There's better ways, less intrusive ads, to do so. But
@Michael made his choice. and some people won't care. Some will. whether not those who will are significant enough to cause any loss of traffic or revenue given time
@Michael will see for himself. He's made his decision, I've made mine to stop using NameBio.
I think it will be ok since the display logic is usage-based. People who don't get enough value from the site to consider it a reasonable trade-off would rarely, if ever, see it anyway. Those that know how to harness the data for a profit will see it occasionally. But they'll probably also consider it a fair trade-off in lieu of supporting the site with a membership, or will subscribe if it bothers them enough. The data is backing this up so far, traffic continues to rise and we're getting more new memberships than we ever have before. I really appreciate people being so supportive and understanding.
I must admit I didn't anticipate a reaction like yours though, in that you don't use the site enough to see the popup (except because of a bug which has been fixed) but you're still leaving. I can't say I understand the logic in that, but thankfully you appear to be in an extreme minority of users who feel that way. I also don't understand coming back to this thread every day for the past few days to re-announce that you're leaving to anyone who is being supportive.
Out of curiosity though, what website do you operate? You keep insisting that less obtrusive ads are a perfectly viable alternative to this popup so I assume you're speaking from experience. I would love to learn more about how you're making money from ads that can be easily ignored/blocked. This popup delivers more clicks in a day than a static in-content banner would deliver in a month or two. I know this because we used to have static in-content banners before we replaced them with auction widgets.
As a general update, I'm still dialing things in, but for now where we stand is:
I changed the window from a rolling seven days to being the first day of the previous month. This should mitigate an issue where the popup wasn't following the "every 50 search actions" intention. It's a bit hard to explain, so I'll give an example to illustrate it better:
Day 1: 2 search actions.
Day 2: 48 search actions. (see the popup on the last search)
Day 3: 25 search actions.
Day 4: 25 search actions. (see the popup on the last search)
Day 5: 10 search actions.
Day 6: 15 search actions.
Day 7: 25 search actions. (see the popup on the last search)
The intention was that on Day 8 you wouldn't see the popup until you did 50 more search actions, since the last thing you did was see the popup. But because of the rolling window where two search actions dropped off the count, it would knock you back under the threshold and you'd see it after two searches.
It could still happen for one popup view on the first day of each month, but now it isn't possible to happen daily. Although it wasn't a huge deal because it could also work in your favor and probably balances out.
I also made it so that if you click the banner the popup closes. That way if you visit the sponsor you don't need to keep staring at the ad for no reason. I also set the countdown back to 45 seconds from 15 seconds, that was too short and clicks dropped off a cliff. You don't have to wait that long anyway if you visit the sponsor. Refreshing will also not bypass the popup any more.