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6 inventors who regret their very successful creations

2. Pop-up windows

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Screen shot of pop ads

  • By Tess Danielson Staff Writer

In 2014, Ethan Zuckerman, the inventor of the much loathed pop-up ad, apologized for his creation in a lengthy Atlantic op-ed.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Zuckerman worked for Tripod.com, a website that marketed content and services to college graduates, but found it could not support itself on the original business model. After the company attempted and failed to sell merchandise, subscriptions services, and a magazine, it turned to Zuckerman’s big idea:

“At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising," he writes. "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."

But when a car company freaked out that its banner ad appeared on a page that celebrated explicit content, "I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it," Zuckerman adds. "I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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