Pop-up ads that even blind people cannot escape, a business that has completely crossed all bottom lines.
The fundamental problem does not lie in technical capability, but in the game between cost and willingness. It is reported that the daily revenue from pop-up ads of some top-tier apps can reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan; while the current penalties for "unstoppable" pop-ups are quite lenient: those who refuse to make corrections will be fined no less than 5,000 yuan and no more than 30,000 yuan.
On the streets of Jiangxi, a visually impaired elderly man held up his mobile phone, with pop-up ads popping up one after another on the screen. He could not see, so he could only fumble for the close button over and over again by muscle memory. The more he fumbled, the more pages he was redirected to.
Figure | Video screenshot
This video went viral across the internet in the past two days, and netizens' comments can be summed up in a few words: Is there still any humanity left?
01
The phones of your parents are turning into ad farms
This is not an isolated case.
Recently, ifeng Technology tested multiple mobile phones by enabling the screen reader mode for the visually impaired. On an Android phone, we installed apps commonly used by elderly users such as Kuaishou Lite, Clean Master, and Ximalaya, then closed our eyes to simulate the real operations of visually impaired users.
When fingers swipe across the screen, the screen reader will mechanically read out a string of words such as "Home", "Recommended", and "Claim Now". After the ad pop-up appears, dozens of words of ad copy keep pouring into the ears, while the most critical "×" in the upper right corner has no clear text label, and the screen reader can only tell you it is an "image" or a "button".
In other words, you know there is a "×" on the screen, but you have no idea where it is.
Worse still, once your finger deviates from the position and taps into the ad area, the page will start to jump continuously: you were just scrolling through short videos, the next second you enter a shopping page, after a few more operations, you are redirected to the interface of a cleaning app, and the whole process cannot be interrupted.
Figure | Test screenshot
This kind of interaction trap targeting the visually impaired is also a dimensionality reduction attack on elderly people with normal vision.
"My mom is driven crazy by the pop-up ads on her phone. Ads pop up while she is watching videos, and if she accidentally taps them, a bunch of messy apps will automatically download in the background, leaving a lot of 'waiting to install' icons on the desktop," netizen "Yunduo Duo" complained. These apps cannot be deleted easily, and her mom cannot tell the difference between ads and normal buttons. "She can't handle it at all, so I have to teach her step by step remotely through the phone screen."
Figure | From Xiaohongshu user @Yunduo Duo
If the experience of "Yunduo Duo" is rogue behavior at the software level, then the experience of user "Su Ge'er"'s mother reveals the "original sin" at the hardware level.
"It is no exaggeration to say that my dad's phone is filled with useless apps all over the screen, it's so laggy," said "Su Ge'er". She found that this kind of random pop-up ad mostly occurs on budget phones: "My dad originally used an Android phone that cost about 1,200 yuan. Shortly after he bought it, there were non-stop ads, pop-ups, and automatic app downloads... There were too many problems." Later, "Su Ge'er" gave her father the high-end phone she had replaced, and these problems rarely occurred.
ifeng Technology also noticed that on models commonly used by young people such as Apple, Huawei Mate series, and Xiaomi MIX series, several of the aforementioned apps have few ads except for prompts to log in as soon as possible and request permissions.
Figure | Test screenshot
This kind of targeted hunting for the elderly has quietly penetrated into their social circles.
According to reports from multiple media including The Beijing News, an 88-year-old retired professor had 770,000 unread messages accumulated in WeChat. In the past three years, she has added nearly 1,200 WeCom accounts, and was pulled into more than 1,900 group chats in the past year. These group chats can pull in the elderly without their confirmation, and they will be re-pulled in shortly after quitting the group.
This shows that the hunting has extended from "in-app pop-ups" to "private domain social chains". Merchants take advantage of the loophole of the platform's rule that "users can be added to small groups without confirmation", treating the elderly as a free traffic pool to carry out continuous marketing bombardment.
02
Every accidental tap means someone is counting their money
The elderly just want to close the pop-up. But the moment their finger touches the screen, page redirect, ad loading, and app download have already started.
For the elderly, this is an "accidental tap"; but on the other side, this action has been split into a quantifiable number that can be priced.
According to data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of December 2025, the number of internet users aged 60 and above in China has reached 173 million. For some gray-area traffic businesses, these people are not elders who need to be taken care of at all, but a traffic pool waiting to be exploited.
The first step of this business is to turn the app itself into an ad carrier.
Many of the unknown apps on the desktop such as "Clean Master", "Free WiFi", and "Earn Money by Walking" do not make money from their tool functions. They generate revenue through pop-ups, induced downloads and redirected ads, and the ads are priced by stages such as display, click, download, and activation.
After integrating information from multiple sources, ifeng Technology found that the minimum charge for 1,000 exposures of pop-up ads is 5 yuan, and each user click (no distinction between intentional taps and accidental taps) costs another 0.1 to 0.3 yuan. In the app promotion industry, the channel rebate for a new user who completes real-name bank card binding is generally between 30 and 50 yuan.
In other words, every accidental tap by an elderly user generates income for a certain link in the industrial chain.
Worse still, elderly users are not randomly involved in this.
When the platform identifies that the owner of the phone is an elderly user, the pushed content, page design and even ad positions may be adjusted to target their usage habits. The most prominent position is not the close button "×", but the ad button; the real "×" is shrunk, lightened, and even hidden in the corner.
Therefore, "accidental taps" are sometimes not accidents, but exactly what the product design is intended to cause.
According to China Central Television reports, an 85-year-old elderly man in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, was once redirected to a payment page due to an induced pop-up. Since the phone had previously enabled password-free payment and automatic renewal, more than 4,800 yuan was deducted from his account in multiple transactions. Facing the bill, the old man could only ask over and over again: "I just wanted to close it, how did my money disappear?"
Behind this, a complete interest chain has already taken shape.
App developers are responsible for providing traffic entrances. By accessing ad SDKs (Software Development Kits), they hand over the ad slots to ad alliances such as Tencent Ad Platform and Baidu Ads;
Ad alliances and SDKs are responsible for deciding when and how ads appear;
Ad clients such as e-commerce platforms, health product sellers, and wealth management platforms pay for the final clicks, downloads and conversions. The elderly's degraded eyesight, slow finger movement and insufficient internet experience are exactly exploited by this chain to generate click rates and ad revenue.
In other words, an "accidental tap" on an elderly person's mobile phone screen may actually go through multiple links including developers, ad platforms, SDKs, and ad clients before finally being converted into revenue.
Ironically, the so-called "aging-friendly design" has not solved this problem.
As early as 2021, regulators clearly stipulated that aging-friendly versions of apps must not induce elderly users to operate through methods such as pop-up ads. But in reality, the so-called "elderly mode" of many apps only enlarges the fonts and buttons, without actually reducing the number of ads and induced redirects.
Compared with the large-font mode, what the elderly need more is that no one induces them to tap accidentally, and when an accidental tap occurs, no one is waiting to profit from it.
The technology that can block all this has long existed. There is only one remaining question — if it can be blocked, why is it still happening?
03
Why are tech companies unwilling to block pop-ups completely?
If this were just a technical problem, it would not be that hard to solve.
But the technology for blocking pop-up ads has long been mature. The reason why it cannot be completely blocked is essentially a "cat-and-mouse game" — when the defending side (mobile system/security software) and the attacking side (apps/ad vendors) are on the same interest boat, the technical defense line is naturally useless.
The core resistance is that mobile phone manufacturers act as both players and referees.
Nowadays, the profit of mobile phone hardware is getting thinner and thinner, and the hardware profit margin of some brands is even below 5%. Ads, pre-installed apps and internet services are the real profitable businesses. For example, according to the disclosure of listed mobile phone manufacturers, their ad-related revenue reached 24.7 billion yuan in 2024 and 28.5 billion yuan in 2025; according to previous investigations by media including *Caijing*, unlisted Android mobile phone manufacturers have an annual revenue of more than 10 billion yuan from "performance-based ads" alone.
Manufacturers are not only the producers of mobile phones, but also the managers of the mobile ad ecosystem. They certainly have the ability to decide what can pop up and what cannot. But the problem is, if the pop-ups themselves can bring in revenue, who has enough motivation to shut down all pop-ups completely?
You may ask, what if you install third-party security software, such as various mobile phone managers and blocking tools? The answer is that it is very difficult.
The first reason is the unequal permissions. The mobile system itself has the highest authority. System-level ad components, app stores and some pre-installed services can directly call system capabilities; while third-party security software are greatly restricted by permissions, making it difficult to obtain deep system permissions, so they naturally cannot block the pop-ups acquiesced by manufacturers.
At the same time, ad vendors will not wait to be blocked. Ad SDKs are updated rapidly. If one close button fails, they will change the interaction method; if the shake-to-trigger action is easy to identify, they will change the trigger method; if pop-ups are easy to block, they will disguise ads to look more like normal pages. And the rule library of security software is always a step behind in updates.
As a result, blocking and bypassing have become an escalating cat-and-mouse game.
For ad platforms, every extra click means extra revenue; for mobile phone manufacturers, overly strict blocking may lead to a decline in ad revenue; for third-party security software, they neither have sufficient permissions nor enough benefits to put a brake on the entire ecosystem.
The fundamental problem does not lie in technical capability, but in the game between cost and willingness. It is reported that the daily revenue from pop-up ads of some top-tier apps can reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan; while the current penalties for "unstoppable" pop-ups are quite lenient: those who refuse to make corrections will be fined no less than 5,000 yuan and no more than 30,000 yuan. The maximum fine of 30,000 yuan can hardly form a deterrent when facing a daily cash flow of hundreds of thousands of yuan. Therefore, when every accidental tap can bring money, "unstoppable" pop-ups are no longer a defect, but a business model.
On the elderly's mobile phones, the gyroscope can be a trap, the screen reader can be noise, and the "close" button can be a download button. Every path of technology that has been abused originally leads to a more decent path — except that no one pays on that path.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "ifeng Technology", written by Lu Chunfeng