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Comment by paulmooreparks | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, then they must not want me to read their content.

Please, let's end this scourge by closing more tabs and not driving more traffic to these sites.

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It's because analytics say this gets more lead captures, but they rarely measure if the leads are fake just to make the things go away. In the end they are just looking at "conversion" metrics and the cost it took to drive that traffic. Longer term effects are hard to measure, and ad agencies and internal ad teams are measured for this month, not the future.

I work at a place where I am a fly on the wall, listening to these ad teams, and let me tell you, they honestly believe this kind of bullshit honestly works and matters.

They hotly debate the virtues of deceptive dark patterns, and, man, are they assholes to boot. They also blow cash on retarded shit like juiceros, and bro-compare their juicero-type schlock and tchotchke collections unironically, and sometimes with transparent envy of one another. It's as bad as you might imagine.

After lunch, when they really get going, with their mind-blowingly vapid conversations, I have to blast my eardrums with tinnitus inducing audio, in order to quarantine my mind from their stunting world views.

When Douglas Adams imagined the Golgafrinchans, I have to believe that he was in the presence of the these sorts of people, when he dreamt up that little tidbit.

It is my ardent belief that the only way to divest society of such parasitic blooms of "humanity" really is to blast them into outer space, but in order to do so, we have to learn to be really careful about how we sanitize our telephones first.

Gonna state a counterpoint, saying that most marketers & advertisers I've spoken with have been pretty on the ball. They understand that people don't "like" adverts and try to get leads through different ways.

People who embrace these irritating practices are not necessarily the minority, but I wouldn't say they're the majority either. It's definitely not an accepted best practice.

Marketing extends much further than just annoying popups and advertising, and is an extremely important field -- something I feel us engineers sometimes forget about, because the benefits aren't immediately measurable.

So, you think these people don't analyze whether adding these pop-ups brings actual traffic to their website, not just increases subscriptions? If it was "fake signups", why would people add their real email, and why would they click on the articles afterwards?

I might be wrong but I read somewhere that more leads are captured during a conscious action by the reader. So prompting for email when reader is closing the window is much better than disrupting the flow while reading the blog.

I'm on board with this. There's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned call to action at the end of the article. Encourage subscription by producing good content, not by abusing your reader's time and attention.

However, those tactics really work. I don’t like them either, but I have done A/B tests and the intrusive model always results in people who are more “gullible” and thus more likely to buy whatever it is you are selling. The dismissive types — they wouldn’t have been a customer anyway. (Generally speaking..)

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?

If they’re any good then it’s both. You should have a content team that works toward the goal of making great content for your audience, an analytics team that helps you figure out exactly who your audience is and what they like, and a CRM team that works to execute on that vision to maximize value for both the customer and the org.

Except when you separate out optimizing value for your audience from optimizing value for your org, the former becomes a cost centre, if not plain waste of money. At some point, someone is bound to ask, why waste money with a person passionate about the topic, when someone who doesn't care could write 2x - 10x the volume of content?

Or put in other way, there are very few orgs that are "good" in the sense you describe. There are so few of them, that myself - and many others - treat monetization steps as a negative signal. Personally, I put that as a heuristic for on-line content - the harder a site tries to make money off you, the less trustworthy and useful it is.

Yeah I can see that point. Like Daring Fireball, Gruber just has the single ad off to the side.

Why can't it be both? Odds are if the content is good, someone who cares created it. More than one thing can be true.

In my experience, those two are inversely correlated. The best content tends to be one that's not monetized in any way, and the more effort into monetization is visible, the more likely the content will be shallow, or bullshit.

Not a law of physics. Just a heuristic I picked up over the last two decades on the Internet.

I don't get this either. Especially when the box shows before I can read the article: why would I sign up it a site I haven't even started to read and find about?

The ones that only appear when your mouse tracks towards the tab close button are impressive, but also super annoying.

Coupled with website notifications, it's all hell break loose. Can someone tell me if it is possible to write a chrome plugin that will close any such websites. I mean within 30 seconds of opening if there is any permission/sign up popup - just close that website.

Thanks for the warning. Opening in Outline.

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