Endangered Media: Pop-Up Ads

Pop-up ads are becoming an endangered Net artifact, thanks to a widespread consumer backlash that has stimulated online services and browser vendors to incorporate pop-up-blocking software. Already, pop-ups - once hailed as the revenue savior for many small sites, are declining in terms of share: 8.7 percent had them in 2003. but now only 6.2 percent do, and the future looks very dim, as cited in this New York Times article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/technology/19popup.html(free registration required)

Few will mourn the extinction of the pop-up. But future-minded media freaks might seek to save one or two operating examples - perhaps from the early X10 campaign - and create a "circa 2003 pop-up simulator" just to show people of the future how miserable life on the Web was between 2001 and 2004.

No, few classic pop-ups or pop unders - not even the cute series from Orbitz - will be saved from global erasure, even though creating them constituted a significant cottage industry for many Web designers in the last 3 years. What museum would have them? Few artists actively used the pop-up as a serious visual, much less a literary medium, most people hated them, and thus the pop-up - a true mass phenomena - will likely become completely opaque to future generations thanks to a lack of interest in documenting the form.