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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

While you may find this annoying, these kinds of screens perform very well when used appropriately. You may drop off, but most people won't. Until that stops happening you will keep seeing these, and making a whiny site about it certainly won't do anything to help.

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You are completely right except that making a whiny site about it will help. It's arguable how much, but ridicule is an effective agent of social change. The more popular this and similar jokes get the fewer consumers will see because they won't work as well.

How many "punch the whatever" flash banner ads do you see lately.

Seconding this unpopular opinion.

A site I was consulting was getting a depressingly low number of email subscribers, so we tested one of these modal popups that prompted the visitor to subscribe... It worked wonderfully. To minimize the annoyance we set it to pop up only once for each visitor (based on cookies).

It wouldn't be so popular if it wasn't effective.

You probably just left it out, but what was the effect on traffic to the website and as follow-on, sales? I'm thinking the goal was not to have more email subscribers, the goal was probably to sell more stuff via the website.

You're right to ask those questions -- on most sites it would be foolish to optimize for email subscribers at the cost of customers. In this case, however, it was a preview site and there was nothing to buy or download, so the most we could hope for was capturing the visitor's email.

> based on cookies.

Which, if I'm not an intimate viewer of your site, means every time.

The thing is, if you're visiting some business's site often enough that this kind of repetition is going to bug you but you're not actually engaging in a way that is beneficial for them, you are exactly the kind of dead weight that they are probably better off without from a commercial point of view. Irritating you enough that you go away and stop wasting their bandwidth is likely to be a (very small) win for them.

Of course, if you're visiting a site for a person or organisation that you are actually engaging with and they still do this, you are entitled to feel karmic smugness the next time they forget their umbrella and it rains. :-)

Or I visit the site using mobile phone, tablet and computer at separate times. And folks can have more than one of those too.

That was what I tried to indicate with the "intimate viewer". If you've shown enough value to me that I register an account with you, cookies are on.

But if you're some site I'm just visiting for the first time, then no, you don't get free use of my disk and machine to track me. When I mentioned "every time", for some sites, this is often "every page load" — so I'm not a repeat visitor.

The most frustrating thing with these popups is when they come up after clicking through from the site's email newsletter. Some sites I visit do it on every single page load, which is a really good way to make an engaged subscriber unsubscribe.

Agreed, that's annoying and just lazy marketing/development.

What's the thinking behind putting an email signup form over the top of the content? That content would be the thing that might make me actually want to sign up, but to find out, I need to close the email signup form.

Maybe email signups were depressingly low because nobody actually gave a toss about their marketing emails, and all you did was trick a small percentage of viewers into signing up for a mailing list they have no interest in because they thought they had to sign up to close the modal. I completely fail to see how your client got any value out of this at all.

Any is a very finite word. As much as I don't like the practice, parent's data doesn't lie, they had more signups. Whether those signups have high customer lifetime value or even stick around are another matter that requires different data to understand. Parent has enough data to make the first conclusion, you don't have enough data to make the second.

But the first conclusion is completely meaningless without the data for the second. That's my point. It's this worship of numbers while ignoring the actual people that these numbers represent that has led to these intrusive practices.

We can go back and forth on this, but I'm just saying that for the same reason you say it's meaningless (i.e. lack of data), I am saying that you also don't know. Something is always better than nothing, unless you have actual reason and data to say otherwise.

I don't use any of these techniques but I occasionally encounter something similar with my e-mail newsletters. I have over 160,000 subscribers so they're not entirely unpopular but I'll sometimes hear from someone saying "No-one uses e-mail anymore. I can't trust you won't spam me or sell my address! Why don't you offer RSS?"-wacka-wacka. My response is usually that it's not for everyone and have a nice day ;-)

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