Pop-up Inventor Apologizes for Internet’s Original Sin

Everything from the vacuum cleaner to the pocket watch has an inventor. Even many things that seem like no one in their right mind would actually sit down and invent had to come from somewhere. That’s right, even the annoying little pop-up was the intentional invention of an individual. 

It’s easy to think that something that is so universally annoying, and something that seems to blur into the background of web browsing, is just sort of there. Just sort of a fundamental part of the internet with no clear origins. However, the pop-up was actually invented by Ethan Zuckerman.

Ethan is now the head of the Centre for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but around two decades ago he was working for a website called tripod.com. Originally they were simply trying to use user profiles to curate targeted advertisements, but along the way, Ethan ended up writing the code that opened a new window to launch an ad. And so the pop-up was born. 

Zuckerman has since apologized. He has stated that he didn’t quite know what he was bringing into the world when he coded the internet’s first pop-up. To his credit, a single annoying advertisement gimmick wouldn’t necessarily seem like something harmful, let alone something that could turn into one of the most annoying advertisement mediums ever. In fact, it wasn’t even originally meant to be pervasive. 

The reason that Zuckerman coded that pop-up had nothing to do with merely coming up with a way for ads to get more facetime with consumers, in fact, the pop-up was originally designed to do away with the potential associations of banner ads. In particular, a company didn’t like their banner ad showing up on a page containing sexual content, so the original pop-up was actually a way for the ad to show up on its own, and not seem linked to the potentially questionable content. Their intentions were good. They found a solution to a problem. Ethan never knew they would be creating a monster of their own.