Monday, January 02, 2017

I Can't Read Your Damn Web Site

Regular boring complaint. I suppose you don't care if I just see the ad that covers the entire web page that I have to hunt for the microscopic X to remove before actually seeing whatever it is I might be willing to waste time clicking through to see, because if I see the damn ad you get paid, but I'm probably never (never say never, but less frequently) coming back. And, yes, I should pay for your content, but that probably doesn't get rid of the ads and after several years (I'm looking at you New York Times) your site can't keep me logged in persistently and I have to login every damn time I try to read something that isn't much help either.

I know people gotta pay the bills, but we've reached peak absurdity in the latest ad cycle. I don't want to spend 5 minutes playing a hunt the 'X' whack a mole video game every time I want to read a 5 paragraph article. And that's before we get to the autoplay audio ads which are extra awesome if you're interested in loading two or more tabs from the same site and you're blessed with multiple autoplay ads at the same time.

Does nobody buying and selling advertising every actually use the internet? I guarantee not one single product based on an autoplay ad or some obnoxious popover has ever been sold in the entire history of the internet. Maybe other advertising is about as effective, but it's at least cheaper and less annoying.

And of course bad behavior drives more people to use ad blockers, which impacts relatively well behaved sites like this one (yes forced Disqus ads are annoying and they pay so little I haven't even bothered to tell them how to pay me so I need to figure out what to do about that..).