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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Measuring a conversion increase means that there was a net positive.

I know it’s not a popular opinion on HN, but losing some annoyed users is an acceptable trade off if the net result is an increase in conversions.

The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with. If you gain 10 subscribers for every 1 annoyed visitor, it’s still a big net win.

Most visitors aren’t as sensitive to annoyances as a lot of the people in these comments.

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Absolutely.

Actively disqualifying people that are not a good fit is a vital part of any business. The people that get easily annoyed are going to be a huge pain at every step, while the real customers buy silently.

Also, when people have a true need, the pop-up is not an annoyance. I do agree that "subscribe to our newsletter" is not a great pitch, but it's a problem of content, not of method. If you get a pop-up on a website offering you a solution of a pressing problem you have, that pop-up is not an annoyance, but an opportunity.

And finally, even if one would be interested in measuring how many of these annoyed visitors there are, that's not really something you can measure. Conversions, instead, are a concrete metric.

> If you get a pop-up on a website offering you a solution of a pressing problem you have, that pop-up is not an annoyance, but an opportunity.

I'm curious if you have an example of what this looks like done well. I have never personally seen a pop-up that I viewed as anything other than an annoyance, but I freely admit that I'm not a typical user (to the extent such a person exists). What kinds of great opportunities do typical users find in their pop-ups?

If I'm on Substack and am reading a genuinely interesting article, and half-way or something through I get a popup asking if I want to sign up for that person's newsletter, I might do it.

That I could see, but I almost always have to close the Substack pop-up before I'm even allowed to read the first paragraph, so that's more of a hypothetical example than a real one.

Also, there are better ways to handle that from the user perspective: inject the subscription form as a static element in between two paragraphs so you don't interrupt me mid-sentence. That way I get my opportunity but I also get to finish your article.

What if half way through the article you see a sign-up field which separates the top and bottom half of the article, instead of a popup? Baked into the page, like an ad? No small "x" to click, because most of these don't care about keyboard input, no interruption?

Is that not an option?

Let say you are losing hair and you are researching the topic online. You will probably read everything you can find. If you then get a pop-up offering a free guide on natural remedies against hair loss, you will definitely want that.

Granted, the guide needs to deliver some value and not just be a bait and switch. If it doesn't deliver any value, it's pretty much guaranteed you will lose that subscriber.

To give you a real example: I offer a guide about design patterns and most of my subscribers come from that pop-up. And they are developers, showing that while pop-ups are not popular on places like HN, they are definitely not despised by all developers.

I myself sing up when I find something I am interested in. For example, I got a nice free guide about photoshop blend modes which was very useful when I got it.

I think you can use this to rationalize every shitty practice as long as it gets you customers.

I'm not annoying: I'm annoyed by these annoying practices.

Correlation is not causation, and yet, a correlation exists and I'd rather lose these visitors than getting headaches later.

And sure, you can always rationalize anything, but I still see a difference between a pop-up that offers something the reader might like against a dark pattern that forces or tricks someone to sing up.

> Most visitors aren’t as sensitive to annoyances as a lot of the people in these comments.

Why on earth should I want to subscribe to a newsletter from a site I've never visited before, which I'm visiting for the first time in my life because an article from it trended on HN?

I know nothing about the quality of the site, neither about the type of regular content of the site. I don't even know if I'm going to find it useful what I'm about to read.

Imagine entering a store and the first thing they do is ask you if you want to give them your phone number so the can keep you informed.

How can you call this sensitive if you view if from this perspective?

> The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with.

I don't agree here, maybe your service or newsletter is absolutely great for me as potential customer, but I close pages with newsletter popups instantly. Not because I'm annoyed, but to make a point. I guess a lot of services might have me lost because of this. You block yourself of getting even data from a user who's just a little privacy concerned.

> The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with.

how do you know this? They chase me away even if I was very interested in whatever the page was talking about.

Yes, a simple pop-up only a minor annoyance -- until most sites do it, then it becomes a really huge deal, like a tiny pebble in your shoe on a long walk.

But do you know this? What does it look like if you're losing 10 annoyed visitors for every 1 signup?

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