I see you wrote a Chrome extension that cuts most of the ads from NYT.
If so I'd love to add that I'm annoyed by some of the tactics and lengths that publishers go to to monetize content ad the expense of user-experience and other costs.
The only path right now are ads, 'sponsored content', 'native units'.
I would much rather we have a subscription-based model that generated enough revenue to ween them off awful ad experiences.
Thats very much an aspirational goal.
My larger point is that having readers circumvent that, as opposed to supporting that, is disheartening to many of us who are working on the inside to push change.
BTW: And that extension was a redesign, of which ads were removed or moved. The NYT legal dept had Google remove it.
> having readers circumvent that, as opposed to supporting that, is disheartening to many of us who are working on the inside to push change.
So what you're saying is that it's OK to circumvent the methods of monetization you don't support?
He doesn't like paywalls, so he circumvents them. You don't like ads, so you circumvent them. And then you say shame on you? This is absolutely the pot calling the kettle black.
Remove the trick where it's okay for Google searches to circumvent the paywall and this extension becomes useless.
Why does that penalize the content itself and the discovery of it?
It's their choice to choose a business model, whether ads or subscriptions. If they serve ads and it's not the experience you want, shouldn't you just move on and not go back to that site?
The ad model actually works well for lots of sites and is the sole reason we have the long-tail of the internet. Someone working at an ad-based publisher would have the exact same comments about your ad disabling extension, why circumvent if they're trying to make it work?