Having read &/or seen both, I would think modern advertising is closer to They Live.
"A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum" (4 June 2015)
<https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...>
And that doesn't raise an eye brow, but well worded AI articles based on sources is described as slop
The direction of views is irrelevant. What's relevant is the forward passage of time. As t -> infinity, shitty monetization -> infinity.
As a counter example, the Economist or the NY Times don’t feel anywhere near this bad. They make you pay. But subscribers get a much nicer product in return.
The Economist is the economist, and can ask for a higher subscription price given its target audience.
AI summaries are reducing visits to Wikipedia, which shall drive down donations.
Creating quality information for the average citizen is not a sustainable enterprise today.
It used to be. People used to subscribe to the newspaper.
Unfortunately, the advertising model convinced a generation that they don’t need to pay for journalism or really any information online. Journalism is just as expensive as it’s ever been. But news is only written if someone is willing to pay journalists and editors.
The Verge is a surprise because it is relatively new and was relatively free of this crap for a long time.
They’re all just empty brands now. They totally caved to advertisers, and now only advertisers care about them.
I dare say AI’s popularity is a symptom of all this more than a cause.
Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites with non-terrible user experiences that are staying stable?
Just say Apple. They're still allowed on Android, although I don't think you can get them from the Play Store.
Also you can put ad block on Apple devices.
On my Android phone, I installed Firefox. It synced my extensions and installed uBlock automatically. That was it.
The last time I tried on iOS, I gave up. The adblockers I found didn't really work, they were painful to install, and the platform is so locked down that I couldn't figure out other options.
I find that when it messes with the layout or formatting of a website it’s really annoying, and I consider the volume and type of ads an important signal for a website’s trustworthiness.
Oh and plenty of devices don’t have easy access to ad block, like my work computer.
You can get the former from the number showing up in the uBlock Origin icon.
Someone from the financial times did a test about the impact of this garbage on read times and brand loyalty. This was maybe 15 years ago. Of course the more ads shoehorned onto the page, the worse the metrics were.
But if I ask Claude or Gemini for a nice version of the recipe, it works perfectly. I think there's a lot of own goals out there.
As soon as I accidentally turn them off I am disgusted by the consumerist, snake-oil, sexist, shit-storm that's advertisement.
I don't understand why ads aren't targeted towards the content of the page, rather than me as a person, that seems to be more correct in the majority of the cases.
I did accidentally try to play a YouTube video without signing into my premium account. That platforms is completely impossible to watch without premium or an ad blocker. YouTube managers should be forced to watch a few hours of content with ads enabled.
I tried NoScript, but it breaks way too many sites.
Though I don't know their revenue breakdown.
Somewhat famously, the similar (though unrelated) Economist relies on three revenue legs: subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), roughly evenly distributed. The fact that these have different economic-cycle behaviours also helps stabilise the newspaper's income.