I am generally opposed to invasive advertising and not for the reasons that you might suspect. Like Doc Searls, I believe that news organizations have the right to generate money to pay their bills and all of the usual justifications and if the aforementioned media outlets don’t try to draw me into some horrific listicle/slideshow layered in trashy js or attempt to hijack every cookie in my browser then I’m okay with letting that stuff load. If you don’t actively interfere with my ability to read text then I don’t get upset at you. I am getting tired to the excessive attempts to get me to subscribe to the dead letter version of a publication in order to read more than excerpts online or the siren call of logging in with another authentication network so the page can reload without delivering the thing I actually came to the site to read. I love Doc’s savage and apt characterization of that variety of advertising:
Tracking-based ads, generally called adtech, do not sponsor publications. They use publications as holding pens in which human cattle can be injected with uninvited and unwelcome tracking files (generally called cookies) so their tracked eyeballs can be shot, wherever they might show up, with ads aimed by whatever surveillance data has been gleaned from those eyeballs’ travels about the Net.
It sums up very concisely the feeling that you get when you realize that as meaningless as the website that its advertising is hosted on is to the ad networks and that they’re only interested in the dim and distant possibility that you might click on one of their advertisements accidentally which will then tally a meaningless click that will eventually demand payment.
Long winded and vindictive as all of the above might be towards being annoyed and inconvenienced by much of the methodology twiddled over above, that brand of advertising which is rapidly becoming (already is?) the predominant source of advertising revenue is completely ineffectual. It’s a shell game where the potential reader, the publisher, and the entity trying to actually get the word out about something they’re selling are all being ripped off and categorized in the most meaningless and superficial way. In the interest of avoiding participation in this circus of stupid I’ve stopped reading or linking to WaPo or the NYT because they aren’t interested in returning readers but a few potential pennies from a herded set of eyeballs. It just makes the experience of trying to read important bits of journalism feel like you’re being hard sold by a carnival barker. I’m more than finished feeling that degree of condescension without wanting to lash out at the source of it. I’m a nonparticipant in it not because I feel like I’m going to fundamentally change anything by removing a ghostly pixel of demographic from the sea of other poorly categorized junk data but because I don’t want to have anything to do with any part of it. It’s the same reason that I’m vegan: I’m not going to change a damn thing but I do not want to be part of any of it.
