Yes, admittedly, I hate pop-ups. I surf with my pop-up blockers enabled in both Firefox and Safari. If they somehow get around my blocking them, I immediately close them. I never click on advertisements. So I'm not really any different than you.
Today however, I was going to a site my husband gets a newsletter from to check a business article. Interestingly, they had this cute little yellow sticky note-looking thing that welcomes you to the site and offers a trial to their daily newsletter. What's so cool about a sticky note, right? Well, this sticky note is different. It sits at the mid-top of the page and overlaps their navigation. It has a nice little drop shadow that you can see through. It has an X in the top right corner so that you can close it, or you can click the sticky note and go straight to the offer. Pretty unobtrusive and well-done in my opinion. I found, by digging through the Early to Rise code that the service is provided by a company called Instant Attention (I am not in any way affiliated with them 
). The little note can be put anywhere on the page, has different handwriting fonts you can choose and grows and shrinks based on the amount of content it contains. It gets around all pop-up blockers, however, since it's based on JavaScript, it obviously won't work with JS disabled.
So why does this one not bother me? I think it's because usually, a pop-up is advertising something for another company. Something I'm not interested in at all. This is instead an offer from the web site I'm visiting. Now that's something I might be interested in. And if I'm not, it's just a handwritten note that I can close right up. It has me thinking about how some of my clients could possibly benefit from such a widget. Hmmmm…
