At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
>I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.
It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.