7 ms·

AdBlock renders most advertising a moot point. What's far more annoying is how every website insists on blocking out the page with a popover asking me to sign u

by imgabe 11y ago

AdBlock renders most advertising a moot point. What's far more annoying is how every website insists on blocking out the page with a popover asking me to sign up for their newsletter when I'm not even halfway done reading the article. Does this actually work? Do people actually sign up for newsletters from these things? Usually it makes me just abandon whatever I was reading because I want nothing to do with such an obnoxious website.

rubicon33 11y ago
I too would love to know, if that actually works. Does anyone have any data on this? As an engineer, I would push back HEAVILY if an employer asked me to do something like that.
- krebby 11y ago
  We ran an A/B test at a former employer a few years ago that showed that the popover was somewhere in the range of 1.5x to 2x as effective at getting signups than anywhere else in the page (sidebar, header, footer). I left the company shortly afterwards, but I'd assume the trend doesn't hold and may even reduce engagement long-term. We also cookied visitors to avoid annoying our users.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    I don't know why you'd assume those things except that they annoy you personally so you'd like to think so.
joshstrange 11y ago
Those are the worst, it's gotten to the point that I couldn't even tell you what is on those popups. If I'm reading an article and you get in my way I will close the distraction so fast that there is zero chance I will even see what you were saying AND now I'm pissed at you.
- code_duck 11y ago
  Sometimes I can't tell what's on the pop overs because they don't work properly on my phone. So I start reading an article and then the whole thing is overlaid with dark grey and I can't scroll...
- SiVal 11y ago
  A very similar annoyance is menus that don't wait to be clicked but jump out in your face and obscure the content you wanted to see just because your mouse randomly passed over them. You click a link to go to an interesting-sounding page. Your mouse is still wherever that link was on the previous page, but now, blammo!, it randomly lands on some menu, which won't wait to find out whether you wanted to see it or not. It just throws up all over the page and leaves you looking for a way to get rid of it. You scroll the new page a bit, click another link, and blammo, another menu jumps up and covers the new page. You see a link near the top of the page you want to click and as your mouse heads up to it, blammo, you pass over another menu that jumps out and covers what you were trying to click. Usually, a popup signup ad will stay closed after you close it the first time, but these menus won't EVER stop jumping up in your face. Tooltips or items that highlight themselves in place on hover are no problem, because they don't get in the way, but menus are meant to cover other things. That's why all native OSes have menus wait until users explicitly ask for them. And touchscreen devices essentially have no hover, so if your menus had to have these obnoxious dynamics for users to discover that they were menus, it would mean that your design was nearly unusable on devices with no mouse. Make your menus obvious to users without a mouse and you no longer have to make them obnoxious to users with a mouse. Tell your designer friends: when you have caught someone's attention and made them want to see something on your site, don't then suddenly block their view with something they DIDN'T want to see, something they then have to escape from, whether "Sign up now!" or "Click here to tell your friends about us!" or "What do you think of us now?" or "Here's a cascading menu of things you weren't asking for instead of what you wanted!"
Nadya 11y ago
I'm one of the people who blacklist websites that do this. If you give me an annoying popup halfway into reading your article I close the tab and blacklist your site from my reading materials. So when presented with an opportunity to people in charge of websites doing this - I asked if they had actually A/B tested these to see if they had any merit or if they hurt user retention. Sadly, they work! One claimed a 78% larger sign-up rate and the other was something like a 65% larger sign-up rate. I did not discuss churn rates with them - but overall traffic to the sites weren't largely impacted I was told. Note that the popups on each of these sites was a one-time deal on a user's first visit. After closing it you never saw it again (unless you clear your cookies or browse incognito, etc.)
- joshstrange 11y ago
  As far as overall traffic not falling off I can understand that. I close them so fast I forget which sites use them and so it never enters into the decision making process (will I go back) for me. I do find them annoying and have never signed up for one. I'm MUCH more likely to signup for your newsletter or follow you on twitter if you put links/forms to do so AT THE END of the article.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    That's largely why I don't think it harms many people. It's a bit of short-term rage by those who care, many people close them out without a second thought, and even more people actually subscribe than a form in the side nav or end of the article.
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    This is what I've done with my newsletter form and it works pretty well. It would likely be possible to get some more signups by adding a popover form but I'd be doing it at the risk of annoying readers that would have never signed up. I have noticed that some sites make the popover happen when you mouse off of the window to the back button, which kind of makes sense because you're leaving anyway.
  - morgante 11y ago
Turing_Machine 11y ago
There probably are some people who sign up from those. The (usually) unasked questions are whether those people represent actual customers (or just the terminally clueless) and whether getting a few more email addresses for your newsletter is worth irritating the crap out of the other 90% of site visitors.
sidthekidder 11y ago
I once signed up for the WaitButWhy blog newsletter through a popover because I liked the article and the copy was pretty effective. Otherwise, I've never done it before.
shanecleveland 11y ago
And good luck finding the "close" option hidden in a non-obvious spot in a similar color to the background.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  I find this is by design for many ads. If I mis-tap I'll actually tap the ad itself and it'll take me to the ad location, usually a website but sometimes the google play store. These guys are seeing metrics and thinking they're convincing us to visit their sites and patting themselves on their high conversation rate, but the reality is that the tiny little 'x' to close just is impossible to hit with adult fingers on most screens.
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  The framework I follow when closing popovers : Click away from modal content; Try ESC button; Close browser tab
philbarr 11y ago
Let's not forget the "would you mind filling in a survey about our site?" popovers as well. I mean, I might have filled out a survey if you'd actually let me look at the site first. Even Microsoft do this.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Oh God. I've even seen those on e-commerce sites, which amazes me. "Hey, you were probably about to give us some actual money, but would you mind stopping that and doing something else instead?"
  - pyre 11y ago
    "Just shut up and take my money!" applies to so many situations. It boggles the mind how many companies put hurdles between themselves and your pocketbook.
kristopolous 11y ago
> Do people actually sign up for newsletters from these things? Yes. This is a very successful way to increase those numbers > Does this actually work? A more important question! The issue is that the numbers that the website owner is trying to get up are really low to begin with - usually <1% or so. So you have to think like a Bayesian here. What are the chances of someone who isn't computer literate enough to know there's a way to dismiss the dialog and believes that giving their email address is the only way to continue? Even if 99.8% of users are smart enough to x out of that dialog, then bam, you've increased your newsletter membership by 20%!!! (simply by confusing 0.2% of your visitors) Congratulations! Look at how effective you are! You're now giving a bunch of novice computer users email they don't want and shit they won't read!
- emodendroket 11y ago
  They also drive up donations and I doubt people are getting out their credit cards and filling out a donation form because they can't figure out out how to close a modal.
  - kristopolous 11y ago
    Sure! You can decrease the amount of time people engage with your content, antagonise your users, and get 0.01% more of the user base to convergence with donations (these are the common numbers I see) Either these things aren't looked at holistically or they are and people don't care about user experience. Think about it, you have to do this using CSS because all the browsers block doing the same functionality with another window. Once you start asking questions like "how many exits happened at dialog versus how much convergence?" you will, as I have, see ~60x more exits from service then engagement with dialog. You lose 6,000% more than you gain. And yes, the engagement is so low on most analysis that you can't dismiss marginal user error in many of the cases as constituting a large percentage of engagement. We can do better
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      How? Do you have a suggestion for raising revenue that's as effective? Lots of nonprofits struggle because they're too afraid to ask people for money but it turns out if you don't ask no one donates. A pop-up or -under window and a modal dialog are also different in that the modal is confined to the window or tab it exists in and when you leave the page you're on it goes away.
wnevets 11y ago
the worst has to be the popovers asking me to complete a survey about the page its preventing me from reading.
agumonkey 11y ago
Sometimes I send all links through printfiendly, reminiscing the days of plain old rss feeds.
hissworks 11y ago
As a consumer, I'll engage with popovers if it's content or a publisher I'm especially interested in reading more about. An example of this might be - let's say I already donate to or am active with an organization, and they have a static newsletter signup link in their site's main nav... I'll never click this, but I will engage if they prompt me. Jordan Coeyman's OptKit is a light but intelligent popover tool that actually works, and I signed up for his newsletter based on how well the tool worked on his blog. https://optkit.com/ https://optkit.com/
- morgante 11y ago
  > Jordan Coeyman's OptKit is a light but intelligent popover tool that actually works, and I signed up for his newsletter based on how well the tool worked on his blog. Ironically, it's the proliferation of unnecessary third-party tools (as described in [1]) which is a major source of the web slowness described in the original article. [1] linked from the article: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/tools-dont-solve-the-webs-problems/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/tools-dont-solve-the-webs-problems/
Strilanc 11y ago
Are there any extensions that auto-dismiss pop-overs, or actually rip them out of the DOM when they try to show up? Or are the statistical signals not strong enough to distinguish them from user-requested pop-overs like "I want to login"?
- fineman 11y ago
  Noscript covers most of them. :) For a less "nuclear" option, use Adblock Plus. And this suggestion might help the defaults a bit: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27776 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27776 And if that doesn't work, get Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey and write your own by playing around with the debug console. (Chrome: Shift-Alt-C or Shift-Cmd-C - firefox: similar...)
emodendroket 11y ago
Yes. Hacker News readers are not a typical demographic and their behavior is not representative of the typical Web user.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
popover asking me to sign up for their newsletter when I'm not even halfway done reading the article This is actually very very useful, but every single implementation is bad. Ideally your browser would have all this figured and allow you to one click sign up for the newsletter. The popup should be noticeable, but away from the content (above the reading area).
morgante 11y ago
> Do people actually sign up for newsletters from these things? Yes. I've personally seen seen multiple A/B tests on different sites showing newsletter popups to be highly effective on both a rate and absolute basis. Their increase in conversion rate is more than enough to offset the (tiny) number of users who leave because of them. (We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.) That being said, good publishers should cookie that you closed the popup and not bother you about it again. I imagine the numbers on this would also be different for a technical audience.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  How about not showing it at all until the person has seen a dozen or so pages? As many have pointed out, most are unlikely to subscribe to the newsletter/install the app/whatever before they've even seen the site. It seems like the least annoying way to do this would be to detect multiple visits (preferably over multiple days) and then ask for the signup. If the person says no, don't show it to them again for a very long time, if ever. "We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.)" Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are?
  - morgante 11y ago
    > How about not showing it at all until the person has seen a dozen or so pages? We actually tested that as well (though I think we did it after 6 pages). The conversion rate was of course higher than showing it immediately, but the users didn't open or click any more frequently. (Hence, showing "immediately" on first page load is better business-wise.) > Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are? Haha, that is indeed why I pushed against this in the first place (if I hadn't, we wouldn't even have tested it so thoroughly). But the fact that such "annoyance" didn't show up in any metrics ultimately won me over. One thing to keep in mind is that I've only tested with non-technical users, who I think are in general much less annoyed by this sort of thing than the typical HN person.

by imgabe 11y ago

rubicon33 11y ago

I too would love to know, if that actually works. Does anyone have any data on this? As an engineer, I would push back HEAVILY if an employer asked me to do something like that.

krebby 11y ago
We ran an A/B test at a former employer a few years ago that showed that the popover was somewhere in the range of 1.5x to 2x as effective at getting signups than anywhere else in the page (sidebar, header, footer). I left the company shortly afterwards, but I'd assume the trend doesn't hold and may even reduce engagement long-term. We also cookied visitors to avoid annoying our users.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  I don't know why you'd assume those things except that they annoy you personally so you'd like to think so.

joshstrange 11y ago

Those are the worst, it's gotten to the point that I couldn't even tell you what is on those popups. If I'm reading an article and you get in my way I will close the distraction so fast that there is zero chance I will even see what you were saying AND now I'm pissed at you.

code_duck 11y ago
Sometimes I can't tell what's on the pop overs because they don't work properly on my phone. So I start reading an article and then the whole thing is overlaid with dark grey and I can't scroll...
SiVal 11y ago
A very similar annoyance is menus that don't wait to be clicked but jump out in your face and obscure the content you wanted to see just because your mouse randomly passed over them. You click a link to go to an interesting-sounding page. Your mouse is still wherever that link was on the previous page, but now, blammo!, it randomly lands on some menu, which won't wait to find out whether you wanted to see it or not. It just throws up all over the page and leaves you looking for a way to get rid of it. You scroll the new page a bit, click another link, and blammo, another menu jumps up and covers the new page. You see a link near the top of the page you want to click and as your mouse heads up to it, blammo, you pass over another menu that jumps out and covers what you were trying to click. Usually, a popup signup ad will stay closed after you close it the first time, but these menus won't EVER stop jumping up in your face. Tooltips or items that highlight themselves in place on hover are no problem, because they don't get in the way, but menus are meant to cover other things. That's why all native OSes have menus wait until users explicitly ask for them. And touchscreen devices essentially have no hover, so if your menus had to have these obnoxious dynamics for users to discover that they were menus, it would mean that your design was nearly unusable on devices with no mouse. Make your menus obvious to users without a mouse and you no longer have to make them obnoxious to users with a mouse. Tell your designer friends: when you have caught someone's attention and made them want to see something on your site, don't then suddenly block their view with something they DIDN'T want to see, something they then have to escape from, whether "Sign up now!" or "Click here to tell your friends about us!" or "What do you think of us now?" or "Here's a cascading menu of things you weren't asking for instead of what you wanted!"

Nadya 11y ago

I'm one of the people who blacklist websites that do this. If you give me an annoying popup halfway into reading your article I close the tab and blacklist your site from my reading materials. So when presented with an opportunity to people in charge of websites doing this - I asked if they had actually A/B tested these to see if they had any merit or if they hurt user retention. Sadly, they work! One claimed a 78% larger sign-up rate and the other was something like a 65% larger sign-up rate. I did not discuss churn rates with them - but overall traffic to the sites weren't largely impacted I was told. Note that the popups on each of these sites was a one-time deal on a user's first visit. After closing it you never saw it again (unless you clear your cookies or browse incognito, etc.)

joshstrange 11y ago
As far as overall traffic not falling off I can understand that. I close them so fast I forget which sites use them and so it never enters into the decision making process (will I go back) for me. I do find them annoying and have never signed up for one. I'm MUCH more likely to signup for your newsletter or follow you on twitter if you put links/forms to do so AT THE END of the article.
- Nadya 11y ago
  That's largely why I don't think it harms many people. It's a bit of short-term rage by those who care, many people close them out without a second thought, and even more people actually subscribe than a form in the side nav or end of the article.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  This is what I've done with my newsletter form and it works pretty well. It would likely be possible to get some more signups by adding a popover form but I'd be doing it at the risk of annoying readers that would have never signed up. I have noticed that some sites make the popover happen when you mouse off of the window to the back button, which kind of makes sense because you're leaving anyway.
- morgante 11y ago

Turing_Machine 11y ago

There probably are some people who sign up from those. The (usually) unasked questions are whether those people represent actual customers (or just the terminally clueless) and whether getting a few more email addresses for your newsletter is worth irritating the crap out of the other 90% of site visitors.

sidthekidder 11y ago

I once signed up for the WaitButWhy blog newsletter through a popover because I liked the article and the copy was pretty effective. Otherwise, I've never done it before.

shanecleveland 11y ago

And good luck finding the "close" option hidden in a non-obvious spot in a similar color to the background.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
I find this is by design for many ads. If I mis-tap I'll actually tap the ad itself and it'll take me to the ad location, usually a website but sometimes the google play store. These guys are seeing metrics and thinking they're convincing us to visit their sites and patting themselves on their high conversation rate, but the reality is that the tiny little 'x' to close just is impossible to hit with adult fingers on most screens.
SonicSoul 11y ago
The framework I follow when closing popovers : Click away from modal content; Try ESC button; Close browser tab

philbarr 11y ago

Let's not forget the "would you mind filling in a survey about our site?" popovers as well. I mean, I might have filled out a survey if you'd actually let me look at the site first. Even Microsoft do this.

smacktoward 11y ago
Oh God. I've even seen those on e-commerce sites, which amazes me. "Hey, you were probably about to give us some actual money, but would you mind stopping that and doing something else instead?"
- pyre 11y ago
  "Just shut up and take my money!" applies to so many situations. It boggles the mind how many companies put hurdles between themselves and your pocketbook.

kristopolous 11y ago

> Do people actually sign up for newsletters from these things? Yes. This is a very successful way to increase those numbers > Does this actually work? A more important question! The issue is that the numbers that the website owner is trying to get up are really low to begin with - usually <1% or so. So you have to think like a Bayesian here. What are the chances of someone who isn't computer literate enough to know there's a way to dismiss the dialog and believes that giving their email address is the only way to continue? Even if 99.8% of users are smart enough to x out of that dialog, then bam, you've increased your newsletter membership by 20%!!! (simply by confusing 0.2% of your visitors) Congratulations! Look at how effective you are! You're now giving a bunch of novice computer users email they don't want and shit they won't read!

emodendroket 11y ago
They also drive up donations and I doubt people are getting out their credit cards and filling out a donation form because they can't figure out out how to close a modal.
- kristopolous 11y ago
  Sure! You can decrease the amount of time people engage with your content, antagonise your users, and get 0.01% more of the user base to convergence with donations (these are the common numbers I see) Either these things aren't looked at holistically or they are and people don't care about user experience. Think about it, you have to do this using CSS because all the browsers block doing the same functionality with another window. Once you start asking questions like "how many exits happened at dialog versus how much convergence?" you will, as I have, see ~60x more exits from service then engagement with dialog. You lose 6,000% more than you gain. And yes, the engagement is so low on most analysis that you can't dismiss marginal user error in many of the cases as constituting a large percentage of engagement. We can do better
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    How? Do you have a suggestion for raising revenue that's as effective? Lots of nonprofits struggle because they're too afraid to ask people for money but it turns out if you don't ask no one donates. A pop-up or -under window and a modal dialog are also different in that the modal is confined to the window or tab it exists in and when you leave the page you're on it goes away.

wnevets 11y ago

the worst has to be the popovers asking me to complete a survey about the page its preventing me from reading.

agumonkey 11y ago

Sometimes I send all links through printfiendly, reminiscing the days of plain old rss feeds.

hissworks 11y ago

As a consumer, I'll engage with popovers if it's content or a publisher I'm especially interested in reading more about. An example of this might be - let's say I already donate to or am active with an organization, and they have a static newsletter signup link in their site's main nav... I'll never click this, but I will engage if they prompt me. Jordan Coeyman's OptKit is a light but intelligent popover tool that actually works, and I signed up for his newsletter based on how well the tool worked on his blog. https://optkit.com/ https://optkit.com/

morgante 11y ago
> Jordan Coeyman's OptKit is a light but intelligent popover tool that actually works, and I signed up for his newsletter based on how well the tool worked on his blog. Ironically, it's the proliferation of unnecessary third-party tools (as described in [1]) which is a major source of the web slowness described in the original article. [1] linked from the article: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/tools-dont-solve-the-webs-problems/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/tools-dont-solve-the-webs-problems/

Strilanc 11y ago

Are there any extensions that auto-dismiss pop-overs, or actually rip them out of the DOM when they try to show up? Or are the statistical signals not strong enough to distinguish them from user-requested pop-overs like "I want to login"?

fineman 11y ago
Noscript covers most of them. :) For a less "nuclear" option, use Adblock Plus. And this suggestion might help the defaults a bit: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27776 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27776 And if that doesn't work, get Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey and write your own by playing around with the debug console. (Chrome: Shift-Alt-C or Shift-Cmd-C - firefox: similar...)

emodendroket 11y ago

Yes. Hacker News readers are not a typical demographic and their behavior is not representative of the typical Web user.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

popover asking me to sign up for their newsletter when I'm not even halfway done reading the article This is actually very very useful, but every single implementation is bad. Ideally your browser would have all this figured and allow you to one click sign up for the newsletter. The popup should be noticeable, but away from the content (above the reading area).

morgante 11y ago

> Do people actually sign up for newsletters from these things? Yes. I've personally seen seen multiple A/B tests on different sites showing newsletter popups to be highly effective on both a rate and absolute basis. Their increase in conversion rate is more than enough to offset the (tiny) number of users who leave because of them. (We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.) That being said, good publishers should cookie that you closed the popup and not bother you about it again. I imagine the numbers on this would also be different for a technical audience.

Turing_Machine 11y ago
How about not showing it at all until the person has seen a dozen or so pages? As many have pointed out, most are unlikely to subscribe to the newsletter/install the app/whatever before they've even seen the site. It seems like the least annoying way to do this would be to detect multiple visits (preferably over multiple days) and then ask for the signup. If the person says no, don't show it to them again for a very long time, if ever. "We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.)" Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are?
- morgante 11y ago
  > How about not showing it at all until the person has seen a dozen or so pages? We actually tested that as well (though I think we did it after 6 pages). The conversion rate was of course higher than showing it immediately, but the users didn't open or click any more frequently. (Hence, showing "immediately" on first page load is better business-wise.) > Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are? Haha, that is indeed why I pushed against this in the first place (if I hadn't, we wouldn't even have tested it so thoroughly). But the fact that such "annoyance" didn't show up in any metrics ultimately won me over. One thing to keep in mind is that I've only tested with non-technical users, who I think are in general much less annoyed by this sort of thing than the typical HN person.