Advertisers abused the hell out of us back in the early days of the Internet and we haven’t forgotten. Multiple Pop-ups, pop-unders and seizure-inducing banner ads.
If they simply stuck with small, basic, non-flashing banners, I could have handled it. But greed knows no limits with advertisers.
I certainly do lot miss the days when I’d go onto a website covered in ads for cheap, garbage MMOs… And then suddenly hear random music really fucking loudly. Scrambling to figure out where it’s coming from I’d find 4 or 5 smaller windows has opened up behind my main browser window.
Basically how I browse the internet these days … if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah … all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site … I’m not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.
I go a step further and block them in DDG. This includes any “article” I have to scroll through to find the answer.
if I’m curious, I’m going through https://archive.today – not only are your ads not getting seen, you’re not getting my page views either
Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don’t just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I’ve even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.
Generally for news websites … especially highly rated ones that are supposed to be the best professional outfits … if I can’t use ‘reader view’ and just read your copy … I’m skipping your site and never going back to you.
All I want to do is read the news … you don’t need to sell me on a great refrigerator or a cigarette lighter that has a flame that can melt steel because I’m never going to buy it.
NoScript tends to break more things on the page than is desired, in my experience, I used to use it but eventually I got rid of it because of the hassle of “is this the one I should add an exception for to make it work? No. How about this one?” repeat until you figure it out, and then repeat the whole process for every website you ever use
Using AdNauseam’s built-in uBlock, I can use its element picker if something is particularly stubborn
Don’t get me wrong, I like NoScript as a concept and think it should exist for the subset of users who want that functionality, but it’s not for me.
My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.
From my personal observational account, i think I’ve only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha’s brain wouldn’t even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.
I often wonder how news websites are supposed to survive. People (myself included) want unbiased news websites without paywalls and ads.
How are they supposed to pay their staff?
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The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.
Who gets to collect revenue from the fees though? Where do you draw the line, are you cutting off independent journalism?
I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.
It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…
If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn’t sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.
Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.
News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.
I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.
Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.
Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.
I’d happily pay a nominal fee for news that was unbiased reporting of facts rather than opinion, and didn’t bombard me with ads or sell my data. It just doesn’t exist so I use aggregators to get a general vibe across sources.
That’s easy to say, but when it comes to finding my credit card to type in my info for yet another news website, I can guarantee that I just don’t give enough fucks about any individual news story.
It’s nigh impossible to get many users to read past the headline. A summary is what 98% of people would actually want (and a good news story really is just a summary anyway) so the pay-through-rate would be so close to zero that I can’t see this model working.
Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.
It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.
The news sites that we have today are an inversion of what they should be. As a journalist, you wield tremendous power that is entrusted to you. Being able to set the narrative for millions of others is a privilege and, in fact, something that journalists should be paying to enjoy (e.g. footing the bill for web hosting).
The ads when I disable the ad blocker
Pi-Hole will block it anyway
You got any blacklists that catch YouTube and twitch ads? Afaik those are provided from their own cdn now, so dns won’t work unless I’m mistaken
I prefer Revanced on mobile and youtube.com with plugins on PC, but I’m talking about for other devices on my network that won’t easily take an alternative app.
Ublock Orgin for desktop and YouTube ReVanced for mobile. They both still have no issues whatsoever with blocking ads on YT, even under the new system. Just use those and don’t worry about it. I’ve been doing this for years.
Already use both of those, but Revanced keeps breaking lately and I have other devices that don’t have other apps or extensions
yt-dlp -o “%(title)s.%(ext)s” --sponsorblock-remove sponsor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=somevideo