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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

The basic reason this is incredibly tempting to do is that it works. Not just a little, but it works radically better than the alternative or politely or subtly asking or providing the option tastefully at the bottom of the article or whatever.

I don' really have a good model of why, but empirically it does. And it's not what you'd think either: it's just be spam or bot or something. It's real people who actually do it, and do it a huge percentage of the time, and who collectively make a categorical difference to your viewership.

It's weird, honestly. I wish I understood better why it was such a strong effect.

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Thanks for answering.

Follow-up questions if you don’t mind:

- How do you know it’s not just bots filling in email addresses?

- Do you get analytics showing how many people leave the page when they get the signup dialog?

To be clear, my information is out of date because I don't do this kind of work anymore, but my understanding is that it's largely the same now.

1. I know because I sold to my list, and the people who signed up from intrusive signup popups were just as likely to buy my products as anyone else, and their virality was the ~same as other sources (ie. the rate at which they shared my stuff). I guess it's possible that an army of bots was sharing my posts and buying my products, but..?

2. Yes, bounce rate is a basic thing almost everyone monitors, and yes, intrusive popups increase bounce rate. But less than you might imagine, and not nearly enough to turn the tide of increased signups.

Like I said, I find it counter intuitive myself, and have no real explanation, just made up stories about it. All I know is that what I consider to be intrusive signup processes have had a life altering effect on my bank account.

My speculation (I have no data) as to why it works:

Showing this to everybody shows it more reliably to those who actually will sign up. It is hard to target the right people reliably (maybe they deleted their cookies, maybe they use a different device...) so if you just show it to everybody the right people will definitely see it. First time visitors still won't sign up, but significantly more established readers will.

Because when someone is asked to do something, generally their first reaction is to do it because that's how they've been conditioned. Especially if they don't really understand that saying no is a totally valid response.

You see this exploited constantly by GDPR popups designed to default to giving the site everything and requiring the user to put an ounce of thought into opting out.

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