The pop-up ads creator is sorry for the very invention he has created that has served as a huge nuisance to the internet public. Ethan Zuckerman was working for the webpage hosting site Tripod.com from 1994 to 1999 when the idea was realized, he shares in an the The Atlantic.

“Along the way,” he writes, “ we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.”

CNNMoney notes that the pop-up ad started as a solution to a complaint from a car maker upset that its banner ad was running on a page with sexual content. Zuckerman then created a code that will launch the ad in a separate window, thus laying the technical foundations for what we now consider one of the most annoying matters on the world wide web.

"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," Zuckerman wrote in The Atlantic. "I'm sorry. Our intentions were good."

He confesses that after two decades into the ad-supported web, he now sees that the current model is bad, broken, and corrosive.

Zuckerman says that he hopes to see the Internet evolve away from an ad-supported business by using other forms of revenue models like subscription payments or direct “micropayments” to content creators.

In what could be a combinatin of both humor and real-life sentiment, one commenter on CNNMoney said that he has “been waiting for this apology for a long time.”

Since the advent of pop-up ads, an industry of pop-up blockers have sprung for a more hassle-free surfing.

A document on Best Net Guru titled “How to deal with pop-up ads and other annoying ads” describe pop-up ads as “attacks” and suggesting its users to install pop-up blockers to counter these windows.