Self | Technology | History

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Alfred Nobel invented the Nobel Prize as a public relations move.

A year earlier, French newspapers mistakenly thought Alfred had died (it was his brother who had passed).

Alfred stared in horror at obituaries that slammed him for inventing dynamite. He’d created it with good intentions, never thinking it would become a weapon of war.

And so perhaps Ethan Zuckerman has the same fear, all because of one well-intended creation, all part of his attempt to be a good employee.

Yet his chapter reads very differently.

The story begins in 1994

Ethan was a brilliant programmer, still in college, and working for Tripod.com.

It was a user-generated online magazine geared at recent college graduates. Its articles discussed saving money, fun things to do, and dating tips.

The web was new and a very, very different place back then. For example, this is Yahoo in 1994:

Via web design museum (public domain)

The web was also far less competitive.

If you typed “shoes” into Yahoo, the first result would be some random dude's site, “Joe’s Shoe Shop”. SEO was a distant and primitive discipline.

How the first pop-up came to be

Ethan was hired on as a “Founding Webmaster”.

A year into his job, he developed a special tool in his off hours and rolled it out quickly. The tool allowed you to paste HTML code into a form, click a button, and instantly create your website.

Ethan didn’t think anything of it and went on to his next project.

Weeks later, he got a call from Tripod’s web provider. They said he owed them $100,000 (versus the normal $5000 annual fee).

His tool had quietly become extremely popular.

Around this same time, another Tripod site went viral (it did a magic trick with 5 cards and could guess the card you picked — without fail). The clunky page was getting 250,000 views a day — which also ramped up costs.

These were all good signs. Traffic is traffic.

The desperate scramble for cash

Tripod realized they needed funds and began running banner ads. They hired several sales agents to go land advertising deals around the country.

This allowed them to keep the site free, and provide assurance to investors that there was a path to monetization in place.

The problems began during a customer visit months later.

A senior sales agent was at Ford’s headquarters, giving a boardroom demonstration on a projector, showing Ford's campaign on Tripod.com.

He was using a “Random Page” button which Tripod now admits was an ill-advised tool.

The rep clicked the button and it took them to a gay orgy page — with a banner ad of Ford trucks floating gleefully at the top.

Ford’s clients weren’t amused. The senior client pulled the rep aside and explained his team's concern about “the brand association” these ads were creating.

Ethan gets an angry call from the sales rep — “The content on our site is going to jeopardize sales.”

Ethan had a devilishly difficult technical problem on his hands. He couldn’t easily pair ads solely with friendly pages — again, it was the early internet.

They also couldn’t moderate content as it would hurt the user's experience, and be prohibitively expensive in terms of moderation.

Javascript was a brand new code and had a function that allowed you to open a separate window. Ethan assumed this could create distance between the content on the page and the brand.

He tested it out and advertisers were happy.

Two weeks later, Tripod’s competitor, Geocities, ran the exact same type of popup.

When Ethan looked at their source code, he saw they had copied and pasted his code — which he was actually thrilled over.

He was young and it meant he was doing something right.

Ethan had no aspirations of creating a monster

He said, “I really did not mean to break the internet. I really did not mean to bring this horrible thing into people’s lives. I really am extremely sorry.”

Via Yahoo Finance (Public Domain)

He added, “We were trying to solve a problem that may turn out to be unsolvable. How do you monetize user-generated content without implicitly endorsing that content.”

Pop-ups didn’t immediately turn into super spam and malware. It took a few years and was a slow burn. But eventually, we got to a place where closing one pop-up caused two more to open.

The ending to his story

Ethan’s biggest regret isn’t the pop-up ad.

It’s that he set the stage for a free internet, where companies made their money not just through advertising, but through mining your data.

He taught at MIT in the years since and remains greatly bothered that people have been calmly OK with companies spying on us.

Ethan added, “For me, the original sin was building a web where everyone assumed everything was free, and we had to support it with increasingly intrusive, and increasingly surveillant advertising.”

In Ethan’s defense, if he hadn’t invented the pop-up ad, it feels like it was only a matter of time before someone else did. It’s a highly effective and disruptive way to advertise.

There are also many other players in the realm of internet inconveniences.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has since said that “HTTP:” was entirely unnecessary. It could have just started with www.

The first web page was created by Tim Berners Lee. (Public domain)

I don’t see a world where advertising and corporate espionage wouldn’t have happened either way.

And while Alfred Nobel created a scientific prize to promote research and human advancement for PR, Ethan has also made his own contributions.

Ethan made $1M when Tripod.com was sold to investors in 1999. He used that money to found Geekcorps.org, a non-profit that sends technology experts to developing countries in West Africa.

He has continued working in education and with disadvantaged communities.

Ultimately, Ethan’s remorse for a mistake says a lot about who he is because he doesn’t have anything to apologize for. Like many of us, he was just doing the best he could with the information available.

There are other tech overlords who deeply owe us apologies — but don’t hold your breath.

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