The Internet’s Original Sin | The Atlantic

.. the business model that got us funded was advertising.

The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them.

Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content.

via The Internet's Original Sin – The Atlantic.