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You can thank the capital side of the equation for this.

Example:

https://andrewchen.com/this-is-what-free-ad-supported-uber-r...

They used to hide it, but because so much money is being made there's no point anymore.

That site is a perfect example of this. It actually required me to sign up for the newsletter to even read the article.

It's interesting to watch how pages work (or don't) when you delete the advertising DOM elements from the page. Some work fine (like this one), others crash when they try to do something smart like "show the un-skippable banner when you scroll past here".

It boggles my mind that this is being presented by the author as if it were a legitimately good idea and not another step on our collective descent into a dystopian hellscape.

or a normal progression to microtransactions to actually pay for content of value rather than let the msrket of doom scrolling and "engagement" dictate the hellscape that led to trump style media.

remember, 20 years ago they wanted microtransactions to enable content production. this coule of course be done in a open way, but the idea that this is worse than the current landscape of abhorrent conspiracy fueled hate med8a parade is silly.

Most mainstream things are like this now.

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