Comment by kelnos
7 months ago
Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe.
It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof.
I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.
And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?
Not sure if it's my browser config, but I saw all these CTAs I mentioned, which I find absurd.
I really think the article was relatively interesting, enough for me to consider other articles if it weren't for the amount of annoying nudges I got, which is a shame because the author probably put some good effort into it.
I agree that the only CTA should be at the end, but more and more it looks like it actually works, otherwise I would imagine people would stop doing it so often.
Ironically, these sorts of nagging CTAs are exactly the thing that "growth hackers" use to reduce quality in favor of short-term metrics.