The other glaring thing I noticed is the browser becomes a festering petri dish of promiscuous cookie-sharing. Every site obviously knows everything I'm doing on every other site.
Shouldn't that be impossible? What browser lets one site access another's cookies?
Afaik, there may not be sharing across domains, but there surely is across pages.
I would certainly argue the way this comment (and many others in a lot of threads about ads here or elsewhere) seems to imply that ads are at their worst ever.
I mean either people forgot or are too young to remember, but in the 2000's alone ads had both their "pop up and sound and unclosable javascript spam" and their "flash everywhere turning your modern supercomputer speed into that of a 80's calculator" eras, and probably a lot of other ad-cancers that my brain chose to forget. The entire reason the ios/flash debate happened was because 1 - flash was on every page and ad, 2 - flash was eating every resources you would throw at it and still need more.
I mean, I agree totally that the web without ad blockers is insane, but I think many also see how it used to be as much better than it actually was.
Today the reputable sites are an absolute mess with huge, bloated and completely unusable ads. So yes the ads back then on non-reputable sites were worse because of what the browser makers allowed websites to do but when you compare the reputable websites? There is no contest that today is far, far worse.
Nothing quite like those search that took you on sketchy websites and their porn pop under blasting orgasmic noises in your home / office while you frantically try to find who does that (and then close everything because it's taking too long).
"The good old time", as they say.
Searching for which tab makes sound is one thing, searching for it and not finding it anywhere because it's a pop under positioned at the bottom right of your screen is a whole other experience.
I prefer a (collection of) ads that obfuscate the entire page I'm trying to read but doesn't bother me while I look at something else and happily let me close and go away than something that makes everything a hog and crash my browser randomly while I might not even see it because it's five tabs away in the footer of some website.
Only use "cleaner" ads ? It will pay less, ads don't pay much any more, you need the big, splashy, if-possible-exclusive-and-targeted ads to get money now.
Offer subscriptions ? They already do that, and they publish quality original content, so it's not the case of journal-X publishing the same press release as everyone and complaining that people don't subscribe.
At this point, they can only do two things with people who don't subscribe: block them from accessing content, thus losing lots of traffic and conversion possibilities, or show them intrusive ads, make a little money off of them, and hope a few subscribe.
One argument could be that "those ads are turning people off of subscribing and ultimately makes them lose money", but in every debate on this matter I have never seen it substantiated with actual numbers, and especially in the case of a household name like National Geographic I sincerely doubt it, at least not in any meaningful way.
I am in now way arguing that those more and more terrible ads did not cause the surge in ad blocker usage, and what I said is not affected in any way by how many people are using ad blockers on NG.
Fact is, revenue per ad viewed has been crashing down for all type of ad.
A site like NG can either block their free access and force a subscribe (lose attention and name recognition), give it for free fully but remove incentive to subscribe (lose revenue), or change their ad type to more intrusive ad that pay more to compensate.
I'm sincerely open to discussion if you disagree, about what they could potentially do that isn't one of those three, but the revenue per ad viewed falling is not in their control, it's a global market trend since several years.
I understand that business needs may require a publication to lower their standards but it seems like they have dropped below where the floor should be. When I load the page, there's a giant Microsoft video at the top of the screen. Microsoft should be ashamed of that as well.
I liked grubbers dubbing of a "dickbar" but this kind of ad deserves its own moniker. PrickPage?