Brad Enslen

I would be much more tolerant of a post about the newsletter; right at the top of your site, the latest post, about your newsletter. That might not sound tasteful to some people but it's a lot better than any pop-up and is a reasonable way to catch the interest of people who might not see the newsletter elsewhere, be it on the site or social media or whatever.

I've been known to leave sites for that. Nobody should see a newsletter sign-up form until they've actually read something on your site.

@simonwoods Yeah, a pinned post with form is legit. I understand it is hard to build a reader base and sometimes you have to kinda push a bit. I'm with you on this one, Simon.

@adders I've hit the back button for less. It depends on my mission, if I'm there out of idle curiousity I'll back out quick, if I'm looking for real knowledge I might stay and read but not sign up.

The variation on this are the websites that have the bottom 1/3rd of the screen obscured with a newsletter signup right from the start, then an advert slides in from the right, huge share tabs slide in from the left and a AI chatbot "helper" slides up in the lower right corner. All are obscuring content and each other. You have 5 layers to dismiss before reading. To me a site like that is just made for Adsense and I back out quick because nothing is worth all that effort.

Yep. Although convincing (commercial) clients not to do it is hard, because it tends to significantly increase sign ups. If that's the only metric you're looking at, then it must be a good idea. Sigh.

@jack I still don't like overlays, but better that they appear after I have scrolled to the bottom of the article rather than before I can read.

That is one of my peeves as well. I usually hit “close” to dump the tab immediately.