Pop up ads, are they acceptable in 2026?

Hello, everyone. I am here for a brief discussion on the did-you-know basics of Pop-Up Advertising on blogs.

Pop-up ad networks used to be quality fits with minimal intrusion on your conversation. They would utilize tech that did a single exit pop or pop under that only showed when the visitor was leaving your site. As time went on, these networks started delivering pop-over and interstitial ads that would jump up as your visitor began to read your post and had to be dismissed to continue reading. A Large number of disgruntled and interrupted readers would simply leave the site and never come back.

Complaints about using these networks kept rolling in and building up, and a new product called an ad blocker was invented. Now, roughly 76% of Internet uses at least one ad blocker. Since the ads made customers mad at companies, most legit businesses stopped advertising their products, and ad networks became dirt cheap and stopped monitoring what ads are being shown.

Today, after 22 years of being online, they still have these networks, and they are full of false advertising, scams, and forced software downloads that will drive the 24% of users who don't yet have an ad blocker to madness and the bad reputation of the adware, malware, and forced on them softwares become YOUR as in YOU Not the pop up ad company's bad reputation.

MATH GETS BAD TOO

These networks have become uber cheap to advertise in, and thus, they barely pay a fraction of what Google Adsense pays. The payments are so bad that most only pay around $100 for 10,000 actual views. That means to earn $100 while taking into account 75% or more of your visitors don't see the ads at all, you need around 40,000 page views to make that hundred bucks.

Affiliate marketing, for example, Wealthy Affiliate Premium Plus Annual Membership sales can pay over $100 for a single visitor who joins and upgrades. If you convert at even 1%, that means you suck at writing reviews and feature breakdowns, case studies, etc... the same 10,000 visitors is 100 sales. That's $10,000 potential income missed because you are showing ads for pennies that destroy reader trust and interrupt the reader from reading your post at all.

Do you think there is an argument to still run pop-up ads on a blog in 2026?