As many of us have been on the internet since its wild west days, there has been an expanding list of irritating things to deal with and one man, responsible for one of the most annoying things, has attempted to defend his actions.
In 2014, Ethan Zuckerman apologized for the creation which he dubbed the 'original sin' of the internet.
Speaking in an Atlantic article he wrote, he explained that it would be unlikely that the ad-based business model would be where it is without his help.
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“All of us have screwed up situations in our lives so badly that we’ve been forced to explain our actions by reminding everyone of our good intentions,” he wrote.
“It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.”
Zuckerman explained how he was responsible for the creation and popularization of the pop-up ad.
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Redditors users were able to find the funny side of the apology and thought up a bunch of puns in relation to Zuckerman’s last name. The story of Zuckerman’s apology was shared on the Damnthatsinteresting board on Friday (November 3) as users poured in with the jokes.
“This guy was first my dude, he zucked us with ads, then we got zucked again for our data. We’re getting thoroughly zucked,” one Reddit user joked.
“If he didn't invent it, someone else [would have] at some point in time. it's an inevitable evil that will manifest itself regardless,” another added.
Zuckerman was working for Tripod.com in the late 90s when he invented the pop-up ad. The website initially marketed content and services to graduates however this business model proved to be ineffective.
They moved to become a webpage-hosting provider and ‘proto-social network’ instead and over the following five years attempted multiple different revenue models.
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“At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising,” Zuckerman said in the article.
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“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. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
Those actions essentially sealed the fate of the internet we know today, cheers Zuckerman.
Topics: Reddit, Technology