[sturgill]

I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources, and the more I learn about the recycling industry the more I believe that everything is just trash any way (reduce and reuse are the only viable paths).

Also, as a quant marketer I can tell you: exit intent works. Most traffic bounces and never returns. Being able to capture email and nurture leads is a profitable way of maximizing the return of your traffic.

There’s a reason why every furniture store is going out of business and has someone twirling signs: we are evolved to pick out movement and change. An exit intent that inverts the color scheme is obnoxious but only because you have to see it.

The interesting question (for me) is how obnoxious do you go before you start to hurt returns.

This comment is (oddly) unlikely to be popular on HN (odd because of HN’s heritage as an offshoot of YC), but exit intent works. It’s one of the first things I put in place at any new company.

[gjm11]

Notably absent from this comment: the slightest awareness that "your traffic" is composed of people who have preferences.

Yeah, no doubt, "exit intent works", if the only thing you care about is "the return of your traffic". This mindset is exactly how we got to the situation described in the OP.

You are making things worse for your users. You don't care, because you don't think of them as users, as people, as human beings, you think of them as "traffic" whose "return" you want to "maximize".

You are the problem.

[sturgill]

Content has a cost; I don’t apologize for maximizing the return of that investment.

I’m personally not offended by exit intent pop ups. They are an expected part of the browsing experience. I don’t think of them like the pop ups (or pop unders!) if the early 90s. An exit intent is limited to the window displayed.

That said, I do strongly believe in respecting user preference. If a person clicks the “no thanks” button I do cookie that preference and suppress additional exit intents. And I have problems with how some companies hijack the back button on mobile to show exit intent style content.

But I disagree with the sentiment that surfacing an offer to a user is hostile.

[bjornjaja]

I definitely agree that the pop ups work, but consider plastic—it works really well also. The problem is that once everything is package in plastic now the streets are littered with it.

Every page we visit has the same things to generate revenue littered all over their sites because it works—but what about the content? It’s becoming secondary to the littered advertising.

Ads used to be strategically similar to the content presented—but now things follow us around the Internet based on purchases in grocery stores etc. The pop ups want me to spend my time helping companies improve their products for free. Where’s the content going? Anything but the primary content on websites is litter in my opinion.

I suppose it’s the frequency of them too: a foresee pop ups on ten sites the frequency becomes like plastic bags following me to the park from the shopping centers, to the rivers, etc. You can’t escape them until they’re eliminated.

[bsanr2]

>I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources

My time is finite, and so is my ability to reset focus once distracted. Pop-ups add up.

[sturgill]

Still not close to the same. I pollute a river and generations struggle. I distract you while you’re browsing online and the real impact rounds to zero.

Eventually you’ll die and no one will care about that time you got annoyed. But no one is ever going to swim in the Gowanus... at least not without billions of dollars being spent...

[bsanr2]

Me? Sure. Multiply that by the number of internet users globally, and the number of interactions they have with these sites. A half second of distraction is double-digit man-years every day.

Or, you can think of it in the context of how easily it is for some people to lose their train of thought. An unexpected distraction of even a split-second can mean minutes of trying to remember what was forgotten, and the mental effort involved therein.

There's a reason why people complain about pop-ups: they represent a real cost to our limited focus and therefore productivity. That means a lot of good ideas and a lot of work gets delayed or goes unrealized towards efforts like "how to clean up polluted environments."