Comments on: There seem to be two types of websites.

By: ER

ER — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:31:05 +0000

In the early days of Cable, one of the big selling points of “pay TV”, as it was called in those days, was that there would be “no commercials”.

Its only a matter of time before the act of logging on and using the computer will be constantly interrupted by commercials.

You see, like in radio, TV, and later, the Web, the progression is inevitable. You go from a popular technical innovation the public is eager for and which pioneers and entrepreneurs have built with great risk and creativity, to just a machine for generating revenue.

People who pioneered the medium needed a legitimate way to finance their exploration. Today, the free range is all carved up and fenced in, and they have settled down to systematic mining and farming. Its a pattern with a long history. The best magazines and newspapers needed advertising. But soon, the process leads inevitably to a means of delivering advertising. Pick up a fashion magazine sometime and leaf though it. There’s just enough articles to attract people to the advertising. I’ve also noticed the same effect with sailing rags, when the moms-and-pops sell out to the big publishers.
Big publishers aren’t in the sailing business, or even the sailing journalism business. They are in the advertising business. They have probably never been on a boat in their life. They go from collections of useful information interspersed with ads of value to those involved in the activity, to catalogs for vendors of expensive gear.

I’ve decided not to renew my subscription to Sky and Telescope.

By: DanS

DanS — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 12:19:46 +0000

…Oh, yeah… They got ads now, too — so I guess ya gotta pay twice…

By: ER

ER — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 23:55:00 +0000

And the funny thing is, the more advertising they throw at us, the less vulnerable we are to it, and the more we ignore, or mistrust it, or even tune it out subconsciously; which in turn forces them to spend more money, talent and time to come up with new ways to propagate their increasingly ineffective message. And these peckerheads and their mindless twat clients are so damn dumb and greedy they haven’t figured that out yet.

Oh, brave new world, that has such people in it.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 23:09:42 +0000

When you’re ~~right~~correct you’re ~~right~~correct, ER. At the technical level and all those gratuitous videos and twatter feeds and running chatter from the comment queue (yeah, I need to send some snark Rebecca’s way; what is she thinking?) And at the stratospheric level of the root cause: Capitalism in general, and in particular the choice to use the perverted system of advertising to fund Web sites. Advertising leads to page bloat and slow load times, because that’s where the money is. You don’t see the problem on non-ad-supported sites.

I’d also criticize the choice at a lot of news sites to post videos of talking heads, and especially auto-running videos, instead of just posting the words the meat puppet is speaking. Waste of bandwidth, and I read much faster than meat puppets speak. (OTOH, they’re wrong half the time the other way, failing to insert pictures and maps and diagrams when they’re really needed to augment the text. Given what we know about the geographical illiteracy of Americans, why are there so few maps in news articles to help the ignorant get oriented? But I digress…)

If you can think of another way to fund Web sites (and a lot of other things under the broad canopy of “media”) some way other than ads, you’d be a hero to literally billions of people, and ensure your place in history to the end of time. There’s no better example than advertising of how an obsession with markets and commerce can stunt the growth of a culture. Liberate us, ER! We’re being strangled by ads!