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Comment by evolve2k | Hacker News Reader

A client has just asked me to add a pop-up "whatch this vid, join our newsletter", when the user scrolls to about half way down the homepage for their SAAS startup. Further the pop up is not to reappear for 90 days.

They got the approach from attending an online marketing workshop that suggested this increases their list.

Felt like a bit of an anti-pattern to me.

Anyone have advice as to if this is effective or if it will be affected by today's announcement?

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This is just a personal anecdote but there's no way I'll ever click on or even read those things. I just frantically search for a close button or link as soon as one appears and if I can't immediately find one I'll sometimes just leave the whole site.

Pop-ups like that have long been shown to improve conversion rates... at the increase of pissing off people who wouldn't have been a conversion anyway.

Do they increase conversion rates long term? A lot of those pissed off people might not be customers today but could be in future.

What was the last hover ad you saw? Closing it is so instinctual I doubt it even registered. Those people won't remember next time. Annoying people is an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Good point, I'm not sure. My instinct has now transformed to closing the tab instead of the popup though, the close button is in a predictable place.

After writing this today, I was reading an interesting (to me) article on building two sided marketplaces, a pop up came up around half way through, didn't feel unreasonable actually as I was feeling value from the contents of the article and it felt likely appropriate moment for them to make the ask.

Thanks for the discussion everyone.

Ref: https://www.sharetribe.com/academy/how-to-communicate-your-v...

Does this actually helps signups? You could be the best product in the world and showing a popup like that would ensure that I never, ever signup.

Do it and measure how many more (or less) registrations you get.

You will probably get more registrations at the expense of pissing everyone else off

This will. The penalty is not specifically targeting ads. It's targeting sites that serve full-page interstitials to mobile users.

I get all these demands too. This is how sites end up covered in distracting junk.

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