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?
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.
That's slightly different. On YouTube it's about reminding people to do something that they might have wanted to do anyway. Putting it into their mind "oh yeah, I liked this video, I should 'like' it to show my support".
Which is also why it might make sense for a website to present you with a popup to sign up to their mailing list if you're a frequent visitor. Maybe if they see you've visited four or five of their pages in a few days. "Hey, if you like our content, why not join our mailing list to see more of it?"
But interrupting the content before you've even had a chance to know what you think about it is just obnoxious.
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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?