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Comment by dqpb | Hacker News Reader

On a side note, I'd like to lament the dystopia of reading articles online, where every 4 paragraphs your attention is hijacked by a video ad. Fuck that. Fuck futurism.com.

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Blame the fact that people will pay for very few media sites. Realistically, Futurism’s choice is have ad supported content or don’t exist

They do have a third option: unobtrusive ads.

Those are worth very little when untargeted.

Quite the contrary: https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exc....

Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079

The NYT is a different story. There's a critical mass after which it becomes worthwhile to just target your audience. I doubt these guys are at it.

Don't believe me, though. Talk to ad execs (spending money on this) or ad ops (using the money on this) and see what they think.

In fact, since you won't have the GDPR hassles if you go untargeted, you should consider following this thesis to its logical untargeted exchange conclusion because with CCPA and GDPR you could push the targeted guys out of business and that's a many billion dollar market. If you're convinced of your thesis, then you're on the cusp of mega money.

Good luck.

or less blogspam. the explosion of mostly-blind news-regurgitation isn't a good thing, and it's largely chasing ad dollars because nobody would voluntarily pay for it.

But is that even an option? I used to pay for NYT and WSJ (not cheap) and was still bombarded with ads.

I use the uMatrix plugin and have it configured to block everything, except of course for the base HTML. For more and more sites this means I get no content without adding in exceptions, but for this and many sites I get the part of the content I want, the text. Then I hit the Reader mode button and I get text which is even in the format that is most comfortable for reading for me.

this kind of dystopia existed in the printing press for centuries.

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