We wanted to build something noble, says creator of pop-up ads

The inventor of the pop-up advert has apologised profusely for its creation as part of a scathing attack on online advertising.

‘‘I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web,’’ Ethan Zuckerman wrote in an essay for The Atlantic magazine.

Zuckerman, the director of the Centre for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that after two decades of a worldwide web underpinned by adverts, ‘‘we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive’’.

He concludes that it is ‘‘time to start paying for privacy, to support services we love, and to abandon those that are free’’.

Zuckerman developed the pop- up advert – which he described as ‘‘one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit’’ – while working at Tripod.com, the web hosting service, in the mid to late 1990s. The adverts pop up in new windows on web browsers and getting rid of them means closing down the new window, or enabling a pop-up blocker on the web browser to stop them appearing in the first place.

‘‘Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex,’’ Zuckerman said.

‘‘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 also developed software that could analyse users’ homepages, allowing companies to better target their advertising. He says that a web which relies on adverts will always require a certain amount of privacy invasion.

‘‘The fallen state of our internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.

‘‘The internet spies on us at every twist and turn not because Zuckerberg, Brin and Page are scheming, sinister masterminds, but due to good intentions gone awry.’’

He added: ‘‘One simple way forward is to charge for services and protect users’ privacy.

‘‘Whether we embrace micropayments, membership, crowd-funding or any other model, there are bound to be unintended consequences.’’