In this case, however, a pop-up on your own site costs nothing. In fact, removing it incurs costs in development time, even if it's a simple line delete.
So, I am 100% sure no marketer would ever push for removing it, unless end-users specifically tell them that they are not going to use the site because of the pop-up. The likelihood that they realize that on their own is next to zero because of the difficulties in retention analysis to catch this.
I'd say if their click through rate to the actual article (aka bouncing off the page instead of clicking the close button and continuing to read the article) is low, they'd likely remove it. At least that's how I've been able to convince certain marketers about the inefficacy of their tactics. But other things, like modals to subscribe to the newsletter that pop up after reading the content half-way, simply work too well to ever give up.
Now, that is a different take. You have been able to convince them. It's not like they realized this themselves, or that they deduced something from the numbers.
Again, only my experience at past employers, but in a lot of cases the developers don't get heard when making these suggestions.
At what point is the faulty generalization simply...a true generalization? Just because you don't want to believe it's true doesn't mean it's not true.
Technical people often complain about popups and other marketing practices, not realizing that the vast majority of people aren't technical and do not complain, much less care, about such practices. They'll click the close button on the popup and move on.
They absolutely care. It's just that they think it can't be helped. People love it when I install uBlock Origin for them. They tell tell me the web just feels nicer, less annoying to use.
"Users don't mind" is nothing but adtech propaganda.
They definitely care. They’re just not empowered to do anything about it It’s ubiquitous and technical solutions are not available to the non-technical.
I can tell you from experience, they really do not care. It's not even something that crosses their minds. You can see for yourself, ask 100 non-technical people you know about stuff like ads and popups. I bet over 50% of them simply do not care. It is a technical person's bias to think they do.
I assume that asking "do you care?" will give you "no" quite often. But asking "do you want to see ads?" will give you an equal amount of "no" if not more. Or asking "do you want to block ads?" will give you a lots of "yes". It's all in the question, as over 50% of all savvy marketeers will know.
That's probably the reason why even the people in the marketing department of my last tech lead gig run adblockers on their Macs. They used to not do that but as one of them recently told me "the internet has turned to shit". I had the feeling the irony of the situation was not lost on him, but he was unable to verbalize it.
I also recall a company where the IT just rolled out an adblocker one day (in 2018 or so) to about a 1000 seats and it was the talk of the week in the cafeteria because the internet had become sooo much better.
Sure, these are individual experiences with little statistical value. They confirm my bias that people, given a choice, would like to see less ads. Most of them don't know they have a choice beyond "seeing ads" and "not using the internet", so they submit. Show them more choices and they gladly chose less ads.
I have done that. Most people go, "oh, cool," then continue on. They really don't care one way or another, and it's more evident when I ask them later about what I just did and how they feel.
I haven’t had to ask. They verbalize their frustrations.e
I think your questioning probably requires a certain level of care, thought, and ability to form a response that isn’t necessarily indicative of whether someone cares to whatever degree. Someone can say, “Oh, I don’t care” and still experience annoyance indicating that they do actually care.
I also think 50% is way too low a bar to claim a class of people does or doesn’t do sometbing like “caring”. If 60% of people “don’t care” and the it’s a really big deal for people who do, it doesn’t seem like a claim that “such people don’t care” is the truth.