I'm talking beyond the matter of ads. On their websites I can use an adblocker, so in that respect the situation has actually improved.
They regularly fail on basic UX. Their ability to turn a kilobyte of text into 10MB of trash is astounding, as is their ability to cripple modern computer hardware, or simply readability, with their latest 'innovations' in totally unnecessary JS/CSS fuckery.
uMatrix blocking all JS, including first party, helps. But you've still got bullshit like floating headers that follow you when you scroll down the article to contend with. I find myself creating cosmetic filters to remove pointless floating clutter on news websites more than any other sort of site. The industry seems utterly incapable of presenting a clean and readable article online.
I would advise using your browser's developer tools to find the irritating web page js, css, or domain/sub-domain responsible, and then using uMatrix/privoxy/hostfile to block that garbage. Many sites are usable by preventing js entirely.
I can often get the text of the article in Emacs, so I generally do that. My TTS integration is better in Emacs than Firefox anyway, so I actually prefer it for longer reading.
But regardless of our personal work-arounds or workflows, those websites shouldn't be like that. The general public is still subjected to the default experience and that bothers me.
Newspaper ads weren’t as noxious or ineffective as online advertising.
I don’t understand how online ads are as big a business as they are, other than the troll stuff on Instagram. The rest is pretty unremarkable and ineffective.
I can probably count on my hands they number of times I intentionally engaged with an ad in the last 25 years.
> I don’t understand how online ads are as big a business as they are
For one, they're on-line, = cheap to make and pretty much free to serve.
Two, with the amount of tracking done, on-line ads are attractive to advertisers because they can evaluate their effectiveness real-time, and often tell what ads are responsible for what real sales.
Three, with all the accrued complexity, it's a wonderland for third parties who help the advertisers navigate through on-line advertising landscape, and divine attribution. Now the trick is, if your customer (the advertiser) doesn't have even basic competence in statistics (they most likely don't), you can bullshit them with data to your heart's content. Which is what you're probably doing if your team doesn't have much statistical competence either. I've seen this happen.
