottom right to say "Someone bought this four hours ago!" I hate those things! I swore I'd never put them on my site!
The problem is, when I swore that, I was making the same mistake that you are here - assuming that I was the target and that everyone is like me. The reality is they are not, and these things work well. They're ubiquitous on ecommerce sites for a reason.
So 6% of people fill yours out meaning 94% of the people either ignore it, block it or get angry and leave the site. How many of the 6% fill it out because they think they have to? How many just give you a garbage email address?
If somebody wants to be part of your email list, most of them will find a place to sign up for it and nobody will see your site as a slimy sales gimmick.
See the problem here is you're projecting your feelings about popups (which I totally get, to be clear) onto my business. From a business perspective that's a bad thing to do.
What I've done (and what countless other website owners have done) is operate based on data. I've done a lot of A/B testing of my email capture popup - I've tested content, timing, and whether or not it's there at all. "How many of the 6% fill it out because they think they have to? How many just give you a garbage email address?" Sub 3%. That one's easy to validate, and I've done so.
You're calling it a "slimy sales gimmick" (which I think is somewhat harsher language than necessary), but the reality is most new users who hit my site come in from Facebook ads. I would wager that you and folks of your same mindset about the popup probably see advertising on social media as slimy as well. The people who come to my site clearly don't.
What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world is not like HN and does not share the beliefs of the typical HN user vis a vis digital advertising, sales tactics, websites, etc.
> You're calling it a "slimy sales gimmick" (which I think is somewhat harsher language than necessary)
I actually don't think that's overly harsh.
> the reality is most new users who hit my site come in from Facebook ads.
And, once again, we see the corrosive effects of Facebook actively making things crappier for the non-FB-using world.
> What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world is not like HN
I suspect that the vast majority of HN is fully aware of this. That doesn't make our complaints any less valid, though. What's alternative? "Shut up and take it"?
> That doesn't make our complaints any less valid, though. What's alternative? "Shut up and take it"?
I have been very clear in my comments here that these complaints are perfectly valid and reasonably. The alternative is obviously not to "shut up and take it" - it's to do what you're doing and leave sites that do things you don't like. Vote with your digital feet.
My point remains that popups asking people to sign up for an email newsletter exist, and will continue to exist, because a significant enough portion of the population does find them useful (as evidenced by the fact that they give their emails and then later make purchases based on emails they receive), even if folks on HN think that they are slimy or evil or what have you.
"See the problem here is you're projecting your emotions and empathy onto my business. From a business perspective that's a bad thing to do.
What I've done is operate on data. My customers are faceless numbers, not people, and so long as they give me money I don't care about them.
What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world are suckers who will do whatever advertising convinces them to."
I'm admittedly taking some liberties here, but it grieves me that business is now pretty much "fuck you I've got mine, or I'll do whatever it takes to get it." There must be a better way.
If you think a popup asking someone to give their email address in exchange for a discount is the same as an advertisement convincing people to smoke, then I don't think we're going to have a productive exchange here.
I can believe that. I operate in a little bubble where all ads and annoyances are blocked. I aggressively unsubscribe from every newsletter and set filters for anything that gets through. I patiently went through the settings of every website to max out the privacy settings.
Your average consumer, however, clicks whatever button is blue, enters their email wherever there's an email field, and powers through the ads which are personalised for them. I would not be surprised if the numbers that you described are true, and not just a fluke.
But I chose to build the sort of internet I like. A quiet, straightforward internet that respects consent and privacy. It worked fine for me, so I feel no need to change my ways.
The HN readership truly is unique; nowhere else will you see a community so virulently opposed to advertising/marketing, in an industry (tech) whose largest players have no other way of making money.
What percentage of people immediately bounce off your site as soon an aggravating interruption like this appears? I know I do. Have you measured if customers stay longer if you don't display the interruption?
Of that 6% how many actually read the newsletter as opposed to sending it to spam? Is that percentage more valuable to you than keeping people on the site?
> Have you measured if customers stay longer if you don't display the interruption?
That's not the right metric. I care about whether people buy things, and since I can measure that directly, it's better to do so than to measure intermediate metrics like time on page. Revenue is meaningfully better with the popup than without.
> Of that 6% how many actually read the newsletter as opposed to sending it to spam? Is that percentage more valuable to you than keeping people on the site?
Open rates vary from 20-40% depending on the type of email. Yes, it is more valuable.
I'll reiterate something I said in another comment, which is that there are a lot of people who don't think of this kind of thing as an aggravating interruption. Most of my new users come in because they click on Facebook ads, which are anathema to a lot of folks on HN but a normal, reasonable thing to look at and maybe click on to a much broader swathe of the world. I'm optimizing for those people, not HN folks.
Nobody here is “assuming that [they are] the target”. Everyone here knows everything that you said. Your behavior is still scummy.
Just listen to yourself:
> Is it annoying? Yup. Would it absolutely, unequivocally, be a bad business decision to take it down? Yup.
Translation: given the choice between making the website even remotely pleasant and making more money for yourself, you choose the money every time. Everyone else can suck it.
We are not criticizing your decision because we don't understand your circumstance or context. We are criticizing the decision precisely because we understand it. It's selfish, scummy, and it's the reason the entire web sucks ass now.
I've tried sliding it down from the top and up from the bottom, as well as a persistent email collection bar anchored to the top. All inferior in terms of form completion as well as revenue generated within three months for the cohort of people exposed to the form.
Haven't tried a block in the middle of the text, but that's because most folks are landing on my product page, and that's had a lot of testing to ensure it's optimized for sales, which are naturally more important than email collection.
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element)
In the sites I interact with, that is probably the majority of these popups. You find them preferable?
I find them just as annoying and counter-productive as OP is describing.
For one thing, when your heuristics say I'm getting interested, that's when you decide to interrupt my attention? It's like they've intentionally decided to algorithmically make this as annoying as possible, when is the time we can interrupt the reader as annoyingly as we can?
And as you say, even if I've read 35% of an article or something, it may still be the first time I'm interacting with a site, and why do I want to give them my email address?
Your argument is valid in the context of people who just don't have any idea about User Experience. A popup can be made very user-friendly and non-obstructive if you plan it that way. A small slide-out from bottom-right corner with soft colors (in my opinion) is a great way to let people know you have a newsletter.
Absolutely not. A pop-up is, by definition, something that “pops up”, which it does specifically to hijack attention, i.e., to be distracting and obnoxious.
The best way to let me know that you have a newsletter is NO POP-UP. A pop-up immediately screams “this website is trying to hijack your attention, get out as fast as possible.” The idea that I should want to stay on such a dystopian website, much less reward it with a newsletter subscription, is just so ludicrous it boggles the mind.
Sure, that's fine. I don't see those, I see popups that cover up the article I was trying to read, and I'm pretty sure this is quite intentional, someone designing it believes that will maximize "conversions". (I have no idea if they are correct about that or not, they may well be).
Or you could just put it somewhere static on your page that doesn't pop up. Maybe quit hiding every single thing under a hamburger menu and some magical swipe, and people might be able to find it.
You could make the argument that if you read the content for free, but cannot even be bothered to be asked for your email (you don't have to provide it!), then there is probably not much lost either for the site or for you if you never visit the site again.
that hypothetic argument depends on the ridiculous assumption that if a user won't convert within a minute or so, in the middle of the first piece of your content they've ever read, they never will
Well, I would put the pop-up more towards the end of the content.
Also, you misrepresent the assumption. The assumption is that if the user is so annoyed even by just the attempt of conversion that they leave the site, that then you will have a hard time to ever convert them.
That assumption doesn't sound ridiculous at all to me. Also, it doesn't need to be true 100% of the time. Even 50% is probably enough to justify it, because if you don't attempt to convert, you will not convert for sure.
Your fixation on users as something that needs “converting”, and your insistence that anyone who doesn't “convert” doesn't matter and is not worthy of any consideration... well, let's just say, it explains why so many websites are unusable.
I want to visit websites that are made for human beings, not commodities.
Me too! But human beings must eat. So, get rid of capitalism, or convert.
Keep in mind that conversion here means to provide the author of the content, hopefully a human being, with an email, so that they can inform you of interesting new content. I cannot see anything inhumane in this.
it indeed sounds ridiculous to expect them to provide their personal information to you the first time they ever see any of your content, even if it's almost 1 whole piece of content
1 webpage view is rarely worth a piece of personal information as intimate as an email address, so you could either focus on demanding something less demanding, or making that 1 webpage view into multiple
Or just make good content, and let people filter themselves out, if they are not interested. If my content is not worth your email, you don't have to give it. If you furthermore don't deem my content worth the small annoyance of being asked for your email, fine! Bye bye.
The alternative is that I have to track you somehow, and determine how often you visited my content. I wouldn't like that. It is more complicated, it is creepier, and I very much doubt that it would convert better.
or just focus on demanding something less demanding, or making that 1 webpage view into multiple by making good content
either way, you're in the minority in feeling that someone viewing <1 piece of your internet content entitles you to personal information about them as intimate as an email address, because it is a ridiculous expectation
So, your point here, is that people complaining about algorithmically timed email-harvesting popups over articles are annoying you, and you want them to know you plan to continue this practice despite their complaints? OK. I think those people plan to keep complaining about how it annoys them, anyway, too. We all good now?
it would be good if you could consider the third option: produce content that drives people to return to or remain on your site and eventually subscribe without the pop-up,
since most people would agree it's unreasonable to interrupt someone for such intimate personal information as you're asking, when they've not even seen a single whole piece of content
indeed, this seems like a case where it's actually up to you
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
They're arguably worse because it's a slap in the face while focusing on something.
I’ve seen a few websites recently with a pleasant newsletter experience.
The signup field is a few paragraphs down the article and as you scroll to it, the article dims (but is still readable) and highlights the newsletter section. As you keep scrolling the the dimming fades out and you can read the article again.
This is much less jarring than a pop up and is placed after the reader gets to read at their pace.
OK, I'll bite. What are you doing with those emails, then? Are you blasting out spam to them? Do they engage? Are the analytics better for those who have subscribed to e-mail compared to those who haven't?
So I just took over responsibility to reboot a polyglot conference in Greenville, SC that will happen this August.
In the interest of time, I needed to communicate a lot with a lot of people to keep people informed, raise awareness, etc before I have time to properly build a new site so I setup a substack blog to do it. You can see it here:
- Feed all of the social media accounts created for it (with dlvr.it)
- Announce call for Speakers (open til May 25th)
- Announce call for Sponsors
- Additional community information (we're trying to help get local meetups moving again as a side effect)
Early on there's been a ton of information to distribute and feedback to gather, so it's worked well. The substack email list is the primary communication channel and we've got about a 50% open rate with very high engagement from about half the list. I use the scheduling features to make sure I never sent more than one thing per day, on weekdays only.
I'm learning the marketing side of this as I go, so I'm trying to be very wary of things that bother me. On the flip side, the defaults for a tool like dlvr.it will post multiple times a day to social channels which seems very spammy but it also seems to work. I've never been very social media active because I don't like doing that type of thing.
Spreading the word on this stuff is hard though, so I've got to balance my own desire to not bother people with the real need to get the word out around this conference. We did have one fun social media challenge for programmers where people could create variations of a code payload about the conference in their favorite language. I'm looking for fun things like that to engage people when I can.
The bigger the list gets, the less I feel the need to keep spreading the word because I feel better about being able to reach people with the important things when I need to. Now I'm far enough along that people are starting to spread the word for me and connect me with potential sponsors, so that's helpful.
Sometimes I feel its time to build separate Internet with a new protocol like Gemini but better. A protocol tht is resistant to all the BS of modern web.
Small sidebar, but I really enjoyed this talk. So much so that I'm going to go try out Svelte having been a big fan of Vue for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I probably won't switch, but I think it's worth exploring the ideas of such an intelligent person across multiple facets of their professional outputs. I even learned a few things hanging out in React land a few years ago!
Really excited to see where Rich goes over the next decade.
The key thing to cut out is the ability of web site owners to make clients initiate connections or exfiltrate information without the user's say-so. That plus the profit motive have made most of the Web spyware—and you're not gonna get rid of the profit motive, so it'd be more effective to make the Web practically impossible to use to distribute spyware.
The Web needs far more capable built-in UI elements, and to remove most ability to script it. Including a great deal of CSS, which is under-rated as a source of bloat and slowness on the Web I think, in addition to having become a privacy threat.
Like a previous comment mentioned, the only resistance is that it as a small user base and it makes no commercial sense to pit any ads there. This also makes is resistant to insincere content. There is no need for low effort click-bait content because if you would like to attract lots of users you wouldn't be publishing on Gemini.
The problem isn't the permissibility of a web browser. It's that we live in a capitalistic world; someone somewhere will always be trying to figure out how to post a bill on a wall that reads "POST NO BILLS".
Reminds me of browsing car and other shopping sites. They always pop up these chat windows and have stupid discount spinners that popup as soon as you access the site. I'm not going to spin for a deal on a shopping site I've never used before I even get a chance to actually look for something to buy.
Think about it from the websites perspective. If you visit their website and leave without "converting" in any sense then why are they serving you? It's like do you get annoyed when servers leave a bill on your way out of the restaurant? Content sites are just trying to reacclimate people to recognizing that they just provided value. Ads are worth less than ever so they need to a relationship to milk. Emails are cheap.
That's not a better analogy because the soapbox guy is essentially pushing spam. These popups are catching you leaving someplace you visited voluntarily. Like the retail people who stand by the door asking if you found everything you were looking for.
now imagine those same retail people asking you for your personal information because you looked at almost 1 thing in the store, it'd obviously be annoying and unreasonable
Web layouts have *evolved* in a bizarre way, especially when businesses are paying for results and the user experience comes second. Popups (or whatever the cute new euphemism is) are an easy way to add new garbage to a site while separating the garbage from the content. Cookie banners, logins, paywalls, and more!
I actually sent a strongly worded email to MIT Tech Review yesterday (there was an article on the front page) because they have 3 separate popups on first-entry to the site. Like, wtf? Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
It's so pathetic and such a 2005 trend, it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible.