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Web of links
Basically how I browse the internet these days .... if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah ... all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site ... I'm not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.
I go a step further and block them in DDG. This includes any "article" I have to scroll through to find the answer.
Wait what? We can do that!?
I am also intrigued
if I’m curious, I’m going through https://archive.today – not only are your ads not getting seen, you’re not getting my page views either
I love cookies!
.......not the browser kind. I'm partial to chocolate chip!
Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don't just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I've even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.
Generally for news websites ... especially highly rated ones that are supposed to be the best professional outfits ... if I can't use 'reader view' and just read your copy ... I'm skipping your site and never going back to you.
All I want to do is read the news ... you don't need to sell me on a great refrigerator or a cigarette lighter that has a flame that can melt steel because I'm never going to buy it.
Advertisers abused the hell out of us back in the early days of the Internet and we haven't forgotten. Multiple Pop-ups, pop-unders and seizure-inducing banner ads.
If they simply stuck with small, basic, non-flashing banners, I could have handled it. But greed knows no limits with advertisers.
Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a "you are the visitor number 1 million" and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.
Someday soon my "adblocker" might be a personal AI that reads the spam-ridden website on a virtual display in memory, identifies the actual content while pretending to look at whatever ads the site demands, and then passes the information I'm actually looking for along to me. Good luck captchaing that.
An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit
Adblockers aren't made by "corporate overlords." This wouldn't be either.
It turns out the popular alternative is "force you to sign up (with a phone number) from critical mass/FOMO, track the snot out of you then slide ads in later." Oh, and the stuff you want is siloed away until you join, and buried in a mountain of rambling and engagement optimization junk.
Note that I'm largely talking about Discord, which is unfortunately where many of my interests have been shunted off to. People talk about Facebook, Google and OpenAI eating the internet, but I feel like Discord is the quiet trojan horse.
Discord is the new snapchat
Discord is 1000x worse because entire communities have taken to moving onto there. It's like the one thing that's worse than moving everything to Reddit: people using a fancy chat service like a forum. Everything from hardware to games seems to have most of the community on Discord; incredibly unhelpful if I'm trying to troubleshoot something.
It's unbelievavly time inefficient for... anything.
And its incredibly engaging. I burnt through so much time shooting the breeze in hopes of actually finding something interesting, notification spam, checking channels... It's why I deleted it from everywhere. And it left a gaping hole in my life, because its the only place some niche communities exist now.
I will try to unblock ads on a new site one time. I want to see the whole article on one page, No click-through gallery of 27 different takes. There can be ads in the borders and margins. And maybe if I'm feeling generous one in the middle of the content. I don't want to see an unrelated pop-up video I don't want to see every paragraph separated by another ad.
If they can't play nice I block the ads, If I can't, by default, see the content without the ads, I'll find the article on another service. Everyone's literally just copying the same content back and forth with different wording.
If I can't see the content, and I can't find it on another service, I'll generally use bypass paywalls clean. If I can't see it through that I don't see it.
I'm not giving in for this b******* ads all over the place scenario. You can't even read a recipe page nowadays without an ad blocker.
I often wonder how news websites are supposed to survive. People (myself included) want unbiased news websites without paywalls and ads.
How are they supposed to pay their staff?
I'm fine with ads when they don't take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.
The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.
If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn't sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.
Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.
Umm I was reading the comments, does nobody else go into the page's HTML and delete the "pay now" popup. Usually deleting the code works for me. Let me know if you have a way that works for you!
Depends, some pages don't actually load the full content. Removing the paywall pop-up doesn't really work then.
Sometimes the reading mode bypasses paywalls and popups.
Also make sure to block "annoyances" in uBlock.
For the rest, I'm using the Nuke Anything extension.
That sounds like a lot of work. On sites where that work (which is not all of them, some are made by competent people), firefox "reading mode" just do the job.
It's legitimately embarrassing how many people can't seem to grasp that this isn't the "fuck you" they think it is.
They aren't shocked or upset, they're not panicking because you left, because it's all the same to them either way. You either access the site while blocking the ads and they get no income from your views, or you go away and they don't get income from your views. Exactly nothing has changed for them except now they don't have you pulling bandwidth.
The point is not to get YOU to turn your ad blocker off, the point is it will get SOME people to turn it off who aren't you. If you're not willing to turn it off, then what you do matters very little because they appreciate there's no way they're getting income from you ever.
It's got the same energy as "You expect me to pay admission to enter this theme park? Well now I'm not going in, don't you feel stupid?"
Well first it's not "fuck you", its "goodbye". And second it's not about "you", it's about "me" not visiting your site if I need to turn off adblock. End of the story, our path will not cross again. Ciao, aurevoir, hasta not luego.
I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there's still an argument to be made.
For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.
Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they'll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it's physically impossible to cram any more in.
I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won't tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.
If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym)
Even citing Google's own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It's their fault users don't want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.
A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn't just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.
Google recommends to "Treat your visitors with respect," but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you've even seen the content don't actually respect you, they just hope you're willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don't even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven't given me good reason to even care about your content yet?
This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have "x number of free articles remaining," or those that say "you've read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?" get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.
Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say "well if you're not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting", but, depending on their growth stage, it's very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.
Say you're a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don't play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k... You lose investment pulling power.
The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well
Reader mode on
Love when sites think you're a captive audience. Bye sucka!!!
ublocks' annoyance lists blocks most of these warnings and more.
i suggest you enable them as its sadly not on by default.
Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would "smartly" unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.
The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:
The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than "normal" banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn't matter if they were 10x more effective.
My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn't care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting "market share" by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won't work, at all, but it feels like they've now optimised themselves into a hole.
That's just fine as far as the site is concerned.
They provide content that is paid for by ads. When you block the ads, you're using up bandwidth and not contributing to the site's revenue. They want you gone.
We want them gone. The market goes where the users use it. The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived. Saying they want us gone means they are the only game in town. They aren't. They are too big for their britches and need to realize the users dictate the usage.
Rose-colored glasses, dude.
The internet was full of never-ending pop-ups that opened 2 more windows every time you closed one 25-30 years ago, and the viruses they carried fucked your computer to the point you had to do a clean Windows install. Spam.filters didn't work and you'd get 500 unfiltered spam messages a day, and since you were on 28-56k using a POP3 system it took an hour to download them before you could sort through them.
Shit's bad now, but it was way, way worse back then.
Peak monetisation. Don't let them even see the article [copied from another website and run through ChatGPT] until they fork over the entrance fee.
It really depends on:
But for some reason, 75% of the time I decide to willingly turn off my ad blocker, there's nothing to block.
