The archive · Advertising · Product decision · 1994–2014
Tripod's pop-up ad keeps brands off risky pages — and becomes the web's most hated format
When a car advertiser panics over its banner's page, Ethan Zuckerman shows the ad in its own pop-up window — the format that cursed web ads.
Tripod.com
What it had to solve
Tripod, a 1990s free web-hosting and proto-social-network company, survived on banner advertising. A major car company that had bought a banner on a page celebrating anal sex panicked, because the placement implied the brand endorsed that content — the moment that produced the pop-up ad.
How it works
In the 1990s Ethan Zuckerman helped build Tripod, a free webpage-hosting and early social-network company that sold banner ads. One major car company bought a banner on a page celebrating anal sex and immediately panicked: on the web, placement looked like endorsement, and the brand did not want to be associated with that content.
Zuckerman's fix was to separate the ad from the page itself. He wrote the code that opened a second browser window and ran the ad there, floating over the content the user was reading — the pop-up, invented so advertisers could buy any page without standing next to it. Tripod had tried subscriptions, revenue-sharing and merchandise; advertising was the model that got it funded, and targeting based on users' homepages was the model behind its acquisition.
Pop-ups became one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit, a format readers learned to swat away. In his 2014 Atlantic essay 'Advertising Is the Internet's Original Sin,' Zuckerman told the Tripod story as an apology, arguing that the ad-supported web had drifted into surveillance and that readers should pay for services outright — pointing to Pinboard and Reddit Gold as working alternatives. The essay drew 215 points and 118 comments on Hacker News.
Why it lands
- Separating the ad from the page answered a real sales objection: brands could buy inventory without endorsing the content beside it.
- A pop-up ran in front of the reader's task and could not be scrolled past, which made it valuable to advertisers and unbearable to readers.
- The choice shows format as path dependency: a technical fix made to close one sale hardened into a default that defined web advertising's reputation.
What it did
The pop-up spread across the commercial web and became 'one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit.' Two decades later Zuckerman publicly apologised in The Atlantic, calling advertising 'the original sin of the web'; the essay drew 215 Hacker News points and 118 comments.
What you can take
A format that solves a placement objection can outlive its cause: the pop-up was invented to sell one nervous advertiser, then hardened into a default the whole industry paid for in trust.
Since then
The pop-up spread across the commercial web and became, in Zuckerman's words, 'one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit.' In August 2014 Zuckerman used his Atlantic essay 'Advertising Is the Internet's Original Sin' to apologise for the pop-up and for the ad-supported web's drift into surveillance, proposing subscription and micropayment alternatives; the essay drew 215 Hacker News points and 118 comments, and its title states the thesis: advertising as the web's original sin.
Sources
- It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web
- It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web
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