Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment “This website has ads, so it’s trash” pop up in conversations. And honestly I don’t quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they’re personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.
Ads are the epitome of the enshitification of the internet. It corrupts the incentives to make anything online.
At least they’re personalized now
This is a whole other can of worms that makes it so much worse. From data harvesting to selling your information to third parties etc… It is a privacy nightmare and rather malicious in nature. This is one of the things that FOSS (Free and open-source software) tries to remedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq7NLMwynYg
Semi related, but here is a funny video about ads. It wouldn’t surprise me if this video had ads on it. I’d recommend an ad blocker.
“At least they’re personalized now”
“At least they’re tracking everything I ever do, all the websites I ever visit and everything I look up, storing that data forever in data centers to tie to me so they can know everything they want about me forever, and making a profit off of me so they don’t have to work a day in their life” - This is how it actually works.
If you pay for a finite amount of mobile data, and want to find the answer to something but first have to watch a 30 second ad, wouldn’t you be upset that you are paying with your own money to use a portion of your limited data just to load something irrelevant that you don’t want to see? And while you think about how you are losing money and precious time on this Earth during those moments, you can think about how your time will go straight into the wallet of the creepy 30 year old dude who paid for you to watch his ad. And get this, you can do this for every single ad you ever see! Which not too long ago was nowhere, and now they are everywhere they can be jammed in:
Website banners, side bars, autoplaying video ads, suggestions, promoted posts and anything sponsored or promoted in the app store / play store, social media ads like in Snapchat and instagram, ads before every video on youtube, mobile game ads, ads before a movie, billboards you have to see while you drive on a road, airplanes carrying a banner behind them polluting the sky with an ugly ad, on every bus stop, before your favorite podcast, before any movie at any movie theater that you already paid for a ticket to see, before you can see the recipe you want to make, on the back of grocery receipts, between each song on the radio, every 10 minutes on Hulu, every 5 minutes on Twitch, plastered all over your $900 Samsung smart 4k TV and unable to be disabled, written inside the game case of your latest video game, and also full screen once you start your new $60 EA game, eventually they will be on the home screen of your phone, before you can accept a phone call, before you can read new text messages, and eventually you’ll be watching an ad to dial 911. Hope your emergency can wait 30 seconds!
You know all those useful youtube videos with detailed, quick instructions how to save a life, like CPR instructions? Would you mind sitting through 2 15-second ads while your friend chokes to death?
On the plus side, OP, it takes less time than a 30 second ad to install an adblocker. Have you ever tried Ublock Origin? Not only is it free, respects your privacy, limits ad tracking, and lets you remove anything annoying on any website, including every single ad ever made automatically without you having to do anything, but it also works on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, but not iOS because Apple likes to be annoying. There are other safari adblockers in the app store though.
Also last thing, there’s a reason why the U.S. F.B.I. officially recommend using an adblocker just to browse the web. Not only do they have the potential to let your system (even with a good antivirus) be susceptible to a malware attack, transmitted just by loading the ad… But they also just plain suck! Nobody likes them for good reason!
Indeed and people often say “if an ad is annoying I’ll never buy that product, so ads don’t work on me, also they’ve never made me click on or run out and buy something” !
However advertising is accompanied with thorough independent market research and sales numbers and companies can directly see the impact of their ad campaigns. It’s indisputable.
In the long term it’s also about brand recognition, we see a “stupid ad” today and in a year when we’re looking for that kind of thing we are more likely to choose that brand over another and we don’t know why but “this jams seems better”. The effect is proven, scary and it’s something we’re relatively helpless against. It doesn’t help that our brains sometimes register things running in the background on the TV while we’re petting the dog. Product placement in movies works like that too, if we notice it we think it’s obvious and stupid, but we still notice it and even when we don’t notice it our helpful subconscious is right there helping us remember.
Moving into even worse territory, on social media like Facebook they can profile us enough to know where we’re leaning politically and if we’re not entirely confident in our political stance they can show us ads that looks like product ads but are designed to nudge our political stance a bit to the side in the desired direction.
The effect of ads on the subconscious is scary. It’s not complete mind control but it can influence us without us noticing.
Not on social media ? No problem, they still build up shadow profiles. A Google executive once bragged at a conference that they know everything we’ve done since the first day we got on the Internet. Hyperbolic maybe but that confidence comes from somewhere.
90% of the internet has always had ads
No, it didn’t, kid.
Ad Blocking IS Cyber Security
Many people have become accustomed to life without ads. I have used adblockers in my browsers for probably the past 20 years. So the experience that you are talking about (just scrolling past them), is an experience that I don’t really know, unless I am suddenly using some other computer that belongs to a friend or something.
People have also gotten away from ads in their entertainment by subscribing to things like Netflix rather than cable.
Once you don’t have advertising shoved in your face 24/7, then suddenly being bombarded with it is incredibly offensive.
90% of the internet has always had ads
I very clearly remember a time when only a handful of websites actually had ads on them and having an ad blocker wasn’t a straight up requirement to stem the tide of popups and banners.
Youtube, before Google bought it, was pretty nice. A little ad taking up a square in the upper right corner, just above recommended videos, and I think that was about it. Nowadays it’s completely impossible to watch YouTube without ad blockers or premium subscription.
… and you can’t even remove ads from your own channel. As a content creator I was happy to find a “disable advertisements” option in the settings menu - my channel isn’t monetized anyway, so getting rid of those super intrusive ads sounded like a win/win situation.
Turns out this only disables “interest based” ads so my viewers still get shoved ads down their throats, just that those are entirely random now instead of custom-tailored towards their interests. Thanks, youtube - very helpful and exactly what I wanted. /s
yeah, i dont know what id do without adblock on youtube.
And that is really sad. In the early days, I disabled my ad blocker for Youtube, as I tend to do with the websites I enjoy, but evidently I’ve had to re-enable it since to keep my sanity.
As so many others, I don’t have a problem with passive or “docile” ads, but I do have a vendetta against intrusive anti-user experiences, which has led me to block ads and other kinds of annoyances /intrusions per default.
The whole “need for more aggressive ads as result of adblockers” is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Just be careful because just because ads aren’t intrusive doesn’t mean they don’t track you. If ads were hosted locally on a website and not part of a big ad network then ad-blockers would be pretty ineffective anyway.
For even more blocking there’s a plugin called sponsorblock. It automatically skips marked sponsor segments in videos. The segments are user submitted so not all videos have em but it’s so great!
My personal take is that people start understanding the negative impact unhinged marketing can have on your well-being. Ironically, while following influencers and having their happiness and worldviews happily influenced by social media.
You can’t scroll some of the ads, that’s one of the problems.
There are video ads that remain on the bottom of the page regardless of what you do. Same for image ads.
I’m trying to read an article and there is distracting ads all over the page.
Ads back in 90s were subtle, I have zero problems with textual google ads in the article but videos and images that is also slowing down my experience with its large downloads?
Sites are like loading 10m of content for a 2kb text article. Come on.
When i load a page on my phone and 60% of the page is ads, then i scroll and there is another ad making 100% of my screen ads, for things i will never be into buying, it makes me not want to use that site.
At least they’re personalized now
All that means is that they’re tracking everything about you to figure out what ads would work on you. They share your data between companies to build a profile on you.
I used to think the same as you but after enough time I just got completely fed up with everyone constantly trying to sell me things. Basically every interaction online is someone trying to take money from me. Not only that but they go out of their way to make things shittier because you’re more likely to part with your money. Like how article websites wait just long enough before you start reading before covering the screen with an ad and breaking your concentration. You can’t just scroll past those and mind your business.
Personally, I don’t mind ads that are not extremely obnoxious. A clickable link on the sidebar advertising something or a random picture here and there - no problemo, as they’re easy to ignore.
What I can’t stand are the extremely intrusive ones - pop-ups that obscure half of the screen with such a tiny little X in the corner that you need to click it in a pixel-perfect manner so you won’t “accidentally” open the ad itself. Ads that play music at full volume without warning. Unskippable ads in videos. Sites that greet you with “we noticed you’re using an adblocker” and just won’t let you view the actual site content. Ads that make the rest of the site lag like hell or freeze entirely. Rapidly flashing ads in neon colors that almost make you have a seizure by looking at them. Those can GTFO and if my adblocker isn’t able to / allowed to hide them, I simply won’t use the site in question anymore and that’s it.
To make an IRL comparison: I don’t mind at all if there are advertisement brochures just lying around on a counter while I’m in a mall, because I can decide on my own whether or not I want to take one of those. But if there is an employee blocking my way, screaming at the top of their lungs and slapping me across the face with said brochure, and I am not allowed to knock them out cold, then I’ll never set foot into that store again, ever.
Fun fact. There’s a dating app, can’t remember which one, where it would display a full sized ad, and if you even tried to swipe back, it would instantly load the playstore.
Sorry. Not swiping to go back. Swiping to close the app. I removed that insanely quick. Whilst still not ideal, Tinder has an ad system that shows like a users profile. But you can just swipe it away without any bullshit. Or if you like the look od it you can click or swipe on it. Take a guess which one has a significantly better user experience.
The people who are reacting so negatively to ads are probably the same people who extensively use adblockers. Seeing a ad sneak through is jarring, and offensive, because an ad demands your attention and distracts you from the mission, its personalized propaganda.
90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business.
Nah, I’ve always hated ads, and always blocked them as soon as we had the capability.
Ads is never just ads. It’s primarily a business model that is fundamentally anti-consumer, because when your main remenue starts becoming showing ads to your user instead of selling them something of value, your priorities shift from trying to make a good quality product to trying to max out engagement in order to print as many ads as possible.
Ads as a general concept are ok to me, otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money. It’s just how many ads and what type. Pop-up ads are bad, too many ads are bad, ads that are deceptive are bad. They need to be small, curated, non-intrusive, and non-deceptive.
otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money.
It’s unfortunate, but this would be a much better internet in the long run. There are other business models besides ads. Like Curiosity Stream and NebulaTV as alternatives to Youtube. People who make video content simply get paid to do it. With ads the type of content you primarily fund is outrage content and whatever gets the most clicks regardless of whether the creator cares about what they are making or not.
There would be some growing pains in an internet that isn’t driven by ads, but it would be way better.
Also all kinds of viruses, malware, adware, crypto miners and other kind of shit that doesn’t get filtered because fuck the users as long as the company paying for the ads actually pays.
