who invented pop up ads

Pop-up ads were invented by Ethan Zuckerman in the late 1990s while he was working at Tripod.com. The invention was originally intended as a way to display advertisements in a separate window without interfering with the content of the webpage. Zuckerman created the pop-up ad because advertisers were concerned about their ads appearing next to inappropriate content, so the pop-up was a solution to separate ads from the main page content. Despite good intentions, pop-up ads quickly became an annoying and aggressive form of online advertising. Ethan Zuckerman later publicly apologized for the unintended nuisance his invention became, acknowledging that the pop-up ad is one of the most hated tools in online advertising.