History is replete with public apologies, but few may have been as universally appreciated as Ethan Zuckerman's apology in 2014. Zuckerman, who identifies himself as the inventor of the Internet pop-up ad, wrote an article for The Atlantic in which he acknowledged his regret for creating the now-ubiquitous gimmick. In the late 1990s, Zuckerman was working for the website Tripod -- now a webpage publishing firm -- and trying to come up with ways to earn money for the company. Advertising appeared to be the answer, he wrote, but he was wary about putting ads on the same page as other content, lest the reader associate the two. Hence, "one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad" was born, Zuckerman wrote. It allowed ads to appear separately from other content. Zuckerman said he had no idea what his work would end up doing to the Internet. "I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it," he wrote. "I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
We've .com a long way:
- The first website went live in 1991; today, there are approximately 47 billion.
- Readily accessible websites like Amazon and Netflix account for only 4 percent of the entire Internet; the rest can't be accessed with standard search engines.
- In 2005, Me at the zoo became the first video uploaded to YouTube. Today, 300 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute.