Ad Tech is killing the online experience

  • Thread starter Thread starter JimG
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

JimG

Guest
This article struck a nerve with me.

Sometimes I like to read an article online. Or read the news. But it’s nearly impossible to do just that. I just want to read the article. Or the news. I don’t want photos, videos, popups, popunders, targeted ads. Just the news. What should have take a few kilobytes at most to transmit ends up taking multi megabytes because of all the excess. It’s enough to resurrect print.

From the article: “This is the tragedy of the commons. It’s your bandwidth, and you’re paying for it, but everybody else is clogging it up with stuff you never asked for or wanted.”
 
JimG said:
This article struck a nerve with me.

Sometimes I like to read an article online. Or read the news. But it’s nearly impossible to do just that. I just want to read the article. Or the news. I don’t want photos, videos, popups, popunders, targeted ads. Just the news. What should have take a few kilobytes at most to transmit ends up taking multi megabytes because of all the excess. It’s enough to resurrect print.

From the article: “This is the tragedy of the commons. It’s your bandwidth, and you’re paying for it, but everybody else is clogging it up with stuff you never asked for or wanted.”
Click to expand...
Very, very true. At least television just has commercial breaks, and you can skip the ads in newspapers if you’re not interested. Online, the content and its astronomical load times (including all sorts of not-really-necessary frills) is forced upon the reader. :o
 
I clicked on your link. Funny how the article on how bad it has become is full of ads, including one hilarious one showing a woman in a bad floppy wig.

Yeah. It’s bad.
 
If you’re reading on your mobile phone, there are a handful of web browser that are text only. They don’t load any images at all, so they won’t load adds.

It is incredibly frustrating how intrusive they’re becoming, especially since it seems that the more intrusive they are they less likely people are to click on them. Heck, if I see something being over-advertised i’ll go out of my way to avoid it in the future.
 
There are some websites I would like to go on even sport or news but I don’t because they grind my laptop to a halt.
 
There is also a privacy issue because some ads are chosen according to your shopping preferences, as recorded by your browser. If I shop for anything on Amazon or Staples, for example, I immediately start seeing ads for it on other websites. If the computer screen is visible to family members, office mates, etc., then they can see what I’ve been shopping for. :eek:
 
JimG said:
“This is the tragedy of the commons. It’s your bandwidth, and you’re paying for it, but everybody else is clogging it up with stuff you never asked for or wanted.”
Click to expand...
Only my internet service is not the commons, but very much private, especially the much more expensive mobile internet. It is theft of the data allotment that I paid for by freeloaders.

Ideally, I shouldn’t have to put a fence around my property. But, nowadays it just is impossible to browse the internet without an ad blocker.
 
The problem is how are sites going to survive without ads? We don’t expect commercial-free TV.
I know the cases are not exactly parallel since the ads for mobile devices hog bandwidth and memory.

I remember in the early day of the internet the slogan was “information wants to be free” to which the riposte was “information wants you to pay me $5”.
 
didymus said:
The problem is how are sites going to survive without ads? We don’t expect commercial-free TV.
I know the cases are not exactly parallel since the ads for mobile devices hog bandwidth and memory.

I remember in the early day of the internet the slogan was “information wants to be free” to which the riposte was “information wants you to pay me $5”.
Click to expand...
True. Someone has to pay the electric bill.

I have a friend who works in advertising for a large daily newspaper. They’re struggling to stay in business and are slowly laying off staff.

I hate the ads and pop-ups and videos that start playing, but what’s the alternative? I’d rather not have to pay subscriptions for everything.
 
didymus said:
The problem is how are sites going to survive without ads? We don’t expect commercial-free TV.
Click to expand...
As others have said, the problem are not ads, but overly intrusive ads that consume expensive bandwidth. Whether they survive or not is a problem that they have brought on themselves.

Thanks to the internet, the cost of accessing information is practically nil and, should a site flounder, it’s pretty much guaranteed that there is another dozen of sites providing the same information.

Not a tear shed.
 
I can understand a simple ad with a link alongside whatever webpage I’m viewing, but when the ad highjacks the page with obnoxious sound and motion, causing the page to take forever to load, I just close my browser. So, so frustrating!
 
I would not be surprised if this is done intentionally…with my internet plan I only get 7G at high speed per month, last month, somehow I went thru all 7G in 8 days, so they have lowered my speed down to a crawl that is similar to internet back in the mid 90s.

When I find these kinds of articles and there are loads of ads trying to load, I just X out and look for the story elsewhere, on a couple local media outlets, in order to read the article, it literally forces you to watch a couple ads first!!

The good thing though , as computer technology progresses, someone should be able to come up with something to put a stop to all this and find a way to turn it off
 
I am beginning to question the wisdom of free content paid for by advertising. Why should content be free? I pay for my newspaper, my books, my magazines. Nobody creates content for free, they want to be paid and deserve to be paid. Not only that, but internet content tends to be a matter of headlines only. Now TV and even newspapers have less in depth content than in the past. We seem to be becoming less well informed with more sources of information.

I’m wondering if a search engine could compete by charging a subscription fee but giving neutral searches with no cookies or advertising or sale of customer data.
 
This is all the evolution of the internet and the free market. Yes, you pay for the internet, but when you go to a website, your the one placing the call, so to speak. Do not go to sites with too many ads, if you do not like them. I quit visiting Yahoo for this reason.
 
pnewton said:
This is all the evolution of the internet and the free market. Yes, you pay for the internet, but when you go to a website, your the one placing the call, so to speak. Do not go to sites with too many ads, if you do not like them. I quit visiting Yahoo for this reason.
Click to expand...
Yes, yahoo is the worst. They post these hideous pictures for things that have nothing to do with the photos, and the other sites list the hoard of Top 10 this that or another.
Also, they post “stories” that are clearly lame excuses for ads.
Never obvious what to click, and forever to load. Guaranteed to shut down your session.
 
Party I think the overabundance of ads is due to so many people running ad blockers. I do not see an overabundance of ads, because I run blocker extensions on chrome and firefox, as well as cookie blockers etc

It’s creepy when you get the targeted ads.
 
misspriss said:
Party I think the overabundance of ads is due to so many people running ad blockers. I do not see an overabundance of ads, because I run blocker extensions on chrome and firefox, as well as cookie blockers etc

It’s creepy when you get the targeted ads.
Click to expand...
Make a one time search for something today, and get ads for the product for weeks on every website!

The problem is that for most of the web, we are not the customers, we are the product.
 
JimG said:
Make a one time search for something today, and get ads for the product for weeks on every website!

The problem is that for most of the web, we are not the customers, we are the product.
Click to expand...
And we willingly do it.

The flip side though is small people who depend on ad revenue who don’t get paid if you use ad block, DH has spent some time researching people who do youtube as a full time gig, and they really suffer with ad blockers that work on youtube videos.

When hulu started offering a commercial free paid service, you would think the fees for being commercial free would negate the effects of the lost ad revenue, but all of a sudden the other (paying, just paying less) customers, at least in my experience, see more ads. Like 4 per break instead of 3, etc.
 
on_the_hill said:
I hate the ads and pop-ups and videos that start playing, but what’s the alternative?
Click to expand...
Non-Intrusive Advertising. I would love this to be more widely used so that I could in some form or way at least support sites I visit regularly.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top