Proof by Mask

mondaynote.com

13 pointsthere3 comments

Youtube (http://i.imgur.com/VIwYx.png) doesn't fare too well. It's like they've never heard of the law of diminishing returns. Which is surprising seeing as though Google adwords was launched and is heavily based around an unobtrusive targeted ad-mix as opposed to the flashing GIF / "punch the monkey" style of ads which were prevalent before adwords.

YouTube is dreadful with the ads these days, both inside the videos themselves and all over the rest of the page. It reached a point sometime in the past year where I actively avoid going to YouTube (even when just following a link in directly to a video) because of the ad noise.

Other sites are quite bad too (and getting worse). I've gone this long without running any ad blockers, but we're almost to the point where I'm losing the battle and can almost rationalize doing it for many sites.

First, they didn't red out all of the ads on some of the English-language websites. I'm guessing this is an honest mistake.

Second, if they masked all of the non-news 'news' things would look a lot worse, but that's another issue entirely.

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