On Ads and Greed

The Atlantic just published a piece called "Something Went Terribly Wrong With Online Ads", which really captured my anger at the increasing prevalence of ads on the Internet. It talks about how ads now permeate every single service that we use. Google ranks companies that buy ads above companies that may be significantly safer. Most streaming services have begun forcing users into ad-supported tiers. It's positively nightmarish and it shows no signs of ending soon.

I think that overloading a website with ads is an act of greed. Oh, there's a website that's providing good services for its users? You best bet they have a plan to make your experience significantly worse for their financial gain. And look, people need to make money. I totally get it. But I'm not convinced the best way to do that is by overloading an otherwise clean website with banner ads that graphic designers will be forced to stare at in Hell, and probably lead to scam sites.

Have you tried going on GoComics lately? Or IMDb? Without an adblocker, they're borderline unusable. YouTube can now cram ads onto any video it wants, even those where the uploader isn't eligible for ad revenue and thus recieves no money. Oh, and YouTube made adblockers against its terms of service. There's nothing one can do. Either don't use the Internet, or watch your CPU usage's knees buckle under the weight of hundreds of ads.

When I started this blog, I very intentionally removed all of the ads from it. Because I hate ads. And if I ever reverse this decision, please come to my house and slap some sense into me. Thank you and have a wonderful day.