Adwall — Pop-Up Ads and Browser Blockers | adwall.net
A dated table of the milestones: the Tripod.com origin of pop-up ads in the late 1990s, the Mozilla and Opera blockers of 2002, the Windows XP SP2 release of 2004, and the 44% click-through of the first AT&T banner.
Pop-up ads originated on the Tripod.com webpage hosting site in the late 1990s. The hosting pages carried scripts that opened a second window on top of the page a visitor was reading, and the pattern spread from there to the rest of the web.
The first AT&T banner ad on HotWired had a 44% click-through rate. That figure shows why advertising kept experimenting with new placements once banner space on a single page was exhausted.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Mozilla introduced its pop-up blocker on 23 September 2002; Opera followed on 13 November 2002, less than three weeks later. The two releases put a working switch in front of mainstream users for the first time.
In 2004 Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, which added pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer. That release covered the largest installed base of the period and made blocking a default expectation rather than an opt-in feature.
In 2016 internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable and broadcast television, a market shift that kept new window formats worth building even after blockers became standard.
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