I'm not sure what to make of this. It's certainly a novel approach to displaying a signup box and they did a great job of implementing it. It works just as well on my Windows desktop as it does my Droid. I would imagine the conversion rate is lower because it requires some reading first, but who knows? With coverage based on that feature alone they probably wont be affected by that. If they weren't getting coverage based on the novelty of that feature then they would probably get the conversion hit.

You might consider testing two versions of the landing page to see which one gets you more email addresses (since that's really what you want).

(And since this submission was apparently just flagged to death you should go ahead with the testing...)

I was thinking the same thing - conversions are lower, but the exposure is higher. It also works well thematically with the info-sparse page. Adds to the mystery.

So, what's so special about this? It's literally nothing more than a resizeable textbox that shows up where you click. Why does this merit my e-mail address?

It is cool. Not sure how practical it is. Next - cancel (X) button without having the refresh the page to get out of it.

this sort of looks cool.. but apart from that doesn't give you any idea whatsoever!