Is _blank (HTML) basically an un-necessary popup?

<p>I've been writing a lot of blog articles lately and I usually add _blank for referenced links in my articles as to not lose my readers to another site, but then I thought, thats kind of unnecessary and here's why:<p>Whenever I am browsing an article and I open a new link, I always CMD click as to open the new link in a new browser tab anyway, so it's kind of redundant to put in _blank. Am I really retaining readers by adding _blank? Would appreciate your thoughts.