Hacker News Reader

How successful in industry are these "please subscribe" popups that come up after about 5 seconds?

Does anyone really subscribe? Is the conversion rate really significantly greater than about 0%? I have never once put my email address into the box and have a hard time imagining anyone doing so -- yet these popup boxes persist.

View on HN

Very.

Our email signups jumped by ~10% when we started using them. And the bounce rate increase was negligible.

I despise them as much as you do, but they work.

I've actually come to the conclusion that we have people come to our website just to get the popup to subscribe to our newsletter. I blows my mind. However, I've known for a while that it is a mistake to think that my views are representative of normal people ;-)

I only suppose that the bounce rate is much higher than the email conversion rate.

I find it jarring and it makes me less likely to want to read whatever it was I clicked the link for. In some cases I find it so annoying that I consider my options for avoiding that site again altogether. Then again I seem to be pickier than most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com