I know online media is a tough business, but I just can’t imagine the reasoning that has led to such an absurdly painful user experience.
Mobile users mainly have no grasp of this, and that is what most people Globally have used to be on-bordered statistically speaking, and they don't know anything else--I was watching a friend show me a recipe online not too long ago on his 1200 iphone and when ad showed up I just looked perplexed to disgusted to him. I told him to get an adblock to avoid that, he simply locked at me and said he 'didn't want to pay for it' and I just let it go and watched the ad in silence.
This is a person who spends an ungodly amount of time on tiktok as well, we were watching trending desert recipes and there are tons of them there that people want try so he justified all the ads he watches as 'market research.'
I regret to say that this is the norm, the dude has a MSc in Structural/Civil Engineering from a reputable University so it's not a schooling thing, just more like of a 'not online before smartphone' kind of thing to me.
You still have to trust the developer, unless you download the extension and modify the manifest to remove the domains listed there, though may result in the extension not working.
I'm not the only one think of this movie recently
It’s just more noticeable in this market (Display Ads) because it’s a terrible, terrible market; Google was definitely going to be found guilty for using its monopoly position in this space to drive up prices for everyone (rip American antitrust…), and even without that, it’s nowhere near as effective as search ads or old-school institutionally-targeted display ads (eg large newspapers, network TV). This, combined with the ever-growing pressures mentioned above and a healthy dollop of conglomeratization, gives us the mad race to the bottom that we’re currently living in.
Google thinks they’ll save the industry with some new, slightly less invasive cookies, but I’m dubious. I would personally recommend everyone get comfortable paying directly for services you need, especially journalism.
If only companies would learn that tasteful ads are possible and would likely give better returns, but the web has been infested with garbage so most people have their guards up.
The good companies will find a way to survive.
It's banned from the chrome store
Or rather, a pattern of activity that may be easily mistaken for someone else committing ad-fraud.
The fraudulent part comes from the agreement between the site-owner and the advertising-entity, where the first agrees to provide "organic" clicks for money. As an independent visitor, I'm not a party to that, and I never agreed to "only click on things when I'm sincerely interested in them", or even "only click on things after firmly observing and registering their presence in my mind", etc.
If I were to use an army of bots to deliberately ruin someone's advertising budget out of pure spite, that's arguably a different kind of crime.
Or google finds a way to beat all adblockers everywhere.
For better or worse, many of the brightest minds of the past 25 years have been working in online advertising, if “tasteful ads” worked better that’s all we would see. Consumers must drive the desired outcome with behavior or law.
The long-term side effect is that the prevalence of ad blocking is growing fast. But if you look at how Google and others are responding, it's likely that the publishers are going to make ad blockers harder to use, instead of designing delightful ad experiences for the average Joe.
Stacking 3 banner ads didn't help.
But ad-blocking seems to be going strong on Firefox, so maybe that's an option for folks?