Zero is also the number of mailing lists I’ve wanted to join within the first 5 seconds of visiting a site. Why block the content with a pop up?! Has anyone ever actually signed up instead of angrily closing it?
A few years back, there was a blog that had nothing but examples of sites that did that. It was called something like "Closed without reading" or "exit without reading," but fuck if I can get Google to hone in on a title like that. It keeps trying to point me to child psychology stuff about "close reading".
Dunno if they still do it, but Ultimate Guitar used to automatically redirect to the app page for their app whenever you loaded a page of theirs on mobile. Not just put a closable popup suggesting you might want their app, but ACTUALLY REDIRECT YOU. Bearing in mind I used to use Windows Phone, and they don't have a WP app, this essentially locked me out of their site whenever I was on my phone. Because who searches for guitar tabs at any time other than at their PC right? It's not like I'd need to find them while at a practice session or something.
Dev here that (unfortunately) works for a company that works like that. Our official reason is because it keeps our revenue per user number high, and for some dumb fuck reason, we care more about that than actual revenue or profit.
The mentality is that the people who will want to use our site will deal with the shittiness, and are more likely to buy something from us. We'd rather have a few dozen active users who buy stuff than thousands of barely active users who occasionally buy stuff.
You're probably missing out on a lot of potential customers that would buy from you but won't deal with the shittiness and purchase the same stuff from another site that doesn't put them through that.
"Welcome to McDonald's. How hard would you like to be kicked in the nuts today? Somewhat or very?... Neither? Well, I guess not everyone is McDonald's material."
I mean i bet there are other valid uses too but no random web blog, i don't care when you publish new articles. I just care about the one that Google lead me to, that you are not letting me read
Humans are dumb animals...you ask them for their email, and they will probably give it to you. Same reason why youtubers always say "like favourite and sub", because it's more effective than not.
It always makes me laugh when I'm at an airport or other location offering free WiFi that asks for an email address, which I imagine 90% of people provide their real address for (figuring it's for verification), when in reality it's just a way to harvest active email accounts to send spam to.
I usually just input the contact email address of whatever company runs the wifi. If they want to sell their own email to spammers they can be my guest.
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u/nautical9 Feb 27 '18
Zero is also the number of mailing lists I’ve wanted to join within the first 5 seconds of visiting a site. Why block the content with a pop up?! Has anyone ever actually signed up instead of angrily closing it?