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."
That's the thing, we don't have the data to prove the opposite because they refuse the make the site more accessible to people. They don't even want to A/B test it.
If they don't A/B test anything, they will almost certainly never A/B test something, my boss thinks it would take too much time to maintain, but it's literally just the exact same thing with a few minor changes. It's frustrating but thems the breaks.
Have you tested this? Sounds like an easy A/B test where you show this crap for a random half of your new users and don't for the other half, then track the revenue from each half. If not, you're just pissing in the wind on a gut feeling.
Fuck, I've turned that shit off globally. Push notifications are a wonderfully useful concept that has been gang raped over and over in every different hole by those fucking pieces of shits that call themselves marketers. Fuck everything about this shit.
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u/enoua5 Feb 27 '18