If you’re an iPhone user the popup on below will almost certainly have gotten in your way many times. It isn’t a spam or malicious popup, but it is just as annoying.

Thankfully a year or so ago it became so common and such a menace that considerate iOS developers started to remove it from their apps and it is much less prevalent today.

But now there is a new plague. This time on the web (particularly shops and blogs). It’s the ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ popup and it’s depressingly rampant. You’re slapped in the face with it the moment you visit way too many sites now.

Both these popups are the product of a few things I believe…

Fashion

The web, like most things, has fashions and trends. The newsletter popup has been around for a long time, but it appears in 2016 to be very much in fashion and to have reached a mass scale. Which leads me onto my next point.

Morally okay

When something is so ubiquitous it is less likely to be examined morally. When all your fellow online shops have fashionable newsletter popups of course you want to implement one too. Whereas if you were one of the first you would need to look at wether this is good for your users and examine its pros and cons. But at some point enough people are doing it that the general census becomes ‘this is fine’ and you no longer have to debate it.

Easy to use ‘plugins’

In the case of iOS, two open source projects called Appirater and iRate allowed developers an easy way to implement ‘rate this app’ popups. On the web Wordpress has many popup newsletter plugins and store CMS’s like Shopify have plenty too. Or you can just use MailChimp and a snippet of code to accomplish it.

It works

People aren’t utterly stupid. If these popups didn’t increase newsletter signups they wouldn’t have them.

Finally

So newsletter popups are fashionable, morally okay (in their minds), easy to implement, and work. But fashions die, morally I consider it wrong, easy doesn’t mean right, and a 0.50% increase in newsletter signups isn’t worth plaguing your users. So please, let this trend die.

Below are some popup examples I’ve come across organically in just the past few days…

• DESIGN
• RANT